Letter, T. Calder, declining to give an explanation

Dear Iain —

No, and I will tell you why at more length than you asked for, because you are going to press me otherwise.

You want the glove material written up as a survival. I know the shape of that paper. It would be a good paper and it would be read, and every line of it would rest on a thing I did not observe. I observed gloves. I did not observe a seventh bearer, a memorial custom, a proxy, or a rite. Nobody in that parish has ever told me there was one. To publish it as a survival is to put into their mouths a sentence none of them said.

You will say that is what interpretation is. It is not. Interpretation is saying what the observed behaviour is doing. Invention is saying what it is a remnant of. The line between them is thin and it is the only line our trade has.

I went back in ninety-one. The box has seven pairs. The treasurer is a different man and gave me the same answer his predecessor did, in almost the same words, which tells you something about how answers are handed on and nothing at all about gloves.

You ask what I think privately. Privately I think the box was made for seven. I have thought so for nineteen years and I have never once been able to make the wear agree with it, and I would rather leave a bad fit in the record than a tidy story on top of it.

Print the table if you want it. It is only numbers and it is honest. But do not put my name to the word survival, and do not name the parish, or they will get visitors, and the visitors will ask, and in five years they will have an explanation to give and it will be ours.

Yours, with regards to Morag,

— T. A. Calder