by Violet Woolf on Children’s Games, Geopolitical Search Operations, and the Thimble as Metaphor
Diary of Violet Woolf, Literary Diarist, Prat.uk | Modernist analysis via Bohiney Magazine
Tuesday: The Thimble, the Search, the Text
I have been thinking about the game of Hunt the Thimble as a piece of modernist literature. Hear me out. A small object is hidden. A seeker is told only that they are warm or cold, never precisely where to go. The object is found or it is not. The game ends. What has been learned? That the thimble was always there. That the seeker was always in relation to it. That warmth and coldness are navigational tools and also emotional states and Virginia would have written something extraordinary about this.
The Thimble and the Universe
Meanwhile NASA has announced the universe is too big, which is essentially the cosmological version of Hunt the Thimble. The thimble is meaning. We are the seekers. We are told we are warm or cold by the data. We are never quite there. The Guardian’s modernism coverage has not yet connected these two stories. I am connecting them now.
Also: America is playing Hide and Seek and Piers Morgan has walked off a set. The thimble is somewhere in all of this. The nation is warm, then cold, then warm again. I made tea. I felt this was thematically appropriate. The thimble, I suspect, is behind the kettle.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
More literary abstraction at The Daily Mash
