Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch Read Online Free PDF Page B

self-confessed failures, already condemned? Have they not been contaminated by the
     virus of “security”?
    The most difficult thing to adjust to, apparently, is peace and contentment.
     As long as there is something to fight, people seem able to brave all manner of hardships.
     Remove the element of struggle, and they are like fish out of water. Those who no longer have
     anything to worry about will, in desperation, often take on the burdens of the world. This not
     through idealism but because they must have something to do, or at least something to talk
     about. Were these empty souls truly concerned about the plight of their fellow-men they would
     consume themselves in the flames of devotion. One need hardly go beyond his own doorstep to
     discover a realm large enough to exhaust the energies of a giant, or better, a saint.
    Naturally, the more attention one gives to the deplorable conditions outside
     the less one is able to enjoy what peace and liberty he possesses. Even if it be heaven we
     find ourselves in, we can render it suspect and dubious.
    Some will say they do not wish to
dream
their lives away. As if life
     itself were not a dream, a very real dream from which there is no awakening! We pass from one
     state of dream to another: from the dream of sleep to the dream of waking, from the dream of
     life to the dream of death. Whoever has enjoyed a good dream never complains of having wasted
     his time. On the contrary, he is delighted to have partaken of a reality which serves to
     heighten and enhance the reality of everyday.
    The oranges of Bosch’s “Millennium,” as I said before, exhalethis dreamlike reality which constantly eludes us and which is the very substance of
     life. They are far more delectable, far more potent, than the Sunkist oranges we daily consume
     in the naive belief that they are laden with wonder-working vitamins. The millennial oranges
     which Bosch created restore the soul; the ambiance in which he suspended them is the
     everlasting one of spirit become real.
    Every creature, every object, every place has its own ambiance. Our world
     itself possesses an ambiance which is unique. But worlds, objects, creatures, places, all have
     this in common: they are ever in a state of transmutation. The supreme delight of dream lies
     in this transformative power. When the personality liquefies, so to speak, as it does so
     deliciously in dream, and the very nature of one’s being is alchemized, when form and
     substance, time and space, become yielding and elastic, responsive and obedient to one’s
     slightest wish, he who awakens from his dream knows beyond all doubt that the imperishable
     soul which he calls his own is but a vehicle of this eternal element of change.
    In waking life, when all is well and cares fall away, when the intellect is
     silenced and we slip into reverie, do we not surrender blissfully to the eternal flux, float
     ecstatically on the still current of life? We have all experienced moments of utter
     forgetfulness when we knew ourselves as plant, animal, creature of the deep or denizen of the
     air. Some of us have even known moments when we were as the gods of old. Most every one has
     known
one
moment in his life when he felt so good, so thoroughly attuned, that he has
     been on the point of exclaiming:
“Ah, now is the time to die!”
What is it lurks here
     in the very heart of euphoria? The thought that it will not, can not last? The sense of an
     ultimate? Perhaps. But I think there is another, deeper aspect to it. I think that in such
     moments we are trying to tell ourselves what we have long known but ever refuse to accept—that
     living and dying are one, that all is one, and that it makes no difference whether we live a
     day or a thousand years.
    Confucius put it this way: “If a man sees Truth in the
     morning, he may die in the evening without regret.”
    In the beginning Big Sur looked to me like an ideal place in which to work.
     Today, though