Leap

by Terry Tempest Williams

Seized by the beauty and mystery of Hieronymus Bosch's fifteenth-century Flemish masterpiece, The Garden of Delights, Terry Tempest Williams focuses her astute gaze on his medieval triptych as she would on a natural landscape. With spiritual candor, psychological immediacy, and exhilarating emotional intensity, she carries us into the world of Bosch's painting, uncovering the connections between his vision, the world it mirrors, and contemporary life.

Approaching Paradise, Williams re-enters the terrain of childhood, where the foundations of orthodoxy are built; Hell, in all its diabolical madness, allows her to reflect on the inherent dislocations of our lives; in The Garden, moving away from the dualities of Heaven and Hell, she sees personal engagement as its own form of prayer and celebrates the possibility of a living faith right here on earth. And in Restoration, we meet two sisters, art conservators, who reveal their understanding of artistic vision.

Leap is an unexpected pilgrimage through the landscape of a painting that continues to startle five hundred years after its creation. It is also an utterly original account of one woman's search for the place where faith, passion, and creativity converge. Finally, Leap captures the alchemical moment of imagination -- the flight from the real to the poetic.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Art, Religion, Nature, Spirituality, Philosophy

338 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Terry Tempest Williams is an American author, conservationist and activist. Williams’ writing is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by the arid landscape of her native Utah in which she was raised. Her work ranges from issues of ecology and wilderness preservation, to women's health, to exploring our relationship to culture and nature.

She has testified before Congress on women’s health, committed acts of civil disobedience in the years 1987 - 1992 in protest against nuclear testing in the Nevada Desert, and again, in March, 2003 in Washington, D.C., with Code Pink, against the Iraq War. She has been a guest at the White House, has camped in the remote regions of the Utah and Alaska wildernesses and worked as "a barefoot artist" in Rwanda.

Williams is the author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Patience and Passion in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy. Her book Finding Beauty in a Broken World was published in 2008 by Pantheon Books.

In 2006, Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, their highest honor given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by The Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfictionand a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction. Williams was featured in Ken Burns' PBS series The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009). In 2011, she received the 18th International Peace Award given by the Community of Christ Church.

Williams is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah and a columnist for the magazine The Progressive. She has been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College where she continues to teach. She divides her time between Wilson, Wyoming and Castle Valley, Utah, where her husband Brooke is field coordinator for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.

Reviews

[Jana · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend (hi Russell) just asked me for a Terry Tempest Williams recommendation and I saw that this has never been added to my books.

More than any other author I've met (or read about) she and I have so much in common: heritage, religious upbringing, family. And then it turns out we share a favorite painting and she has written a book about it! Like her, I travelled to Madrid to see the painting. (Luckily it was there when I was, not on tour!).

It's been oh so long since I read this, but I still remember the stream of conscious style writing and the beautiful meditations on art, religion, and life.

Time for a re-reading. Meanwhile, I've put it in my list of favorites.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was bored at first, but the underlying dissonance was so fascinating I kept reading. Hardly anyone is brave enough to embrace dissonance like her. It seems like we either reject it completely or we are in denial that we have it. Accepting the dissonance and striving for harmony within it, enabled her to make her own decision. I loved the book so much that I think I am going to read the entire thing again before returning it to the library next week. Terry Tempest Williams is one of my favorite authors, the way that she sees things and writes about it really resonates with me.

[RH Walters · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pretentious and grandiose, this book left me cold and puzzled, and disagreement over its merits helped lead to a girlfriend divorce. I've read subsequent intriguing interviews with Williams, where she talks about how she doesn't value words because action is so much more valuable, but I didn't care for this melodramatic account. The book makes me sad and I put it in a box for the Salvation Army today. Madonna will probably make a movie about it starring herself. Okay I couldn't resist a little dig.

[Sparrow Knight · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poetic stream of consciousness, with the loss of boundary between imagined and real is not really a style I enjoy. I kept reading it because I found the brief descriptions of her time in Madrid visiting the painting interesting, and I was curious about how her ambivalence about being Mormon was resolved through her devotion to the painting.

[Jessica Archibald · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little too much art talk for me

[Elizabeth Harlan-Ferlo · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great combination of art, religion and environmental writing. It is very freeform and dreamy, so if that bothers you, you may not like it. But I am really impressed with her. I already loaned it to Sabina!

[Anita · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book about Bosch's painting, "The Garden of Delights," Madrid, Mormonism, and her struggles with faith. Very deep and perfect for me, since I recently visited Madrid, saw this painting, and am Mormon.

[Darlene Young · Rating 1 out of 5]

The good stuff could have fit in 10 pages. Too long, too self-conscious.

[Raina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not her best or most insightful book, at least I didn't get as much out of this one as out of her other books. Nonetheless there were several memorable lines.

[Adam Burnett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” triptych serves as a platform for musings at the intersection of art, ecology, religion, and loss. Diving into the painting, Williams collects a pastiche of memories, invented scenic renderings of life inside the painting, fleeting interludes and exchanges with strangers , ideas, scraps of poems and news articles and quotes as detritus to the cultural understanding of the artist, whose biography is largely unknown. The author’s obsession with Bosch — the consuming desire to reach something out of your grasp (story of my life) — is broadly evoked through the ecological, the sensual, and the spiritual. The theme of how to transform the mystery and beauty of religion back to its origins in the sacred wonder, terror and dualities of nature resounds in crystalline.

