Leap [Anglais] [Relié]

The wonders of biology meet the mysteries of Mormonism in Terry Tempest Williams's spiritual evocation of Hieronymus Bosch's El Jardin de las Delicias. Williams is mesmerized by the painting, and there is much to be fascinated by, including her own stream-of-consciousness exploration of its images and symbolism.

The Garden of Earthly Delights, as it's known in English, is part of a triptych, surrounded by wings of paradise and hell. Williams visits the painting daily in the Prado Museum in Madrid, reveling in the gestalt and concentrating on the nuances in the elaborate and extraordinarily detailed masterpiece. One day she'll devote hours inspecting the cavorting, joyous figures, "the blue pool of bathers standing thigh-high in the middle of the triptych," the cherries "flying in the air, dangling from the poles, dropped into the mouths of lovers." Another day she's there with binoculars, cataloguing the birds Bosch chose to place in the garden of earthly delights (she finds 35 of them, including the gadwall, the wagtail, the great white egret, and Tengmalm's owl--a bird who sings "poo-poo-poo," which she considers a bit of prime Bosch paradise humor). Her insight, however, is not limited to the painting. She looks inward and outward, her probing artistic analysis inspiring childhood memories, worldly observations, and universal questions about love and faith.

Williams's leap into Bosch's garden is an unusual blend of academic rigor and unfettered artistic license, studying the painter's world with erudite discipline, then soaring into lyric associations that'll charm your poetic soul or curdle your objective sensibilities, depending on the latitude you grant in works that mix art history with personal memoir and spiritual exploration. --Stephanie Gold

When naturalist writer Williams was a child staying over at her grandmother's house, she would sleep beneath images of Paradise and Hell thumbtacked to the wall above her bed, symbols of the "oughts and shoulds and if you don'ts" of her Mormon upbringing. Years later, as an adult, Williams rediscovered those prints in Madrid's Prado Museum--they are the wings of Hieronymus Bosch's 15th-century triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights. But why had the erotic center panel been hidden from her childish eyes? The question leads Williams on a prolonged meditation contemplating the painting's meaning, her own childhood and the place of religion in life. In rich, poetic prose interspersed with scripture, news items and anecdotes, she builds a monument to the richness of Mormon culture in the life of a woman who is fiercely environmentalist, feminist, aware. But Williams also mixes her philosophical musings with the quotidian events of her trip to Spain and quotations from writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf and Charles Darwin, burdening her work at times with excessive detail. The hundreds of cherries in Bosch's garden remind Williams of picking cherries as a child in the orchards along the Wasatch Front. "What principle of the Gospel of Jesus Christ means the most to you?" asked her great-uncle as she and her cousin perched high on a ladder. "Obedience," the cousin replied. "Free agency," answered Williams, savoring a cherry. Her memoir searchingly explores the distance and tension between these answers. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Adult/High School-An extraordinary blend of allegory, spiritual quest, and meditation on creativity (human, natural, and divine), Leap is Williams's there-and-back-again presentation on the ability of art to imbue and transform random experience into a spiritual whole. As a child raised Mormon in Salt Lake City, the Heaven and Hell panels of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Delights hung over her bed in fractured triptych-Heaven and Hell were displayed but the center of the triptych was omitted. It wasn't until adulthood that the author realized that Earthly Delights had been withheld from her, and what this lack of a union between the two remaining parts might symbolize. The author traces her devotion to the painting and her trips to the Prado Museum over seven years to view the painting firsthand. Leap is both beautiful and blasphemous in the best senses, as Earthly Delights is clearly the only true place for human habitation. This complex book muses over art, spirituality, the religion of one's birth, environmentalism, and the nature of paradise without many nods to narrative thread or the conventional workings of the conscious self. It is for serious students of art and the spirit, and dedicated readers and searchers.

