Öyle Şeyler Ki

by Amy Leach, Ebru Alp (Translator)

"Ben bir Trappistim, tıpkı ağaçlar gibi," diye düşündü zambak; kendisini esintiye bıraktı ama yine de ona tek kelime bile etmedi. "Ben bir Trappistim, tıpkı zambak gibi," diye düşündü dere; inci gibi parlak turuncu balıklarla dolup taştı ama onlarla sohbet etmek istemedi. "Bizler Trappistiz, tıpkı dere gibi," diye düşündü yağmur damlaları, bulutların tatlı suyuyla göleti doldururken veya düşmüş bir kirazın suyuna karışırken yahut da toz toprak içinde hareketsiz dururken; hiçbir yerde kendilerini tanıtma gereği görmediler. "Ben bir Trappistim, tıpkı yağmur gibi," diye düşündü ağaç; suskun yağmurun, ılık yapraklarından toprağa süzüldüğünü hissetti; ıslak kuşlar geri döndü, ağaç ise hiç konuşmadı. "Ben bir Trappistim, tıpkı ağaçlar gibi," diye düşündü Trappist ormana doğru yürürken. Zambak, dere ve balıklar ve yağmur onu duygulandırdı; o ise hiçbir şey söylemedi.
Sessizlik yemini etmişlerdi.
-Amy Leach-

"Bu küçük cesur kitapta evrenin harikaları sergileniyor. Amy Leach'ın eşsiz sesi yankılanıyor ve mest ediyor. Kimse şimdiki zamana ondan daha iyi hayat veremez: saf bir uçuş deneyimi sağlıyor."
-Lawrence Weschler-

"Amy Leach; Lewis Carroll ve Emily Dickinson gibi yazıyor. Dünyaya bizsiz ama yine de dünyanın içinden bir anlam getiriyor. Bu kitapla evreni tanıyan okuyucu nihayetinde en çok da kendini tanıdığını keşfediyor. Leach, Amerika'nın en orijinal ve heyecan verici seslerinden birisi."
-Yiyun Li-

"Hem eğlendiriyor hem de büyülüyor."
-The Guardian-

"Nadir dediğimiz şey işte bu."
-Financial Times-

"Dünyada ya da gökler aleminde Amy Leach gibi yazan bir yazar daha tanımıyorum. Öyle Şeyler Ki dünyasız ve havasız kalmış bizlere, hayvanların ve bitkilerin arasından kendimiz hakkındaki hakikatleri anlatıyor."
-Eula Biss-

"[Amy Leach] Nasıl da bağımlılık yapıyor."
-David Abram-

"Bu kitaba ihtiyacınız var."
-Seth Marko-

"Doğa anlatılarında böylesine bir hayal gücünü, dilin böylesine büyülü bir kullanımını görmedim."
-Dale Szczeblowski-

"Kıvılcımlar saçıyor. Paha biçilemez."
-Stacie Williams-

"Bilgelik konuşuyor: Amy Leach insanileştiriyor ve yükseklere kaldırıyor."
-NYT.com-

"Sihirli."
-Washington Independent Review of Books-

"Şiire dökülmüş ilim."
-Missoula Independent-

"Acayip ve büyüleyici."
-New Letters-
(Tanıtım Bülteninden)

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Nature, Science, Poetry, Animals, Short Stories

160 pages, Paperback

First published June 12, 2012

About the author

Amy Leach’s work has been published in A Public Space, Tin House, Orion, the Los Angeles Review, and many others. She has been recognized with the Whiting Writers’ Award, Best American Essays selections, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, and a Pushcart Prize. She plays bluegrass, teaches English, and lives in Montana. Things That Are is her first book.

Reviews

[Abby · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not finished. So disappointed; I had such high hopes for this book. But it felt like reading a crazy person's diary, all of these disjointed, overwrought sentences about flora and fauna (par ex., "Stars are my bonfires, blue is my diaphanous land"). So annoyed. I want to read a real nature book that is also beautifully written (see: Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez), not flowery non sequiturs from a drunk poet. That's just the kind of curmudgeon I am.

