An Excerpt from “Prisms, Veils” by David Bentley Hart

From one of the most-read religious and philosophical scholars in the United States comes a collection of creative, thought-provoking fables. In Prisms, Veils: A Book of Fables, David Bentley Hart explores the elusive nature of dreams and the enduring power of mythologies. Moving over themes ranging from the beauty of the natural world to the very nature of consciousness itself, each narrative is threaded through with Hart’s deep religious, cultural, and historical knowledge, drawing readers into an expertly woven tapestry of diverse allusions and deep meaning.

Perhaps, he thought to himself as he rose from the bench, placed the strap of his canvas valise over his shoulder, and began his walk home, this was indeed the day he had been waiting for. Certainly the weather was ideal: a mild, balmy early autumn afternoon in the Pacific Northwest, a sky of particularly limpid—even diaphanous—blue, alto-cumulus clouds of dazzling white; yet also a slight, cool dampness in the air, the keen, faintly metallic fragrance of approaching rain, and a brisk and constant breeze raising soft deciduous sighs and coniferous whispers in the woods to the right of the gray gravel path and stirring the grass in the meadow to its left, so that its wide, low expanse looked like a sea of crawling tidal combers with aquamarine crests. The evening, moreover, promised to be pleasant, with a few light showers and an early moon only three days removed from full (the perfect degree of imperfection). He would be able to leave the French doors leading to his garden open, so that the night breezes could issue in, now and then perhaps bringing in a few raindrops.

His last seminar of the semester, moreover, was two hours in the past and the campus half a mile behind him. He had already recorded grades for all eight of his graduate students—an “A” in every case, of course—even without having received their final papers, since there was no question but that they would all acquit themselves brilliantly; he had admitted only his best disciples into the seminar. So, then, no professional obligations remained that need detain him now, if indeed the right moment had arrived. And he was quite satisfied that he had, by the semester’s conclusion, duly impressed upon his students the three lessons he had been most anxious to impart: First, that Japanese aesthetic theory simply presumes the beautiful, but exhausts itself in ever subtler reflections on the mysteries of the sublime, in the original classical sense of that latter word—that which lies sub limine, below the threshold—the plain, the unadorned, the nobly restrained. Second, that this yields an implicit metaphysics of aesthetic experience quite unlike the Platonic notion that the eros for corporeal beauty leads the soul upward to the contemplation of eternal beauty; it is rather a metaphysics devoted to a studiously refined, if often quiescent, appreciation of everything most delicately subdued and withdrawn in nature and artifice, most marked by time and use, most expressive of the sheer thereness of the world in its unimposing simplicity, and so devoted also to the pure temporality of being’s disclosure of itself. And third (and this had been his sole critical contribution to his discipline over twenty-five years of teaching and writing on Asian arts), that the best and most “systematic” approach for Westerners like himself and his students to the host of largely untranslatable terms that constitutes the indigenous glossary of Japanese aesthetics is to try to situate them along a continuum between the experiences of mono no aware—the “Ah!” of aching enchantment at the utter dewlike evanescence of everything lovely, the gasp of wistful awe, the pang of a melancholy mastered by thankful detachment—and yūgen—that gracefully grave transport induced by a sense of mist-veiled distances, shadowed depths, darkness, things hidden or at most suggested by the faintest of traces, things concealed, mysterious, always further away, always barely recalled, always ineffable.

A few dozen yards ahead, at the edge of the path, a young maple whose leaves were already bright crimson and opulent purple except on the lowest branches where they were a golden pink, stood out against a larger, overshadowing Eastern Red Cedar—not a cedar at all, actually, but rather a variety of juniper—whose thin, darkly green scaled leaves and sprawling clusters of small, midnight-blue “berries” produced a hue of extraordinary richness, one that reminded him of a color—both emerald and azure at once, in alternating but somehow distinct layers—he had once seen the ocean briefly assume just after dusk, as the last blush of the sunset was departing from the horizon and stars were beginning to appear in the sky. Still further along, enveloping the cedar’s outline in a kind of nimbus, there was a yet larger tree, perhaps a poplar, all its foliage now a dark, parched gold. And directly ahead of him on the path, twenty yards away perhaps and walking in the same direction as he, was a girl—one of the college’s undergraduates undoubtedly—with an admirable figure and long straight brown hair, carrying a small black pocketbook over one shoulder and clad (in obvious defiance of the changing season) in a light, tightly fitting white knitted blouse and a pleated red tartan miniskirt. Just as she was passing the maple the wind rose and lifted the hem of her skirt, wholly revealing one hip and exposing quite a good deal more than that, not at all concealed by the purely ceremonial wisp of lavender undergarment she was wearing; and she, promptly but casually, reached down to stroke the hem into place again, glanced over her shoulder, graced him with a radiant and whimsically hapless smile, and simply continued walking onward at the same leisurely pace. And then a number of leaves from the maple came spinning down in her wake from the high branches, momentarily hiding her from view in a cloud of flickering red. He paused for several seconds, watching the leaves settling on the path and then looking up to follow her with his eyes as she continued, with her very fluid stride, to draw away from him. How enchanting, it seemed to him, and touchingly so, the sheer insouciance—the want of haste—with which she had adjusted her skirt, and how impressive the calm confidence of someone so assured of her own loveliness that she felt no embarrassment whatsoever at the small indisposition her minimalist choice in attire had caused her. It had imbued the moment, however fleeting, with a kind of perfection that no one could have planned. An excellent illustration, he thought, of the unrepeatable, irretrievable, and for that reason all the more precious beauty of the ephemeral. Never again in the whole expanse of eternity would this precise orchestration of elements—that girl and this moment, blossoming youth and the dying year, innocence and sensuality, elegance and absurdity—recur; never again would this vanishingly transient instant of charming equilibrium be achieved with this same fortuitous grace and always already melting immediacy, or precisely this arrangement of delightful juxtapositions; all of it was irrecoverable and for just that reason pervaded by the softly sparkling beauty of death.

(excerpted from chapter 11)

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