Leap [Hardcover]

Terry Tempest Williams (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2, 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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

From Publishers Weekly

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 338 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon (May 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679432922
• ISBN-13: 978-0679432920
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #998,387 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

She is the award-winning author of Leap, An Unspoken Hunger, Refuge & most recently Red - A Desert Reader. She lives in Castle Valley, Utah.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars She may seem mad, but she's inside my head., June 1, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Leap (Hardcover)

Terry Tempest Williams begins this book with a brief artistic description of her Mormon upbringing in Northern Utah (something I can relate with), then a confession of an obsession with a painting--a secret she had kept "for fear of seeming mad." From this point on she touched just about every emotion that I have felt in my own "Paradise" (oh the security of "knowing" that you belong to a church that has all the answers), my "Hell" (very traumatic to ask the hard questions concerning one's faith and emerge in a world of total uncertainty), my "Earthly Delights" (to find the middle ground between Heaven & Hell, good & bad, do's & don'ts; to find the present--the beauty of where I stand), and my "Restoration" (to try to piece it all together without losing the roots of who I am).

T.T.W. assisted me in coming out of my hell and finding earthly delights when I first read her book "Refuge" several years ago; I have personally thanked her for this. Now she writes a book with the final chapter titled "Restoration." After reading this beautiful, rambling, amazing, disjointed, wonderful collections of words, I may seem mad in saying this, but she is inside my head. I loved this book.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intensely fascinating., August 2, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Leap (Hardcover)

When do we ever take the time to stop and smell the roses, or to indulge our obsessions, or to give our inner voice the time it deserves? This author did all those things, and then went a step further in getting her observations and insights down. She's a smart and introspective writer and my mind is whirling from her journey with the painting. This is a risky book... she admits we may find her crazy, and I did at times. But being in her wild, cerebral, artistic zone was not boring or banal... this book is not a superficial beach read. It made me want to look harder and deeper at the world around me and to listen with attentive ears. Bravo! Bravo!

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars And you thought it was just a bizarre painting....., May 30, 2000

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Leap (Hardcover)

Terry Tempest Williams. A new author for me. Because of my fascination for the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch I entered the door of this book much the way I'd join a lively discussion of a favorite topic. GOOD choice. This book is a very successful diversion that touches on so many viable excursions that it holds the reader in awe.

Williams is a terrific observor. Her extended encounter with Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights is at once genuinely academic while acting as a springboard for stream of consciousness poetic and spiritual ramblings. What a word smith she is! The Prado Museum in Madrid, where the painting dwells, is a delicious maze of antiquity with all coridors leading to the kaleidoscopic joys of the Garden. She studies each panel of the famous altarpiece and shares her fears, vulnerabilities, and passions willingly. I felt at times I was in the darker side of a confessional booth, so personal is her communication. But aside from the luxuriant entertainment of her transmongrification of a painting, Williams also shares with us a strange journey through the history and philosophy of the Mormon Church - a fascinating subject I've never encountered in novel form.

Williams in the end has provided us with an uncommonly entertaining, even picaresque, journey through asethetics, art history, religion, and spiritualism, sharing with us the fact that Heaven, Hell, and especially our individual time on planet earth are creations of our own making. And all this from the meticulous study of a well known painting.......what a delightful feat!