Colonel Beerencreutz

Beerencreutz stretches his wool from wall to wall across a room so he can see the whole rug at once, and while he works he thinks of his own life and his friends' lives as a small piece of God's greater weaving. He travels each midsummer to visit old comrades, preferring the roads when the clover smells and the flowers line the ditches. His loom-meditations give the story its image of a pattern that includes both light and dark shades, and of old men who read their past as part of something larger.