[Rebecca]

I made it to page 8. This is the sort of earnest amateurish nature writing that gives the genre a bad name (like World of Wonders). Here’s a sample of the twee overwriting, from a mini-essay on beavers: “As soon as they hear the burbly gushing of a stream, beavers speed to the nearest trees to chisel girdles around their trunks so they go whomping down and then they can stuff them into the chatterboxy river to strangulate it into silence. But the ocean is a wilderness of chatter, and not in all the forests of the world are there enough trees to muzzle its splashing, sloshing, gurgling, yammering, yackety-yacking waves.” From the local Little Free Library it came, and there it shall return!

[Perseus Q · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't like the taste of pumpkin and as such I don't like pumpkin soup (or any other pumpkin-based dishes). I am not saying pumpkin is intrinsically bad, or that people who like pumpkin are my inferiors; I'm just saying I don't like it.

This book is pumpkin. If you liked it, good on you. You are my equal (unlike people who liked The Kite Runner or Memoirs Of A Geisha: you are my inferiors).

I didn't get past page 12. Others may love it though. She can certainly write, but I had no taste for her writing style or subject matter. It's a book of, umm, creative essays? Anecdotes? Vignettes? Observations?

Here are three of my own observations of page 11 and 12 (which has something to do with salmon).

"..the music starts to dance the people passing by."
'Dance' the people? Starting to get nervous...

She is adjective heavy: "...you are the music's toy, juggled into its furious torrents, jostled into its foamy jokes, assuming its sparklyblue or greenweedy or brownmuddy tinges, being driven down to the dirgy bottom where rumble-clacking stones are lit by waterlogged and melancholy sunlight..."

Allow me to re-write that extract: "...you are a musical toy juggled into torrents, assuming its muddy tinges, being driven down to the dirgy bottom where stones are lit by a melancholy sunlight..."

I prefer my version, but I didn't write the book, Amy Leach did, and she is free to write it how she sees fit.

I had no idea what she was talking about: "...even if you have built masterful Aspen castles in your mind, have toppled whole forests to throttle the writhing elements into a liveably serene personal pond; if you have longtime sculled your ingenious fins to withstand the tumble-crazy currents, there is music that will dissolve your anchors..."

Even if I what? I'm not a salmon anyway so maybe it doesn't apply to me. But even if I appropriate salmon-brain, I'm still not interested or happy with the adjectives and metaphors. It all reminds me of new poems by 19 year olds at a Creative Writing night course.

Still, many people love this, so, you know, I'm sorry I didn't finish it, but the thing is, I like stories.

[Sienna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amy Leach writes essays in the old style; these attempts are less concerned with making sense of the world around us — though they're rooted firmly in knowledge, love and familiarity — than with illuminating it, reminding us to wonder at our surroundings. I'm talking open-mouthed, awestruck wonder. Like Kipling's Just So Stories dressed smartly in science and naturalism, these short pieces of non-fiction marvel and meander and respect. Read them and find yourself in unexpected places, surrounded by life, lit up by stars in configurations that shift from bear to ladle to futuristic machine. After all,

The air is a question and those who travel upon it travel in questions: When will I find what? Where is who?

Leach's ability to empathize — with animals, with plants, even with galaxies — is perhaps her greatest gift, and one of the greatest she gifts readers, as we understand what it means to have a different sort of heart.

Plants cannot stay safe. Desire for light spools grass out of the ground; desire for a visitor spools red ruffles out of twigs. Desire makes plants very brave, so they can find what they desire; and very tender, so they can feel what they find. Thus genips with hearts of honey-pulp; thus poppies with hearts of fringe, and pickerelweeds with hearts of soft pale purple frill, and tulips with tilting hearts, and foxgloves with downy freckled hearts, and the maddening-sweet hearts of the careening pea.

I feel like I know now, in some small, significant sense, what it means to be that pea, to be a panda, a goat, a field full of love-lies-bleeding, a jellyfish, the collective animals rejected from the ark in our future. Some of the language here is shiver-inducingly beautiful. "Some memories are so fragile they bury themselves." Some made me laugh out loud ("'I have my mother's petals!' 'I have my father's filaments!'") and some sent me off on mental tangents, forced to take a break before moving on to the next piece.

Because you see details, you cannot see hints of light; because you see hints of light, you cannot see details. You would need diverse eyes if you wished to be equally penetrating and sensitive.