Sheryl Fowler, Chantilly Regional Library, VA

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

"I am a traveler returning home after wandering through a painting," concludes Williams (Refuge). The muse that serves as her metaphorical and spiritual travelog is Hieronymus Bosch's enigmatic 15th-century masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Williams's "leap," which reads like an extended prose poem, consists of her journey inward, aided by her passionate interaction with Bosch's painting at the Prado in Spain, while she seeks to reconcile her dark night of the soul through art. In chapters titled "Paradise," "Hell," "Earthly Delights," and "Restoration," one voyeuristically accesses Williams's interior dialog, in which she struggles against the greatest sinDthat of indifference in a world fraught with the ephemeral mystery and beauty so ardently exemplified by this medieval painting. Her thoughts about the environment, for which she is well known, are folded into the panoply of concerns she faces here. She is a thoughtful individual, grounded in the tenets of Mormonism, questing for a mature faith. Though Williams finds that she is not the believer she once was, she emerges stronger for having undertaken the quest, finding in her faith the keys to creating a meaningful adult life. Williams's lyricism will resonate for spiritual seekers of all types.DSandra Collins, Univ. of Pittsburgh
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In a provocative narrative notable for its flow and lyricism, Williams, the naturalist author of Refuge (1991), expresses her profound response not to the outdoors but to a world born of the imagination, the triptych known as The Garden of Delights, by the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch. As a Mormon child, Williams slept beneath reproductions of the two outer panels of this fabulously detailed masterpiece, yet she never knew of the existence of the central painting, "The Garden of Earthly Delights," a veritable pageant of sensuality, until she stood, thunderstruck, before the original in the Prado Museum. The sight of Bosch's nearly hallucinatory vision of life in all its elaborate fecundity sparked an epiphany so powerful Williams embarked on a life-altering study of the painting she chronicles. Like a biologist in the field, she watches the painting as though it were alive; she even uses binoculars, much to the amazement of the museum guards, to identify the birds Bosch so accurately portrayed, as well as all the fruits, flowers, and figures ecstatic and tormented, graceful and grotesque. Williams gives herself over wholly to the experience, even writing from within the painting's lushly detailed and wildly inventive landscapes, an immersion that gives rise to extraordinarily revelatory leaps of thought. Williams' insights into Bosch's resonant work form an arresting inquiry into our relationship with nature, the divide between religion and spirituality, and the question of how to preserve wilderness. With each leap, she extends her definition of a "living faith" and discovers something new about our need for art and wilderness. Earth is art, Williams realizes, and at the very least, it deserves the same respect and protection accorded Bosch's triptych. "The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy," she writes, and no one who follows her on this remarkable journey will ever take art, nature, or faith for granted again. Donna Seaman

"In this lyrical, wise, and questioning book, Terry Tempest Williams leads us in and out of the double-sided looking glass that is Bosch's Garden of Delights and of the heavens and hells of our own natural world. An innovative hybrid, woven of lived experience, visionary thinking, and critical intelligence, Leap points the way to new spiritual dimensions buried in art,'nature,' and our own lives."
-- Lucy Lippard, author of Overlay and The Lure of the Local

"Confession: I sat down, opened the book in the middle of it and of a busy day. An hour later I got up from my chair. Page after page of discovery. What a marvelous manner of handling the interlaced themes of flesh and soul. The beauty of Terry Tempest Williams's writing, her feeling, her devotion. Leap took me into the heart of Importance."
-- James Hillman, author of The Soul's Code

"Leap does what we hope literature can do -- rinse the reader's gaze, refreshing our sight and making the world new again."
-- Mark Doty, author of My Alexandria

Seized by the beauty and mystery of Hieronymus Bosch's fifteenth-century Flemish masterpiece, The Garden of Delights, Terry Tempest Williams focuses her astute gaze on his medieval triptych as she would on a natural landscape. With spiritual candor, psychological immediacy, and exhilarating emotional intensity, she carries us into the world of Bosch's painting, uncovering the connections between his vision, the world it mirrors, and contemporary life.

Approaching Paradise, Williams re-enters the terrain of childhood, where the foundations of orthodoxy are built; Hell, in all its diabolical madness, allows her to reflect on the inherent dislocations of our lives; in The Garden, moving away from the dualities of Heaven and Hell, she sees personal engagement as its own form of prayer and celebrates the possibility of a living faith right here on earth. And in Restoration, we meet two sisters, art conservators, who reveal their understanding of artistic vision.

Leap is an unexpected pilgrimage through the landscape of a painting that continues to startle five hundred years after its creation. It is also an utterly original account of one woman's search for the place where faith, passion, and creativity converge. Finally, Leap captures the alchemical moment of imagination -- the flight from the real to the poetic.

"In this lyrical, wise, and questioning book, Terry Tempest Williams leads us in and out of the double-sided looking glass that is Bosch's Garden of Delights and of the heavens and hells of our own natural world. An innovative hybrid, woven of lived experience, visionary thinking, and critical intelligence, Leap points the way to new spiritual dimensions buried in art,'nature,' and our own lives."
-- Lucy Lippard, author of Overlay and The Lure of the Local

"Confession: I sat down, opened the book in the middle of it and of a busy day. An hour later I got up from my chair. Page after page of discovery. What a marvelous manner of handling the interlaced themes of flesh and soul. The beauty of Terry Tempest Williams's writing, her feeling, her devotion. Leap took me into the heart of Importance."
-- James Hillman, author of The Soul's Code

"Leap does what we hope literature can do -- rinse the reader's gaze, refreshing our sight and making the world new again."
-- Mark Doty, author of My Alexandria

Terry Tempest Williams is the author of Refuge, An Unspoken Hunger (both available in paperback from Vintage Books), and Desert Quartet. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she lives with her husband, Brooke Williams, in Grand County, Utah.