“Wisdom of an Elder”
“Gilberto got lost in the natural beauty surrounding them. When he glanced at Tahatan, the boy saw a soul completely at peace with its surroundings. Tahatan possessed that quality: He always looked perfectly at peace wherever he was. The stage made no difference; the actor mastered the boards. Tahatan drew the boy’s attention to various elements of the scene in which they sat. His eyes would move to a tree branch, and Gilberto, after some examination, finally succeeded in locating the white-breasted nuthatch perched upon it. The bird was shaped like a magic lantern and sported clean pastel-blue, gray, and white coloring. Then the old man’s eyes turned to one of the trees on the far side of the stream. It was again only with difficulty that the boy succeeded in finding a fawn with a white-dotted back nestled in the undergrowth beneath another birch tree. Finally, Tahatan began to stare at a rock in the middle of the water. The rock had one corner that sparkled brightly in the sunshine. It might have been schist with some mica inlaid. At certain moments, the rock would take the impinging sunbeam, multiply its brilliance by a factor of fifty, and then shoot it out into the surrounding air like a quiver of highly burnished platinum quills. When Gilberto saw this, he lost himself in a surge of sheer ecstasy. A tiny rock had sent this arrowed cup of refulgent beams, all perfectly distanced one from the other, into the near atmosphere. It looked as if a cup intended for the use of gods had just been created right before his eyes.” (from “Palace of Perfect Wisdom”)