I can't recommend this collection highly enough to anyone unable — and unwilling — to forget how connected we are to the non-human.

Maybe some people's minds are like libraries, with memories like books, and even if the exits were left open the memories would still be sitting on their shelves in alphabetical submission. Maybe some people's memories are like furniture, useful: chairs to sit in and desks to work at and urns to bequeath; and maybe among many normal memories, some people have an unsnuffable flame, which every several years gets aggravated and burns the whole mind down. You happen to have one of those minds inhabited by memories like wild animals, with wandering ways of their own: diffident giraffes, changeable mice, milling birds, clamouring turtles, a few that harry you and many multitudes that skirt you.

[Peter Rock · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really confident, excellent sort of book. There's not another like it, and I really like how it pushes most notions of the essay far out to sea. The sensibility here is so rich, and so full of whimsy that it might flag or seem precious or even twee if it weren't so consistent, and the language so rigorous and energetic. I can't wait to have my students read some of this. Say, "Goats and Bygone Goats," where Leach opens by hypothesizing a world where sound waves don't decay and segues through the hypothetical goats into a full on investigation of goats, from which she doesn't really (does she?) return. The line between the metaphorical and the concrete is so wonderfully blurred or thrown out the window, so often (say, in "The Safari"), and the shape of the essays is so unpredictable, so attuned to what must be Leach's intuition. The structures feel as misshapen and organic as Montaigne's, in a way. So I'll change my 4 star to 5 star, since to what am I really comparing it?

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I will miss the freshness of grass crushed under my feet, I will miss the wasp-sting, i will miss seeing the pale green praying mantis sway and hesitate and look around before jumping into the air and flying away. But who . . . who. . . does not miss everything?"

I really love the way science is given song and image and metaphor in these essays -- it's natural science meets poetry. Perfect. I find the description of things I know very original, and there is so much I don't know, that I learn about, and she makes it matter. I started entering words in my diction notebook again, because she makes me want to use better words. The essays are probably best read slowly, over time.

[Kitty G Books]

DNF-ed this one, I don't think that the writing style was for me, it was all just a bit too over-the-top and flowery, which I know works for some, but it wasn't what I thought it would be when I bought it.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

In an attempt to find a muse for my Creative Non Fiction class, my professor suggested looking into a few writers. That list included Amy Leach. She is a deep muser, combining observations about nature into her own reflections. The essays are dense and often go places I don't expect. There is a lot of humor in the pieces I liked most.

from "Please Do Not Yell at the Sea Cucumber"
Jellyfish, on the other hand, are less accountable for wherever they are. Even great paroxysms of responsibility have little effect when you are made of mucus." and
...Perhaps being both [hyperacute and hypersensitive] would very soon melt your brain and leave you quiescent, hanging transparently in the giant dancing green waters of the world."

"God" is one of my favorites, and you can hear the author read it with a bluegrass background.

"The Same Old Joy" personifies warning sirens, and I had been struggling over a tornado piece so it really made me smile.

"Comfortless" is read in its entirety and the overdramatic narrator makes it perfect. Very funny, but not everyone could get away with it.

from "Oracle"
Who needs a priestess with the divinity at hand?"
Eh, just read the whole thing.

[Justin Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most incredible books of essays I've ever read, in both senses of incredible -- wow and I can't believe this. A factbook cross-bred with a storybook, unspooled by some sort of mad scientist infinite grandmother. You'll learn about beavers and penguins and black dwarves and exploding sea-cucumbers and the terror of change and the beauty of accepting it. Also dying. Also being noticed, working and being worked on. Every sentence is this long sticky light-catching strand of caramel and coats your throat, or even if you're silent finds its way under your nailbeds.

