هذا كتاب لطيف ومضحك ومسلي، يحكي قصة حقيقية للمؤلف، توني هوكس، والذي زار ايرلندا في التسعينات وأثناء تلك الزيارة الأولى، رأى شخص معه ثلاجة يقف على طرف الشارع وينتظر أن يقله أحدهم. وعندما سأل السائق الإيرلندي – هل ما رأيته صحيح – هل هذه ثلاجة؟ أجاب السائق: نعم. وسكت. يقول المؤلف عن هذه القصة: في ايرلندا حتى فكرة التنقل مع ثلاجة بهذا الشكل ليس حتى موضوع نقاش مع السائق، وكأن الأمر طبيعي. بعد ذلك قام المؤلف بعمل تحدي مع أصدقائه بأن يقوم بالتنقل مع ثلاجة في كل ايرلندا لمدة شهر من خلال التوقف على جانب الطريق وطلب المساعدة للتنقل بين المدن.
هذا الكتاب يروي ما حصل معه. كيف كان تنقله بهذا الشكل وتعرفه على أشخاص بعفوية تامة ناشرا الفرح والسعادة أينما ذهب. يبدو أن الكتاب تحول لفيلم أيضاً. يرى المؤلف بأن هذه الرحلة وفكرتها السخيفة – التنقل مع ثلاجة – تشبه قصة حياتنا، داعيا الآخرين لأخذ الأمور بهذه الروحية: أحيانا مهم أن نقوم بأشياء سخيفة. أن ندع الأمور تحصل لنا بدل أن نخطط لكافة التفاصيل. يشير المؤلف لذلك في هذا اللقاء على أنها فلسفة الثلاجة. أدعوكم لقراءة الكتاب – وللتعرف على الكتاب وهذه الفلسفة: أهمية السخافة والضحك في الحياة من خلال هذا الفيديو. أدناه بعض الاقتباسات من الكتاب.
بعض الاقتباسات من الكتاب:
“Be ambitious, strive for great heights and don’t give up without a fight—but don’t do so without first exploring the simple option.” “During the car journey I had expounded the credo that wherever you go, good things will happen to you, provided that you truly believe they will.” “No doubt I was experiencing some kind of inherited British need to play fair with regard to queuing. I think its roots are in the colonial thing. Shooting hordes of insubordinate natives was acceptable when ‘needs must’, but jumping a queue was always quite intolerable. The whole raison d’être for a vast British Empire had been a desire to teach the ignorant peoples of the world how to queue correctly. We British lead the world in queuing. (Well, we used to, until a few other countries pushed in front of us.) And here was I flouting my responsibility as a good British Citizen to respect this most basic of all human rights.” “There is no other physical gesture which comes as close to an embodiment of the fridge philosophy—a quiet acceptance of what has gone, and a healthy lack of concern about what is to come.” ‘Life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.’ “As I sat looking over the reflective waters with their stunning backdrop, I too became reflective. I began to wonder whether my ‘fridge journey’ could be considered an allegory for life. I decided that there was some persuasive evidence. Each day I was faced with a number of choices, some were easy and others were harder. The same was true of life.” “I had learned not to worry; to make my choice and allow things to happen. For the most part they turned out to be good, and when they weren’t—like the night from hell in a hostel—then they were character building. There weren’t any wrong or right paths to choose, just different ones, and where they led was governed by the attitude adopted towards them. It seemed to me that was true of life also.” “So what else? Well, I couldn’t manage alone. The nature of hitching, especially when encumbered by a kitchen appliance, is such that you are reliant on others. We may not expect it, but there may come a time in all of our lives when we have to hitch, either physically or figuratively. It doesn’t matter how important, wealthy or talented you are, if your car breaks down somewhere and you are forced to stick out your thumb and hitch, then your fallibility and the fact that you are no better than the next person will become abundantly clear to you. You need someone else’s kindness to take you to safety. What I was beginning to discover was that signing up to this Trust was as liberating as it was fun. Fun. That brought me to the final thrust of my lakeside dialectic—my purposeless journey was, like life itself, cyclical. My starting point, Dublin, represented the beginning of life, and throughout my journey, it was destined to be my eventual ‘resting place’. Since my fridge had cost more than the £100 bet itself, I had no valid economic motivation for the trip, and in terms of great human achievement it would go down in the annals of history alongside Timothy ‘Bud’ Budyana and his backwards marathon. Given this ‘purposelessness’, the only justification for