Stone Work: Reflections on Serious Play and Other Aspects of Country Life
Sign in to keep track of books you’ve read and want to read.
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.
Read more
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."
Liked Stone Work: Reflections on Serious Play and Other Aspects of Country Life? Here’s where I’d start.
These suit anyone who liked Stone Work: Reflections on Serious Play and Other Aspects of Country Life. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.
-
Rock, Meet Window: A Father-Son Story Shares memoir, nonfiction
-
The Awakening of HK Derryberry: My Unlikely Friendship with the Boy Who Remembers Everything Shares memoir, nonfiction
-
Out of the Box: The Highs and Lows of a Champion Smuggler Shares memoir, nonfiction -
The Pharmacist's Mate and 8 Shares memoir, nonfiction
