THIS beneficient forest, which anoints my body with health, has provided a great lesson for my spirit. It is a magisterial forest; old, as teachers should be, serene and complex. In addition it practices the pedagogy of sugestion, the only delicate and profound pedagogy. He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief gesture, a gesture which starts an ideal trajectory in the air along which we glide until we find ourselves at the feet of the new truth.Once known, truths acquire a utilitarian crust; they no longer interest us as truths but as useful recipes. That pure, sudden illumination which characterizes truth accompanies the latter only at the moment of discovery. Hence its Greek name aletheia, which originally meant the same as the word apocalipsis later, that is, discovery, revelation, or rather, unveiling, removing a veil or cover. He who wants to teach us a truth should place us in a position to discover it ourselves.
This forest has taught me that there is a first plane of realities which imposes itself upon me in a violent way; they are the colors, the sounds, the pleasure and the pain of the senses. Toward this plane my attitude is a passive one. But behind those realities there appear others, as the outlines of the higher mountains appear in a sierra when we have reached the first foothills. Some rising over the tops of others, like new planes of reality, ever more profound, more suggestive, wait for us to ascend them, to reach them. But these higher realities are rather bashful and do not seize us as their victimes. On the contrary, they make themselves apparent to us only on one condition: that we desire their existence and that we strive toward them. In a way, then, they depend on our will for their existence. Science, art, justice, manners, religion are orbits of reality which do not overwhelm our persons in a brutal way as hunger or cold does; they exist only for him who wills them to exist.
When the man of great faith says that he sees God in the flowery fields and in the arch of the night sky, he does not express himself more metaphorically that if he should be speaking of having seen an orange. If there were only a passive way of seeing, the world would be reduced to a chaos and luminous dots; but besides the passive way there is an active seeing which interprets by seeing and sees by interpreting, a seeing which is observing. Plato found a divine word for these visions which come from observing: he called them ideas. Just as the third dimension of the orange is only an idea, God is the ultimate dimension of the countryside.
There is no more mysticism in this than when we say we are seeing a faded color. What color do we see when we see a faded color? The blue which we have before us we see as having been a more intense blue, and this seeing the present color along with its past color, through what it was formerly, is an active vision which is not like a reflection in a mirror; it is an idea. The fading and dulling of a color is a new virtual quality which comes over it, giving it something like a temporal depth. Without the need of reasoning, in a single, momentary vision, we discover the color and its history, its hour of splendor and its present ruin. And something within us echoes, instantly, that same process of decline, of decay; hence the somewhat depressing effect a faded color has on us.
The dimension of depth, whether of space or time, whether visual or aural, always appears in one surface, so that this surface really possesses two values: one when we take it for what it is materially, the other when we see it in its second virtual life. In the latter case the surface, without ceasing to be flat, expands in depth. This is what we call foreshortening. Vision in depth is made possible by foreshortening, in which we find an extreme case of a fusion of simple vision with a purely intellectual act.
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