It's a feeling I've had most often in a good bookstore, when faced with the sheer number of books I'll never have time to read. Or my first time in Italy, when the sudden superabundance of antiquity and beauty pitched me into a strange kind of despair. After my first exposure to Kyoto, I finally feel I have travelled to a truly different place -- though I've been an ocean from home for more than a week. Imagine spending a day smelling nothing but essential oils, and then imagine that happening to all your other senses too.
There have been many moments today when the beauty has simply wrung something out of me involuntarily, a little mortal "oh". My first glimpse of Kinkaku-ji, the so-called "Golden Pavilion", shining in the morning sun, seated in glory over its own reflection and retinue of fading irises. Or dappled sunbeams piercing a still pond at Ryoan-ji. Or an astonishing wooden screen at Nijo-jo's palace, carved from a single piece of wood, that somehow depicts peacocks from one side and peonies from the other. Or the particular "clacking" sound tall bamboo makes in the wind -- something I discovered right outside the door of my room at Myoshin-ji temple.
"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure," said Rainer Maria Rilke, "and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible." I am not destroyed today, and I am temporarily relieved to be back in the world of plywood and linoleum and internal combustion. But there's still time for me to disappear tomorrow.
© 2015 Nicholas Nicastro
© 2015 Nicholas Nicastro
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