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University Press of New England

Stone Work: Reflections on Serious Play and Other Aspects of Country Life (Upne)

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Title
Title: Stone Work: Reflections on Serious Play and Other Aspects of Country Life (Upne)
Author: John Jerome
ISBN: 9780874517620
Publisher: University Press of New England
Published: 1996
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Edition: First Edition
Number of Pages: 224
Condition Note: Excellent, unmarked copy with little wear and tight binding. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
Publisher Description: 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."