Tout les matins du monde sont sans retour: The mornings of the world are without return. The line is from a novel, and gave the title to a film. It might describe the left-hand panel of Bosch's triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights.
It is the morning of the world that Bosch depicts, the Judeo-Christian version of that ancient and almost universal myth of a time in the past before woe and worry. Eve kneels demurely in her nakedness to receive God's blessing. Adam looks on bemusedly, as if wondering exactly what it is he is supposed to do with the thing between his legs. Their wondrous paradise is filled with birds and beasts of every sort. (Bosch proves himself a careful observer of the natural world; dozens of species can be recognized.) There is indeed a bliss of sorts -- who would not want to wander within these zoological precincts, pet a unicorn, climb the bird-flocked mountain, discover sex for the first time? But all is not as benign as it seems. A cat makes off with a rat; a lion devours a deer. At the center right is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, with its tempting fruit, twining serpent, and slithering beasties emerging from the pond. And what, pray tell, lurks in the dark pool at foreground?
Never mind, forget the ominous hints that paradise is imperfect. It is morning. A passing shower during the night has washed the air. I sit on the terrace in almost Edenic nakedness and watch the sky brighten in the east. Our resident spider, Argiope argentata, six centimeters from claw to claw, has as usual rebuilt overnight her dazzling orb that fills the space between the porch and the white torch tree. The mocking bird, Mimus polyglottos, sings from the peak of the roof. No newspaper lies on the front stoop with terrible headlines from Darfur or Iraq. No television. The radio is silent. It is morning, and every day dawns anew -- awaits its Original Sin.
There is the wish to make this apparently perfect sunrise hour extend indefinitely, to live suspended between thought and action -- to live without thought and without action -- in the stillness of an unending dawn. Perhaps that is what took me briefly as a young man to the Trappist monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky. Surely that is the attraction of the cloistered life, Simon on his pillar, the woman in the wall. The mornings of the world are without return, they dawn but once. Catch them if you can.
The itch of sex, the scratch of mind, the nagging voice of responsibility: these haven't yet dawned on Adam, haven't yet crossed Eve's mind. But they will, oh yes they will. Look carefully. Paradise is not what it seems. The great globe of the sun breaks free of the horizon, as it has done more than a trillion times since the first terrestrial dawn. I feel its warmth on my naked skin. Argiope argentata waits beneath her silver shield for the fly that bumbles into her trap. The myth of Eden -- the immaculate auroral hour -- is only that.
(You can click and then click again on any of this week's illustrations for enlargements.)