my exploits was that I ensured they were fun.” Once the people in this country realised that what I was doing I was doing purely ‘for the craic’, they understood fully what I was about, and took me to their hearts. Here, dangling my feet in the waters of this splendid lough, I resolved to take the same approach to life itself. The fridge philosophy’ was taking shape. One thing was sure though. It would need another name before it went on general release. ‘Well, all I can say Gerry is that some marches are for things and some are againstthings, but never has there been a march for absolutely nothing. Now is our chance to put that right. Grab your toaster and kettle and discover like me, how great it feels to devote yourself to something truly purposeless. By doing something with absolutely no point to it, we eliminate the possibility of failure, because in a sense the worse it may go then the more it can be considered a success.’ The finale might have been fakery, but everything which had preceded it had not For me this was real. The journey may not have changed the lives of the people of Ireland, but it had changed mine. I was a different, a better person. I had made discoveries, learned some important lessons. From this day forth I was going to stop for hitch-hikers, laugh along with happy drunks in pubs, and respect the right of the bad guitarist to play along with the rest I had learned tolerance, I had learned that you could trust in your fellow man for help, and I had learned a new and pleasurable way of acquiring splinters.الكتاب أيضاً أصبح فلما وهو متاح على YOUTUBE بشكل كامل:
للإطلاع على لائحة الكتب التي تمت مراجعتها في العام 2020:
1) The Arab Winter: A Tragedy. By Noah Feldman 2) Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, by Yuval Noah Harari3) فلسطين: منظور تنموي جديد للدكتور محمد اشتية
4) The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, by Pace and Sen. 5) Paul Kahn, Origins of Order, Yale University Press (2019) 6) Why Nations Fail(2012) by Acemoglu and Robinson.7) يوسف زيدان: عزازيل (دار الشروق 2008)
8) وائل حلاق: ما هي الشريعة؟ (2016)
9) يوسف زيدان: النبطي (2010)
10) John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (2020).
11) How to Talk so Kids Will Listen…And Listen So Kids Will Talk(2002).
12) Juan J. Linz: Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (1975, 2000).
13) Assaf Likhovski: Law and identity in mandate Palestine (2006).
14) Francis Fukuyama: Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Present Day (2014).
15) Dimitris Bouris: The European Union and Occupied Palestinian Territories: State-building without a state (Routledge Advances in European Politics, 2014).
16) Antony Anghie: Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law(Cambridge University Press, 2012).
17) Neri Zilberand Ghaith al-Omari: State with No Army, Army with No State: Evolution of the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, 1994–2018 (2018).
18) Alan Bryman: Social Research Methods (Oxford University Press, 3rd Edition, 2008).
19) Alaa Tartir and Timothy Seidel (Eds.), Palestine and Rule of Power: Local Dissent vs. International Governance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 247 pages).
20) Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage book edition, 1979, 25th Anniversary Edition with a new Preface by the Author).
21) Gabi Baramki, Peaceful Resistance: Building a Palestinian University Under Occupation (Pluto Press, 2010, 166 pages without annexes).
The Jewel of Medina: A Novel (2008).
23) Alain Badiou: The Rebirth of History (2012).
24) Lorenzo Veracini: Israel and Settler Society (2006).
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26) Yuval Noah Harari: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2019).
27) Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said, Interviewed by David Barsamian, Pluto Press (2003).
28) Ronit Lentin. Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism. Bloomsbury Academic (2018).
29) Michael Sandel, Justice: What’s the Rights Thing to Do? (2010).
30) Lisa Downing, The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault (2008)
31) Albert Einstein, About Zionism (1931).
32) Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (1973)
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