"Aldous Huxley - The Doors Of Perception" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huxley Aldous)

it alone, in isolation from the Dharma-Body, in Luciferian defiance of the grace of god.
"The nearest approach to this," I said, "would be a Vermeer."
Yes, a Vermeer. For that mysterious artist was truly gifted-with the vision that perceives the
Dharma-Body as the hedge at the bottom of the garden, with the talent to render as much of that vision
as the limitations of human capacity permit, and with the prudence to confine himself in his paintings to
the more manageable aspects of reality; for though Vermeer represented human beings, he was always
a painter of still life. Cezanne, who told his female sitters to do their best to look like apples, tried to
paint portraits in the same spirit. But his pippin-like women are more nearly related to Plato's Ideas than
to the Dharma-Body in the hedge. They are Eternity and Infinity seen, not in sand or flower, but in the
abstractions of some very superior brand of geometry. Vermeer never asked his girls to look like
apples. On the contrary, he insisted on their being girls to the very limit - but always with the proviso
that they refrain from behaving girlishly. They might sit or quietly stand but never giggle, never display
self-consciousness, never say their prayers or pine for absent sweethearts, never gossip, never gaze
enviously at other women's babies, never dirt, never love or hate or work. In the act of doing any of
these things they would doubtless become more intensely themselves, but would cease, for that very
reason, to manifest their divine essential Not-self. In Blake's phrase, the doors of Vermeer's perception
were only partially cleansed. A single panel had become almost perfectly transparent; the rest of the
door was still muddy. The essential Not-self could be perceived very clearly in things and in living
creatures on the hither side of good and evil. In human beings it was visible only when they were in
repose, their minds untroubled, their bodies motionless. In these circumstances Vermeer could see
Suchness in all its heavenly beauty - could see and, in some small measure, render it-in a subtle and
sumptuous still life. Vermeer is undoubtedly the greatest painter of human still lives. But there have been
others, for example, Vermeer's French contemporaries, the Le Nain brothers. They set out, I suppose,
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to be genre painters; but what they actually produced was a series of human still lives, in which their
cleansed perception of the infinite significance of all things is rendered not, as with Vermeer, by subtle
enrichment of color and texture, but by a heightened clarity, an obsessive distinctness of form, within an
austere, almost monochromatic tonality. In our own day we have had Vuillard, the painter, at his best, of
unforgettably splendid pictures of the Dharma-Body manifested in a bourgeois bedroom, of the
Absolute blazing away in the midst of some stockbroker's family in a suburban garden, taking tea.

Ce qui fait que I'ancien bandagiste renie
Le compioir dont le faste all├йchait les passants,
C'est son jardin d'Auteuil, ou, veufs de tout encens,
Les Zinnias ont I'air d'├кtre en t├┤le vernie.

For Laurent Tailhade the spectacle was merely obscene. But if the retired rubber goods merchant
had sat still enough, Vuillard would have seen in him only the Dharma-Body, would have painted, in the
zinnias, the goldfish pool, the villa's Moorish tower and Chinese lanterns, a corner of Eden before the
Fall.
But meanwhile my question remained unanswered. How was this cleansed perception to be
reconciled with a proper concern with human relations, with the necessary chores and duties, to say
nothing of charity and practical compassion? The age-old debate between the actives and the
contemplatives was being renewed - renewed, so far as I was concerned, with an unprecedented
poignancy. For until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms
- as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music; as a patient waiting upon
those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as
occasional glimpses, in Nature, of Wordsworth's "something far more deeply interfused"; as systematic
silence leading, sometimes, to hints of an "obscure knowledge." But now I knew contemplation at its
height. At its height, but not yet in its fullness. For in its fullness the way of Mary includes the way of