It hardly struck me, as I set out for a couple of days in Somerset, that they would lead me to Bridport in Dorset, thence to Dame Margaret Drabble, to the history of the jigsaw puzzle, and finally to some melancholy reflections on the meaning of life. But of such apparently random pieces are jigsaws made, and sometimes they do make a picture.
We’d seen a day of hurricane-force gales along the south coast last Saturday, when our Somerset hosts remarked that they’d bought tickets for a talk by Margaret Drabble at the Bridport Literary Festival early that evening, and were planning to drive over to the town before supper — and would anyone care to come? Gales notwithstanding, Margaret Drabble was there on time, in a scarlet silk tunic and red shoes. The sweet little 18th-century chapel, now a theatre, was packed for the talk.
Drabble’s subject was her latest book, The Pattern in the Carpet — a Personal History with Jigsaws, published by Atlantic. We were all curious to know what the book might be. A memoir? A textbook on jigsaw puzzles? A history of the author, or of the puzzle?
Something of all these, it turned out. Drabble is a pleasant, thoughtful speaker, and had all our attention as she explained that this was a true story, partly about a difficult woman, her aunt, and partly about how she came, at her aunt’s knee, to love jigsaw puzzles — a bridge between a solitary and unsociable lady, and children. From this starting point the book becomes an idiosyncratic history of the jigsaw puzzle, which turns out (to my surprise) to be an English invention.
But as its author spoke and answered questions, my mind was tending in a different direction: the nature of all those many puzzles where the challenge is to fit things together. Whodunits, join-the-dots, crosswords, Rubik’s Cube — all invite the player to make order out of chaos or fill in the blanks. It’s a deep human instinct, I think, to try to make sense of nonsense.
Someone had asked Dame Margaret if she had any tips for jigsaw puzzlers. Yes, she replied, like most people she started at the edges. The component pieces are easy to narrow down, having at least one straight edge; and in this way you can make a frame for your picture, and work inwards…
But by now my thoughts were racing. The beauty of a jigsaw puzzle as a challenge is that it is a kind of contained chaos: a jumble, yes, but a jumble we approach secured by three fixed anchors in our task. Though the puzzle-solver may appear to be confronted with a sprawling heap of apparently unrelated little coloured shapes, he knows (1) that they are finite in number and do add up to a single block with defined edges and no blanks; (2) that the block makes a recognisable picture; and (3) that this picture will be identical to the one on the front of the box containing the pieces. His options, in short, are helpfully confined within a template for the reconstruction of which he knows he has all he needs.
Imagine if it were otherwise: that, for each succeeding piece, we dipped into a barrel whose depth was unfathomed, with no idea how many more pieces there might be still to come; that there were no way of identifying the frame-making pieces; that (consequently) we had no idea of its extent. Imagine we were not provided with any copy of the picture we were supposed to put together — that it could be anything.
Or nothing. For imagine that there was no assurance that the pieces ever would add up to any sort of design: that they might be infinite, random, perfectly meaningless, and never fit; that for each piece there did not necessarily exist a piece which slotted into it.
Is this not the condition in which we all find ourselves?
As consciousness first dawns, the infant begins to grasp — in the form of individual items of experience — jigsaw pieces in what might be an immense jigsawed picture of the meaning of his existence, and of life itself. It is in the nature of the human mind to try to fit data together, and we immediately begin the attempt to make a picture. Some pieces do fit, others do not; we assemble little clumps, unrelated to other clumps. But, unlike Margaret Drabble and her aunt sitting around their latest puzzle, we have no idea how many pieces we are going to need before we have much chance of any grand design beginning to swim into shape. Indeed we have no idea how many pieces comprise the total picture, if it exists. It could be infinite. Nor do we know the boundaries. This world? Other worlds? Parallel universes? Things not dreamed of in our philosophy?
But we pore over our experiences, trying this fit and that. As the shapes stubbornly refuse to click together, as no uniting picture emerges, we think, ‘I’m only young; with age and experience I may find the missing pieces; things may start to fit.’
But they don’t — or for this columnist, anyway, they don’t. By the time I was 30 I was well on the way to accumulating a huge and shapeless heap of experiences and thoughts, but still with no hint as to how they added up. I feel this now. At 60 the heap is simply bigger. The thought dawned early that there might be no uniting design. Now I’m sure of it.
But I have no religion. The great appeal of religion is not that (for any thoughtful person) it supplies the whole picture — who would be so arrogant as to think that? — but that it places the seeker in a similar position to that which Dame Margaret and her aunt found themselves as the pair sat down excitedly to begin a new crossword. They didn’t know which pieces fitted where, or where to start, or whether they’d finish; but they did know that there was a picture, they did know it had a frame, and they did know they had been provided with the means to put it together; and that, if they persisted, the fit might be found.
Seekers after religious truth are not supplied (as the jigsaw-puzzler is) with the finished product for which to aim; but with the various (and sometimes rival) accounts of divine truth which books, sermons, metaphors, revelations and holy scriptures claim as authoritative, giving the seeker glimpses, at least, of what the picture might be: different templates to try.
It must be reassuring to feel confident there’s a design, however mysterious and confusing; and that when the pieces fail to fit, that’s evidence only of the need for more pieces, or more thought, or more prayer, to find the fit. A confidence not, I fear, for me. But I never did care for jigsaw puzzles.
Matthew Parris is a columnist on the Times.
Comments