The splendor of moonlight

I admire a contented mind — one that reveres enlightenment of simple things. Yet, in quiet meditation, the one emotion that’s hardest to fight against is a longing for all things past.

The moon prods, as one spends nights wondering alone or with someone, viewing the moon, from a sick bed.

The surprise splendor of moonlight never ceases, it exalts your spirit. Such a spirit must belong to this dreamer.

Poets suddenly soften and praise the grand and serene beauty of the pale-faced night’s languid elegance.

Why had God done this? “Since the night is destined for sleep, for unconsciousness, for repose, for forgetfulness of everything. Why, then make it more  charming than day? Sweeter than dawns and sunset?,” Guy de Maupassant asked.

You’re suddenly inundated by the threshold of this caressing radiance and downed by the tender and languishing charm of the serene night.

In chorus, the cicadas threw their short metallic notes into space. With the moonlight’s seduction, the distant nightingales mingled that fitful music of theirs, which brings no thoughts but dreams a light and vibrant melody which seemed attuned to kisses — a prelude to lovemaking.

Soaking in a glittering mist, I am obliged by this unexplainable great desire to sit down, pause and praise God in all his workings.

One watches in awe — about the streets, a kind of light that is transparent and is suspended in a fine mist, which the moon rays crossed and silvered, and caused to gleam.

This slow, seductive huge star is more poetic than the sun. It is so discreet that is seems to light up things so delicate in its mysterious aura.

Why had it all come in all shades? Why did not the sweetest of songsters rest like the others? Why set itself to singing in the vaguely troubled dark? Why this half-veil over the world?

Why these quiverings of the heart, these emotions of the soul, this language of the body?

Claude Debussy’s music Clair de Lune has a prose that engulfs, and explores the sublime spectacle — the flood poetry pouring from heaven to earth, in a display of seduction which mankind never sees, since night brings sleep.

You’re suddenly softened, moved, ravished and surprised by its splendor — constrained to pose right there and praise God in all His works.

The stretch of Rexford Drive was bathed with its soft brilliance. The trees, all in a row, had slender limbs of wood clothed with green.

The honeysuckle and magnolia climbing on house walls exhaled delicious, sugared breaths, which hovered through the ward and perfumed the clear night.

The splendor of a calm and silent moonlight meant, for those who love, a divine frame.

When love is likened to some Bible story (like the love of Ruth and Boaz) — where the accomplishment of the will of the Lord took years to fulfill in one of those great scenes talked in Holy writ, when one’s hand can run the verse of the Song of Songs — the ardent cries the call and wail of the human body to another, separated by an ocean, all the passionate poetry of that poem, which brims with tenderness and love.

For does not God, indeed, permit love? Since He visits with the magnificence of such moonlight-filled moments, it makes me feel so well –  almost brilliantly well. It stirs one into artistry.

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