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is a gift

[Alexis Fresh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Consistently it seems that my favourite books are highly stylised non-fiction. This is a collection of essays and short stories, creative non-fiction. It covers a wide range of subjects but essentially is preoccupied with nature, exploring dozens of unique aspects of the natural world, and our relationships with them. Each story is filled with easily a half dozen meanings and metaphors and points of consideration. A favourite of mine is Love-in-a-mist, which I quoted in a speech I gave at my best friend's wedding. She was the one who gifted me the book.
I feel like there's too much to say about this book, to the point where I simply could never say it all. It took me a really long time to read because every time I read another section, it would stick with me for weeks. I felt it really valuable to let the book stay with me as long as it needed to, not to rush it in its journey through my life. I'm not someone who rereads books very often, but I can very easily imagine myself coming back to this one.
The afterword also really stuck with me, as the environmentalist leanings of the book as a whole became glaring. "Here's a list of some of the world's beauties," this book says, "and here is a post-natural world." I really think this is a must-read, if only to remind yourself of how much wonder exists in the universe and how important it is to protect. Leach's style of writing is beautiful in its own right, though, and I frequently found myself wishing I could be zapped into her brain and never leave.
Thank you Rachel for giving me this book, it's going to be very important to me for a long time I think.

[Kristal Kitap]

Daha önce hiç deneme okumadım. "Nedir bu deneme, sever miyim acaba?" diye düşünenlere tavsiyem: @monoklkitaptan "Öyle Şeyler ki". Okuması çok kolay, çok akıcı. Su gibi akıp gidiyor kelimeler sayfaların üzerinde sanki. İpek dokur gibi dokumuş yazar kelimelerini. O kadar zarif o kadar... nasıl anlatılır? soft ki!

Yazarın dünyasını takip etmekten büyük keyif aldım. Denemelere karşı ön yargım vardı. Okuyamam, sevemem derdim. Şimdi şans vermek için bir sebebim var. Nasıl ki öyküler de kırılmamı sağlayan bir Kurt Vonnegut varsa artık denemelerde de beni yüreklendiren bir yazar var: Amy Leach.

[Yan Xin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delightful collection of love letters to the physical world.

[aybikimben · Rating 5 out of 5]

DÜNYANIN EN TATLI KİTABI LÜDFNNE OKUYUN

[Jack O'Donnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Things That Are is the size of a prayer book. And you should have to put on those white gloves snooker referees wear when re-spotting a ball, when opening its pages. It should be treated with reverence and awe, because there is wisdom in these pages. It should become a religion with worshippers meeting up to discuss sentence and phrases such as the introduction to ‘Silly Lilies’, Most plants bend over backwards to cooperate with reality’. This is a book you can stay faithful to. Read every day, but only after a night of silence when the words are bright and your mind clear.
I could make promises, but I’m such a book slut. Really, anything with a cover lying open is fair game. But there was trouble with this book right away. First paragraph, opening page, ‘In the seventeen century, his Holiness the Pope adjudged beavers to be fish’. As a Catholic I know the Pope is infallible, but I didn’t know when I was eating a fish supper I was eating beaver, after all I’m a vegetarian. The trouble wasn’t with that sudden gift. Prayers can mutter themselves. The trouble is, if like me, you start making notes of the good, the true, the metaphors that dance, the similes that sing, phrases that go ping, then you’ll find that you’ve copies out the whole book word for word as if the Angel Gabriel has been whispering it in your ear. Listen to this truth, ‘The Moon also graces the water without getting floated off its feet, but effortlessly, while beavers have to work as hard as derricks’.
The mad disorder of order, just poetics, the wisdom of biology and mythology ‘King of Babylon who was too proud’ and for his penance roamed ‘green of mind’. There are loose sentence in grammar that begins with the main idea at the beginning and periodic sentence that express the main idea at the end. ‘Try climbing to the moon with only thirteen rungs in your backpack.’ Sometimes the liminal, the transition between what is and what is not, you just can’t explain, put into words, beauty in being, not unless you are Amy Leach. Genius you can genuflect to.

[Fred Putnam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Twenty-six essays that sparkle, dazzling leaps that demonstrate that all things are connected, that all the denizens of Planet Earth (and by implication, the entire universe) are linked by their existence--morphologically, behaviourally, and in (nearly) any other way conceivable. I gave this to my son-in-law, who was at the time a research biologist, a world-class expert on diatoms; he was overwhelmed, calling it "brilliant", "thrilling", and other such. Here is a sample, from the essay titled "Radical Bears in the Forest Delicious":

"Mostly what pandas do with their time is eat bamboo. Bamboo, that sturdy wooden grass, makes up 99 percent of their diet and they eat it for up to fourteen hours a day. They have to eat it constantly since they are assimilating only about 20 percent. Their penitential diet is a mystery; pandas are like celery saints--everyone else is convivially dining on stuffed eggs, truffled fingerlings, little pies and oranges, enjoying the tableside crooners, while out behind a bush sits a celery saint with his basket of celery, crunch crunch crunch. Eat enough pies and you can put aside the desire for food and pursue something else, such as a cowhand. Rare is the romance of the celery extremist." (43)

Every page of this book will delight, astonish, surprise, and every essay--most as short as a few hundred words--will open to see, imagine, and wonder about creation (and not just the pretty bits that we use on calendars and as screen-savers).

