Month: June 2012
A Moment in Time
Even though it’s supposed to be a fixed thing with the same exact quantity of minutes in every hour, in some occasions Time appears to be so elastic that allows some minutes to feel longer and some other to feel shorter.
That also makes me think about how some things in our life are missed while we’re too busy doing other things. Then, when Time passes by, we can’t help wonder “where did the Time has gone?”
Watching a TV series the other day, called Third Watch, this phrase caught my attention when a policeman tells a friend “I’ve spent 25 years of my life in this game and nobody even told me I was playing.”
That made me remember this singular feeling that appears when we recover consciousness of our life after having been too busy, and then we realize all what we have missed during this period.
This situation also reminds me of a movie called Somewhere in time, because it reflects in a very precise way this feeling that an important part of our lives has gone lost “somewhere in time”.
The movie, stared by Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, is based on a novel called Bid Time Return, written by Richard Matheson, and it’s called in Spanish “Pidele al tiempo que vuelva” (Ask for the time to come back), which, I think, it also applies very well to this suffocating feeling that appears every time that we’ve missed something important and we wish we could go back in time to re-do those missing things.
May be this is one of the reasons why we can find so many books and TV series in which the main topic is the search for a device that allows us to travel in time.
But then the question always remains, is it really possible to change our past? Or are we condemned to live with it, just as General Kirk, from The Time Tunnel TV Series, said: “The past is something that we cannot change and we have to learn how to live with it”?
Weekly Photo: Create
Weekly Photo: Close
May books lead your dreams
But I’ve also found that this long travels throughout the city always give the chance to spend a pleasant time with my beloved books. And I always find it really surprising how fast time passes by when I’m reading, even if I get stuck between stations or in the middle of the traffic. Books simply take my mind away and let it fly free.
Being in this reflexive mood about how big cities, books and writers relate, this week I also came across to an interesting article that talked about Otavio Junior, a man who spent most of his young life in a poor neighborhood in Brazil.
One day a book came to his hands and then his life changed forever.
Since that moment he started borrowing books from his neighbors, and then he realized that books where making his life better and nicer. Then he decided to share this experience with other kids, and Junior started a library project to give people from the same neighborhood the chance to get close to books.
Now, Otavio Junior has written a book that’s being called Biblioteca Favela (The bookstore of the neighborhood) and while presenting this book in Spain, he told El Mundo newspaper the following: “Everybody told me ‘You’re crazy’, but I always answered, I’m not crazy, I’m only in love with books”.
This week I also got moved while reading Ray Bradbury’s biography, after this great American writer died some days ago.
Bradbury liked to walk and to observe the people and the city around him and then reflect this observations on his stories. As a child and a young man, he didn’t have so much money but books were always present in his life. As he couldn’t afford to buy them, he spend a lot of time in public libraries reading and learning the subjects that he couldn’t study at school, as his family couldn’t afford it.
Bradbury even wrote his first story and even his novel Fahrenheit 451 at a university library and with a rental typewriter.
In 2009, Bradbury told The New York Times: “Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years”.
Weekly Photo: Friendship
Labyrinths and Mazes…can you find your way out?
Text and Photo by Nora Vasconcelos
Magical Labyrinths, Journeys Through Space and Time, is a book written by Bertrun Jeitner-Hartmann and illustrated by Thomas Thiemeyer, shows 12 unusual 3D labyrinths which are placed in strange and unique spots, so that while solving them it’s easy to fell that the structure is place in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle, deep down in the Ocean close to the Atlantida, or over there, really really far away in the outer space.
This book also gives an interesting explanation about how labyrinths have evolve through the years and how they have had different meanings that go from being mystical spots to be places where people can have fun or get to know them better.
A much more complex book is the one called Maze, The world’s most challenging puzzle, created by Christopher Manson. Here, the author starts the maze with a warning that says: “this is not really a book. This is a building in the shape of a book”.
Throughout the maze, different rooms and riddles are shown at the same time that a story is told, so that the readers can “walk” through the rooms of a complex construction, where several clues to solve the puzzle are hidden, by looking closely at these clues and solving the riddles, the explorers might be lucky enough to leave this enchanted place in only 16 steps. Of course, it’s quite complicated to do it so, so, you can spend several weeks, even months lost in this place trying to find your way out.
Another book I’ve found really amusing is Storming a Castle, a maze adventure. This book, by Graham White, it’s focused on younger readers, however the lovely and well detailed drawings of an ancient castle are so wonderful that it’s hard to pass on this book.
Here, a young man and his father have to find the way in and the out of a castle, while they meet all kind of challenges. During all this time, many details about how castles were built and how middle age cities were at that time are given.
Weekly Photo: Today
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