A Preface to the History of Chairs

412 If all day you’d been kneeling and crouching behind trees or bushes or crawling through grass and suddenly straightening your spine and your knees and running hard and fast to come close (before you tried to kill it) to the wild game also running hard, harder and faster than you could, wouldn’t you too have been thinking of somewhere— not to stoop or hunker, not to sit on your heels or flop down altogether— but to take a load off your feet, to lower yourself closer to the earth, bending at least four of your hinges, trying to rest the two more fully padded, not onto a stone, but maybe a dry stump you’d found and remembered and hollowed beforehand or had learned to duplicate from pieces of itself, a place you could be at ease but halfway standing up, half ready to make tracks? A PREFACE TO THE HISTORY OF CHAIRS David Wagoner ...