#sontag

I used the Ragged Soldier pattern that's a modern addition to a pattern from Godey's Lady's Book from 1860. I recalculated the whole thing according to my gauge and added a row in the patterning (6 rows per basketweave block instead of 5) and had to re-do the whole increase ratio, and changed the size according to my grandma's measurements (more than 18 blocks on the shoulders)... I messed it up quite a bit around the neckline / shoulders - the un-decreased shoulder section of the flaps is longer than described in the pattern because I forgot myself knitting and couldn't be bothered to undo it, and I also counted wrong for the neckline. I wanted to make it larger than in the pattern (7 blocks instead of 5), thinking my grandma had a relatively thick neck and it might work better. But then I made one side larger than intended and the other smaller than intended, so I ended up having to add to the smaller side and having the neckline be 5 blocks after all. I think ultimately that ended up being the right size after all, so, phew. But now there's that added section, and I messed up the decreases in there, too, so I think it ended up being uneven and you can maybe see that in the photo. Fortunately, this yarn hides a multitude of sins!

The yarn is one of many I rescued in my previous job when the old stores of unused industrial yarns were being cleared. I got sooo greedy and was only encouraged in it by my older more experienced coworker. :P No one else wanted these thin wool / wool blend yarns, other knitters just took a little bit of the thicker ones that surfaced, and I, a lover of historical knitting, went... probably very overboard. How could I not, when this one is, for example, 92% merino 8% cashmere??!! I got it in a number of colourways, and it's soooo soft (when the parafin is washed off).

Grandma fell in love with this particular yarn when I knitted a blanket for my little niece out of it for Christmas 2024, and asked for something out of it for herself, and we settled on a sontag because it occurred to me as the perfect thing to solve her complaints of often being cold / disliking drafts. Being in her 90s now (still very sharp and capable, but she has her lows now), she forgot about it in the meanwhile, but when I gave it to her, she immediately clocked why I picked the design, again.

I debated various border options, and finally settled on a scalloped crochet edge along just the outer edges, as a way to help grandma find her way around the admittedly slightly confusing garment!

It's a BIG knitting win for me, even with the mistakes, because I started knitting one of these back in... was it 2010?... out of lower quality yarn, on lower quality needles, and struggled, and never finished it, and then it sat in my memory as a debt to myself. I FINALLY FINISHED A SONTAG!!!

Have you ever read Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag? Once when I was very sad I went to the library to cope and found myself on the floor reading that book in one go. I had also been listening to the anthropocene reviewed and it occurred to me that a lot of the things Sontag discussed reminded me of your videos and podcasts about tuberculosis and some of the ideas in TFIOS. It also seems likely that, as an author and person who seems to read a lot of books, especially on the subject of tuberculosis, it would be statistically likely that you had. Anyways, I thought that book was very interesting and wondered what you thought (if you did read it after all).

Sincerely,

A regular sandwich

Yes it was very important to me when writing The Fault in Our Stars, especially. Here is a passage from the opening of Sontag's essay:

"My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill —is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped."

And this is how I wanted to approach TFIOS if I could--to write with a hyperawareness of how people metaphorize, and how the lurid metaphors of cancer especially have shaped (and in many cases harmed) the lives of cancer survivors, but try to find a way not to metaphorize the disease itself, which as Hazel repeatedly says, is just a disease.

But I also relied (and rely!) so much on Illness as Metaphor because of the way it connects historical constructions of tuberculosis to contemporary constructions of cancer. Cancer now is seen in much of the rich world as the most capricious disease, the "robber of youth" (as TB used to be known), as the illness that you may survive through positive thinking or clean living or whatever--which all used to be how we thought of TB.

(This is why the band in The Fault in Our Stars is called "The Hectic Glow," which is something Thoreau said about TB when romanticizing it as a beautiful disease.)