Bedenim Bana Ait- Pro Familia itibaren Gergedan Yayınları içinde LIT biçim

Mucahit Doğan _lackmd1 — This is perhaps the best book I have read in the past five years. That being said, I put the book down three times before I was able to get past page 60 where the book turns confusion into magic. The author captures and delicately re-presents moments in life that we pass over too quickly. He asks us to think about life, and its passing, by focusing on elements or qualities of life that defy time: ie. the color of light; the movement of water; the sounds of moving air. He asks us to think about those aspects of life which glide through time while he suggests that our lives are transient and hopeless efforts to mark, measure, and keep track of time. He uses the metaphor of beautifully crafted old clocks that need delicate work to keep them running as a way of asking the reader to consider the care and attention and regular "tinkering" that we should apply to our lives if we are to experience the beauty of life before we die. And here's what I think after reading the book two more times in the past three months. Tinkers, by Paul Harding I love this book so much that I have read it three times in six months, not for story, not for plot, not for style, and not for characters. I reread this book because it is compels the willing reader to linger and become consumed in the magical moments when life is suddenly revealed to exist not in the big picture, not in what seems to be in direct sight, but in the fissures of the obvious that keep the nourishing beauty of life safe from becoming ordinary. Harding writes of light and time as universal elements that both mark and reveal life. He places the reader in the center of a room that looks out at the current, back to the past, and through to the existential. And yes, this is a book where an old man is dying, and yes, it is framed in a tale about the last eight days of his life, and yes it tells the life of his father who was epileptic. But it really is not about that, at least, not to me. Or, more truthfully, it wasn’t until after about page sixty when I realized that I was no longer just reading. Rather, I was remembering, re-experiencing, and being led on an almost unconscious journey examining the lights that revealed subtle, wondrous, and deeply satisfying and beautiful aspects of the world around me. Harding takes the reader to the fields, where the light of day is “banded” and light of night is “folded.” He writes about the energy of light, how it “sparkles,” “trickles,” “gushes,”” floods,” and “splinters. Further, he writes that, “Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed infinitely… (p. 124).” Throughout Tinkers, Harding asks the reader to consider how ever changing colors, lights, and details fill the overlapping time before, around, and ahead of us in ways that frame our lives with or without our noticing these elements. And, he uses a focus on the rich and beautiful images of nature’s wonders, by writing about the memories of a dying man, to makes the compelling point that, [Life] “doesn’t stop, it [human life] just ends.” Again and again, Harding reminds us that the very act of trying to understand gets in the way of losing oneself in the consuming esthetic of the moment. He weaves technical and playful notes from a horologist (clockmaker) who uses “clock” as both a metaphor for both the operations of a functioning and failing life, and also for man’s effort to mark, measure, and organize the universe. This use of clock to represent time, that is marked, that is passed, and that lies ahead also refers to the finite and infinite. Harding suggests that human life is reabsorbed into something that is everything and nothing. This passing, from the seen to the unseen, from the familiar to the unknown, from the present to the future is beyond our knowing. Some mourn, some muse, some lament, but we just end. A clock that marks time may stop, a life might end, but time and Life never stop. Harding tinkers with us by using the morbid subject of dying, to awaken perceptions that lay in our unconscious. For me, he summoned unaccustomed memories with details richer than I had perceived at the time. At the most profound moments, I found the book, Tinkers, slipping to my lap and my mind wandering to images of natural beauty. For example, I remembered noticing blades of mountain-side grass resilient to the weight of morning dew; and at another point, I recalled the sound and sight of morning mist moving over spider-webbed trees; and then I remembered an October day when I stood under an ochre light bursting through yellowed and age-spotted maple leaves glowing in their last fall days. Maybe, I won’t read Tinkers again soon, but like that October day in 1992 that my mind found when I let it search for beautiful light, I will follow Harding’s call and let myself succumb to and be drawn into those fissures in the obvious, that reveal the sublime.

Hee Lee ezbrush07d1 — Blah. Doesn't keep your interest. There are too many good books out there to waste your time on this one.

Ksusha Kibenko harmonaizer — SBC Challenge: spring word in title

Carmen Ferreira carmenefsi030f — Remember bits and pieces of this but it kinds of blurs together with his other books. It was a quick read if that means anything.