Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 527

 

Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "Everything Sad is Untrue," by Daniel Nayeri.

Here's another fact about rugs, and then I'll get back to the story. They are graded by how many knots they have crammed in every square centimeter. So if it only has sixty knots in one centimeter of carpet, then you'd see that rug on the floor of a tea house in the bazaar, and you'd be welcome to step on it. But some rugs have 400 knots in one centimeter, and if you owned one as small as a pillowcase, you'd still be rich.

But no matter which grade or pattern - no matter even if the greatest grandmother in the whole world wove it - every rug has a Persian flaw.

The artisans of Kashan and Isfahan and Tabriz and Mashad all knew that only God is perfect - the only one who could listen to and speak the perfect truth. To remind themselves, and to show their humility, they would purposefully include one missed knot in every rug, one imperfection.

I think it's pretty funny that people would mistake themselves for perfect if they didn't include a hole in a rug.

But that's the whole point of the Persian flaw - it's there to remind you of all the other flaws, and even the flaw that makes you unable to see them in the first place.