#tinkers

I was just thinking that I am not very many years old, but that I am a century wide. I think I have my literal age but am surrounded in a radius of years. I think that these years of days, this near century of years, is a gift from you. Thank you. Now, let me read you something to get you back to sleep. ↗

— Paul Harding

#pulitzer-prize #tinkers #age

When it came time to die, we knew and went to deep yards where we lay down and our bones turned to brass. We were picked over. We were used to fix broken clocks, music boxes; our pelvises were fitted onto pinions, our spines soldered into cast works. Our ribs were fitted as gear teeth and tapped and clicked like tusks. This is how, finally, we were joined. ↗

— Paul Harding

#music

Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split the frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you that that is beautiful, and a part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough. ↗

— P. Harding

#life #tinkers #beauty

Howard though, Is it not true: A move of the head, a step to the left or right, and we change from wise, decent, loyal people to conceited fools? Light changes, our eyes blink and see the world from the slightest difference of perspective and our place in it has changed infinitely: Sun catches cheap plate flaking- I am a tinker; the moon is an egg glowing in its nest of leafless trees- I am a poet; a brochure for an asylum is on the dresser; I am an epileptic, insane; the house is behind me- I am a fugitive. His despair had not come from the fact that he was a fool; he knew he was a fool. His despair came from the fact that his wife saw him as a fool, as a useless tinker, a copier of bad verse from two-penny religous magazines, an epileptic, and could find no reason to turn her head and see him as something better. ↗

— P. Harding

#change

Boy to his dying grampa: "I am a century wide. I think that I have my literal age but am surrounded in a radius of years. I think that these years of days, this near century of years, is a gift from you. ↗

— P. Harding

#age

And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. ↗

— Paul Harding

#confusion #death #life #souls #tinkers

When his grandchildren had been little, they had asked if they could hide inside the clock. Now he wanted to gather them and open himself up and hide them among his ribs and faintly ticking heart. ↗

— Paul Harding

#paul-harding #tinkers #family