Today, whether by sunlight or by flourescent office light, I will lose myself in the bright stained-glass chamber of my lovely small kaleidoscope with its refracted pattern of flowers and bees and ladybugs and grasshoppers and butterflies—a winter-garden with a summer’s air.
It’s like the rosy pattern on an English bone-china teacup, or indeed like stained glass, the wonder that is La Sainte Chapelle, the radiance of that Parisian chapel that I have compared (most recently in my novel Nude Against the Light) with the radiance of the roomful of Bonnards at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC.
Here is a short passage from Rainer Maria Remarque’s Heaven Has No Favorites about the power of that stained glass, for a dying woman:
It’s like the rosy pattern on an English bone-china teacup, or indeed like stained glass, the wonder that is La Sainte Chapelle, the radiance of that Parisian chapel that I have compared (most recently in my novel Nude Against the Light) with the radiance of the roomful of Bonnards at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC.
Here is a short passage from Rainer Maria Remarque’s Heaven Has No Favorites about the power of that stained glass, for a dying woman:
Lilian stretched her whole body in the rippling light. It seemed to her that she could hear it. One could hear so many things, she thought, if only one could be quiet enough. She breathed deeply. She breathed in the gold and blue and wine red. . . . She was happy. The happiness of radiance, she thought: the most immaterial in the world.
And so the stream of the refracted light leads me from my concrete sensual joy in this moment outward to England, France, Bonnard, summer, and deep-down happiness.
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