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a long time to finish this because I would read a handful of essays and then not pick the book up again for a while. But I did really enjoy reading it. My favorite essay was "God" - like many of the essays, the full impact of it is only felt as you finish it. My favorite quote, from the essay "The Round-Earth Affair": "But perhaps nature needs us like a hostage needs her captors: nature needs us not to annihilate her, not to run her over, not to cover her with cement, not to chop her down. We can hardly admire ourselves, then, when we stop to accommodate nature's needs: we are dubious heroes who create a peril and then save its victims, we who rescue the the animals and the trees from ourselves."

[Beyza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Doğa hakkında, doğa gibi huzurlu bir kitap. Nasıl ki, bir ormanda, bir deniz kıyısında, bir dağ yamacında kendimize dönüyoruz, bu kitap da çeşit çeşit hayvanı ve hatta güneşi, yıldızları, ayı anlatırken aslında bizden bahsediyor. Çok severek okudum - ama söylemeden geçilmemesi gereken bir şey de, çevirinin güzelliği... Bazen yabancı bir kitap okuduğumu hissettirecek kadar iyiydi. Yayıncısından çevirmenine, editörüne, tasarımcısına... Herkesin eline sağlık!

[Amanda Witt]

A wonderful read, with flowing language and descriptive phrases of and about everything to do with nature, the earth and the universe.
Example: Once the tree was full of tree, now it is full of holes. It is not good to pour concrete in the holes. Would you do that to your own wounds?

[Elif · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an interesting book of essays. Believe me; you've never read essays like these before.

English: https://elifthereader.com/books/thing...
Türkçe: http://kitaplikkedisi.com/kitaplar/oy...

[Kerri Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of 26 eclectic, funny, and wonderfully whimsical essays about everything from salmon to flowers to pandas to the moon is maybe one of the strangest things I've ever read. It was also absolutely delightful.

The reason I bought it/read it in the first place, and my favorite paragraph:

“But perhaps nature needs us like a hostage needs her captors: nature needs us not to annihilate her, not to run her over, not to cover her with cement, not to chop her down. We can hardly admire ourselves, then, when we stop to accommodate nature’s needs: we are dubious heroes who create a peril and then save its victims, we who rescue the animals and the trees from ourselves.” —from “The Round-Earth Affair”

[Four-point-five stars for being relentlessly interesting.]

[Danny Ritter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of essays about nature. The writing style is very flowery....Amy Leach celebrates each and every detail of each and every Thing, usually relating it to another Thing in a surprising and humorous way.

I think her essays are best consumed in isolation from one another, allowing her way of thinking to surprise and delight you. Read one after another, the essays in this collection can be a lot. Each requires an extraordinary amount of attention in order to be enjoyed.

[Jana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the concept and most of the ideas in this book, which is made up of dreamy sketch-like essays, but I thought that the writing itself was a bit too deliberately twee from time to time. I did enjoy reading an essay a day, though!

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is such a delightful book; full of short sprinklings of poetic sugar. A lovely accompaniment to your morning coffee to stave off a general hatred of the world. Do not read all at once.

[Liz VanDerwerken · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite elements of creative non-fiction and nature writing rolled into one. Loved it from start (the table of contents!) to finish (the glossary!) and everything in between.

[Felix Maclean · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is such a treat, an absolute joy!

[Carian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall this was not for me. I really liked a few of the essays but most of them lost me. I was reading words, but they didn't amount to anything I could follow and enjoy.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whew. Your verbs.

[harry · Rating 4 out of 5]

just another sandy, feathery, chocolate-mint person laughing on the lawn

[Mabel Smyth · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF- not a fan.