Ep. 15 Sermon on Passion and Consequence (part II)

Excerpts from Aesthetical Sermons

In the concluding episode of our 2-part special on Joris Planck's "Sermon on Passion and Consequence," we hear a story of captivating pathos told by our beloved Chief Zealot.

Transcription of Joris:

The Maple was not always Maple to the Cedar. At one point, the two looked upon each other and saw no difference. ’Twas a love marked by rapture and moistened brows. Such was their love that one unto the other would whisper the sweetest of nothings, all the while continuously churning the surrounding air with leaféd limbs. Such was their love. But this sublimity, this state of pleasure swollen by tender, woody caresses, eventually capitulated to time. It became uneasy and fitful. It demanded new experience and novel circumstance, for no other reason than that time insisted upon it. And with this evolution, Maple imagined new ways to admire her lover. She drew in her mind new landscapes, in which the cedar struck a handsome silhouette and beautified the otherwise naked stone.

“There!” said she, “about the barren breast of yon mountain, there wouldst thou make a pretty picture. Where there is nothing but pale granite, there wouldst thine slender form make happy that brute titan Atlas, who sweats and puffs belligerently as he sustains the weight of all heaven upon his shoulder. Go thou to deck that scape with your fair form. Make my view more pleasing to mine eye.”

And so, leaving Maple below, cedar departed to satisfy her desire…. But ah, no longer would their boughs share sweet caresses. No longer would they hear each other’s sighs. And Maple swelled with remorse, and she cried her leaves for having sent away her love, and she scorned her children for resembling her—reminding her of what she did—while cedar, aloft a precipice of stone, forebeared his broken heart, never knowing of the Maple’s shed leaves, patiently maintaining a proud countenance despite his woe, and taking the name “Cedar,” as a Slavic widow does a black veil to show the world the substance of love.