Cannisters and wine beakers and food vessels and couldrons and water ewers and bells and chariot fittings and knives and fantastic animals and Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and Kuan Yins, most of them encrusted with a patina that has been thousands of years aging in the bronze, came out of their crates until the eyes even of the curator of Far Eastern art, who has seen a ting or two himself, were fairly dazzled.
"The mass of them brought together," he reports in as infectious a catalogue introduction as this reviewer has ever read, "accumulates so much: power and compressed en-orgy that it is almost terrifying—one almost expects to hear a roar or to see the thing explode."
Indeed, there does seem an air of unwonted tenseness in D 6, though no doubt you must be an expert to apprehend an explosion.
And even experts who can sense a danger such as that, and taste an ecstasy we cannot more than in a dim way share—these very experts, they confess, do not know the half of it yet, "The Book of Rites itself," says Mr. Priest, was compiled a thousand years and more after these [sacrificial vessels] were first in use—compiled when questions of prece-dure were already muddled and uncertain. We can read what is written in many of them, and we begin to understand the symbolism. All {will be] unravelled before we are through. But in the meantime, he adds, we cannot be blind to the reality of the terrors of natural forces to the people who made these vessels. Echoes of it appear in our life today—and at this point the layman begins to comprehend a little, t for: Do we not speak of a flood, an earthquake, a tidal wave as an act of God'?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.