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Stone Work
John Jerome
其他書名
Reflections on Serious Play and Other Aspects of Country Life
出版UPNE, 1996
主題Literary Collections / EssaysNature / GeneralSocial Science / Sociology / RuralTravel / United States / Northeast / New England (CT, MA, ME, NH, RI, VT)
ISBN08745176219780874517620
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=1fQvcxWEz74C&hl=&source=gbs_api
EBookSAMPLE
註釋With grace, style, and gentle, self-deprecating wit, John Jerome describes the back-breaking but soul-mending task of building a stone wall on his New England farm. The job begins on a whim-he decides to move one from his woods for the sheer pleasure of seeing it from the house-and as the wall progresses, the physical occupation leads Jerome to philosophical preoccupation. Thus Stone Work, first published in 1989, becomes a discourse on the meaning of craft, the stolidness of work, the gifts of the seasons, and the complexities of being male and fifty-five.
Jerome finds something pure in the lugging and the struggling with the stones, a clarity that leads him to insights into family ties, the tenuousness of nature's beauty, and his ongoing quest for fixity in a world of flux. "Maybe gravity is all the alignment one ever gets," he thinks as he pushes a stone into place, "and therefore all I ought to need. What more could one want, anyway, than the sure sense-right there, at any given moment for the noticing-of a straight line pointing toward the center of the earth?" While his wall isn't a masterwork-isn't even finished-his hands-on labor allows Jerome to grasp some elemental truths; with him we come to see the "riches, riches, everywhere, just for the paying of attention."