V.
… IT is very hot. … I hold in my hand a Japanese paper-fan
with a design upon it of the simplest sort: one jointed green
bamboo, with a single spurt of sharp leaves, cutting across a
pale blue murky double streak that means the horizon above a sea.
That is all. Trivial to my Northern friends this design might
seem; but to me it causes a pleasure bordering on pain. … I
know so
well what the artist means; and they could not know,
unless they had seen bamboos,—and bamboos peculiarly situated.
As I look at this fan I know myself descending the Morne
Parnasse by the steep winding road; I have the sense of windy
heights behind me, and forest on either hand, and before me the
blended azure of sky and sea with one bamboo-spray swaying across
it at the level of my eyes. Nor is this all;—I have the every
sensation of the very moment,—the vegetal odors, the mighty
tropic light, the wamrth, the intensity of irreproducible
color. … Beyond a doubt, the artist who dashed the design on
this fan with his miraculous brush must have had a nearly similar
experience to that of which the memory is thus aroused in me, but
which I cannot communicate to others.
… And it seems to me now that all which I have tried to write
about the Pays des Revenants can only be for others, who have
never beheld it,—vague like the design upon this fan.
