“Lay me down in sheets of linen,” sings Elton John in his classic 1971 song “Tiny Dancer.” The words suggest luxury, comfort, calm, and healing after a busy day. Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics as an homage to his new wife but with the linen reference, he taps into a deep history extending back tens of thousands of years.
It is the fabric of pharaohs and princes, and also mummies, which is why their wrappings are so durable. In addition, the body of Jesus was likely wrapped in linen, the very fabric of the Shroud of Turin. That’s two millennia of durability.
A friend uses linen sheets handed down in the family. Attempting to trace their original purchase, she isolated the year 1932. They have been in use since then with no decay, a startling fact for those who are used to buying new cotton sheets every few years. Yes, they cost twice as much but they will be the only sheets you ever need to own, and then you can hand them down to the kids and theirs.
Why might that be so? It has something to do with the frequency of fabric vibrations, which is very high in the case of linen. I can report from personal experience that the sleeping experience is different and more enjoyable, and even dreams are affected: more coherent, more vivid.
No, I don’t think I’m imagining this. There is a genuine difference in the experience.
Having worn linen in clothing for years and then coming to adore linen tablecloths and napkins, I went the full way with linen sheets. At this point, there is no going back. I simply cannot imagine any other way, and even the finest cottons in the finest hotels cannot stack up. I’ve recently heard of Airbnb owners who have replaced their cottons with linens, and enjoyed the celebrations and loyalties of the guests as a result.
This entire topic of rediscovering lost knowledge has come to intrigue me. In the last several years, we’ve experienced strange ways in which history’s wisdom somehow gets wiped out by events, new priorities, and a generational skip in experience.
An excellent example here is the subject of natural immunity. It’s as if the whole public awareness of this was here one day and then gone the next. Vast parts of the world embarked on a crazed experiment in virus control even as natural immunity was treated like some kind of right-wing conspiracy theory. It was all crazy.
But it makes me wonder how much else has been lost. I know for sure that great authors of the past seem to have disappeared from the firmament (H.L. Mencken, Garet Garrett, Albert Jay Nock, John T. Flynn). It’s the same with music. And one wonders about basic skills too. In a time when everything is automated and public knowledge and skills seem not as necessary, what becomes of musical skill and basic literacy? This is becoming a serious issue.
The problem of lost knowledge, however, is not a new one. The history of scurvy is instructive in this respect. The solution of scurvy was known in the ancient world but once the problem went away, the cure itself was forgotten. Historians of medicine have documented at least three times when the cure for scurvy had to be rediscovered because the knowledge was forgotten over the generations once the problem seemed to go away.
Each time, someone had to find out that lemons and other citrus kept it away. Done!
And this general phenomenon raises an interesting prospect that there are many technologies or practices of the past that were highly effective and meritorious that somehow became sidelined and forgotten over time.
I decided to test this out with linen sheets. So far as I’m concerned, this is a clear case in point. I can see no case for cotton much less synthetics over linen. You might not agree (a man I know rejects them because they feel too primitive) but I’m guessing that you will agree with me if you are willing to try them out.
What about the care of linen sheets? There is apparently nothing wrong with machine washing and drying, though they dry in a fraction of the time as cotton because the fabric is so porous. I would take them out much sooner than you might otherwise.
For my own part, I hang dry mine in the sun because doing so is delightful. And please don’t be mortified: I hand wash mine in a tub because this also delights me. It’s super easy and works wonderfully. That’s the old-fashioned way but there is nothing wrong with choosing the new fashion of a machine either.
The question of durability intrigues me the most. Is it really the case that these will last for generations and even thousands of years? I have no personal experience to report but we do have intact samples of linen cloth from many thousands of years ago and they hold up quite well, the Shroud of Turin being the most famous example, but there is also Ötzi the Iceman from 3,300 BC. If that is true, the higher expense of these sheets is more than worth it.
Think about this more philosophically and what it implies. We spend a third of our lives in bed. We’ve done this for hundreds of years since beds became a common household item. You would think we had this going well by now, that we would know what’s what. And yet look: people still use duvets rather than bedspreads or quilts, even though the latter are far breathable and more wonderful.
There was lost knowledge here so why not in bedsheets too? I think it is likely. Cotton fell lower and lower in price starting in the 1830s and was ever more accessible. Thus did it push linen out of the market. After a few generations, everyone forgot about the healing and durability of linen. Nearly two centuries have gone by and only now are people discovering how utterly fantastic linen sheets truly are.
If this observation is correct, it says something about the human capacity of forgetting. It simply is not the case that the newest is the best. Things get lost along the way, and it is up to each new generation to undertake that exciting treasure hunt to find out what that might be. I would add linen sheets to the list.
