[Bukan] Review Buku

buku yang ditulis oleh Gemma Elwin Harris ini menarik untuk dibaca. kemarin aku dapet buku secara digital dari internet. kalau harus beli harganya cukup mahal dan aku gak sanggup untuk nunggu. buku ini berisi tentang beberapa pertanyaan konyol yang sering muncul di benak anak-anak, tapi mungkin bukan anak-anak indonesia he he. 

beberapa pertanyaan seperti is it ok to eat a worm?, why is blood red, not blue?, what is atoms?, why water is wet? dan masih banyak pertanyaan lain yang dianggap sering muncul dalam benak anak-anak. pertanyaan yang terkadang sulit dijawab oleh orang dewasa. tapi di buku ini pertanyaan-pertanyaan tersebut coba dijawab oleh scientist dan filsuf secara ringan dan mudah dipahami.

ada dua jawaban dari dua pertanyaan yang bisa dibilang menurutku menarik karena sangat dekat dengan kita, yang pertama: why we have dreams? seorang filsuf modern, alain de botton menjawab:

Most of the time, you feel in charge of your own mind. You want to play with some Lego? Your brain is there to make it happen. You fancy reading a book? You can put the letters together and watch characters emerge in your imagination.

But at night, strange stuff happens. While you’re in bed, your mind puts on the weirdest, most amazing and sometimes scariest shows.

In the olden days, people believed that our dreams were full of clues about the future. Nowadays, we tend to think that dreams are a way for the mind to rearrange and tidy itself up after the activities of the day.

 

Why are dreams sometimes scary? During the day, things may happen that frighten us, but we are so busy we don’t have time to think properly about them. At night, while we are sleeping safely, we can give those fears a run around. Or maybe something you did during the day was lovely but you were in a hurry and didn’t give it time. It may pop up in a dream. In dreams, you go back over things you missed, repair what got damaged, make up stories about what you’d love, and explore the fears you normally put to the back of your mind.

Dreams are both more exciting and more frightening than daily life. They’re a sign that our brains are marvellous machines — and that they have powers we don’t often give them credit for, when we’re just using them to do our homework or play a computer game. Dreams show us that we’re not quite the bosses of our own selves.

dan pertanyaan kedua adalah tentang hal yang sensitif dikalangan remaja sekarang, how do we fall in love? seorang penulis bernama  Jeanette Winterson menjawab dengan sangat puitis:

You don’t fall in love like you fall in a hole. You fall like falling through space. It’s like you jump off your own private planet to visit someone else’s planet. And when you get there it all looks different: the flowers, the animals, the colours people wear. It is a big surprise falling in love because you thought you had everything just right on your own planet, and that was true, in a way, but then somebody signalled to you across space and the only way you could visit was to take a giant jump. Away you go, falling into someone else’s orbit and after a while you might decide to pull your two planets together and call it home. And you can bring your dog. Or your cat. Your goldfish, hamster, collection of stones, all your odd socks. (The ones you lost, including the holes, are on the new planet you found.)

 

And you can bring your friends to visit. And read your favourite stories to each other. And the falling was really the big jump that you had to make to be with someone you don’t want to be without. That’s it.

PS you have to be brave

itu baru dua pertanyaan dari beberapa pertanyaan lain yang ada dalam buku itu. mungkin buku ini mencoba mengajak kita berpikir ulang tentang pertanyaan 'sepele' yang kita pikir kita tau jawabannya dan menghidupkan kembali rasa kagum dan rasa ingin terus bertanya pada hal 'sepele' tentang alam semesta yang dimana kita hidup di dalamnya.

aku dapat buku ini di web torrent, jadi silahkan cari dan selamat bersenang-senang!