While reading this book I considered how, if you are to truly absorb yourself, you have to respect the author’s time signature. I waxed between finding Williams’ prose insufferable to getting lost in the rapturous, poetic quality and precision of experience. It depended on the hour, the day, and most importantly, my breath. I often forget that reading is not just an intellectual experience but a full-bodied one, a work-out that allows for the “door in the floor” imaginative escape to landscapes and visions that aren’t attainable through any other route. This is why books can save lives.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't even know where to begin here my friends.
This book pummeled me, in the best way.

I really didn't know what I was in for, and I actually already knew Terry Tempest Williams and her work and her sensibilities. Like, dating back to age 18 and my own grappling with Earth and faith. I've read her, I've delved deep, I've been a Refuge Radical, I've heard her speak in person multiple times, but nothing prepared me for her encounter with Hieronymus Bosch and El jardin de las delicias.

I don't even know what to do with myself next but this is definitely one of the moments in the string of a series of moments that make up my life.

I do actually think it's interesting/a flaw that she interweaves quotations in italics without citing anything and almost every time you have to go to the Notes to see whom she's quoting. (Except if in the cases of the hymns and Mormon stuff which some of us ahem will recognize right away.) Once I started reading the Notes pages after each 20 pages or so I was really glad. Don't skip the Notes!

p.s.
I never have needed to go to Spain in the way that I now need to do that.
p.p.s.
This is a way into art for me, when a writer takes me there. But also, Bosch is something else. Something the holy fuck else.

[Edward Nugent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been a big fan of TTW for years and read a great deal of her work. This one stretched me a little more than others. It is a very personal expression of her own spiritual journey.
The title recalled for me reading, many years ago, Josef Piper's Belief and Faith: A Philosophical Tract at a time I was questioning my own religious upbringing. Unlike TTW, I could not make the leap reuired. The dissonance was just too much for me and still remains so. I still was intrigued by TTW's acceptance and embrace of that dissonance. As always after reading one of her books, I am forced into a reexamination of what I understand to be true.

[Meleece · Rating 3 out of 5]

Williams writing was beautiful, and her portrayal of her faith in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was darkly poetic, just like Bosch’s painting that the entire book focuses on. But this book’s pretty weirdness was too much in the stratosphere for me, the air of her meanings too thin, and by about 3/4 of the way through I wanted off the ride. A good example of this is this sentence: “I am inside a milkweed seed riding on the hump of a camel.” 🤨

[Marika Also marichka · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn’t finish it, but definitely done with it. Although I respect her credentials- and the ethereal quality of her storytelling, I couldn’t quite square her angle. I dropped the book when she recounted her days working as a cabin maid in a national park and keeping an eye out for matrimonial signs of blood on the sheets. Gag. This book was a strange mix of eroticism and religious piety that I think will turn many off.

[Deb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very unusual - almost stream of consciousness. If not for the insert of the painting by Bosch, I would have been completely lost - and I wasn’t always able to find the part of the painting she was referencing. It took me a very long time to get through this book. Though it was a good read, it tired out my brain.

[Vicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Williams' books are for deep thinking - take your time to read this gorgeous study of art through Bosch's painting in the Prado in Madrid. Williams is a treasure!

[Cara · Rating 2 out of 5]

MFA

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I tried to read this book a couple of years ago and couldn't stay with it. Way too dreamy and disconnected. I put it aside, very disappointed, as TTW is a favorite author of mine.

Then, last week, I went to hear her speak at our public library and she said that she wrote LEAP as way of finding her way out of Mormon orthodoxy.

Well, of course, I couldn't resist that. So, I picked it back up again and finished it this time. Allowing myself to skim when I needed to.

It's beyond me how she connected a new personal spirituality with her traditional Mormon spirituality. But I guess that's why I love her, for the unique way her brain works. But this was a little bit beyond my ken.

She goes into "dream" sequences in which she writes whole paragraphs with no punctuation. I really really really did not like that.

She interjects a lot of phrases and thoughts from other writers and weaves them in to her own thinking and connections between Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Delights and Mormon Theology. But you don't know where those come from until you read the notes in the back. If she could have cited, or foot noted it, it might have been easier to follow.

Of course, there are wonderful little profound and insightful gems that are totally TTW that I loved and highlighted. But you sure had to wade through a lot to get to them.

And all in all, I appreciated her journey. Unique and singular as it was. It was inspiring and fascinating. And were it not for this book, I would know nothing about Bosch or his Garden. And I'm always grateful to have my art and culture horizons widened.

I wouldn't recommend this book. But I'm not sorry to have read it.

[Helynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Utah environmental writer Terry Tempest Williams uses (of all things!) as a springboard for this discussion on natural landscapes Hieronymus Bosch's bizarre, 15th-century Flemish masterpiece painting, "The Garden of Earthly Delights." A pull-out color reproduction of this painting is found right inside the book, and the reader needs it to refer back to numerous times as Williams discusses various aspects in this complicated painting and ties them to her own references to heaven and hell as well as the responsibiities of living with faith and responsibility on the earth. "It is the nature of art to offend. It is the nature of art to offer," she says. "It is the paradox of the artist to both widen and heal the split within ourselves . . . We can reject or accept art . . What remains secret is the private intention, the nightmares that accompany the artist, the ectsasy each touches . . And in the end, it doesn't matter" (184). She urges a fresh, more tolerant look at our "pertrified inheritance of absolutes, the puritanic instructs of authority threatened by joy and discovery" (213) . I know this is cryptic stuff, but Williams's urgent, but oddly peaceful, style leads to a kind of personal faith in the future of our world. Leap is a very thought-provoking book!

[G (galen) · Rating 4 out of 5]

it's hard to even put a book like this into words... it's amazing what Terry Tempest Williams did with words in this book, an incredible poetic tour through faith, body, food, the environment and an amazingly diverse range of artworks... and the whole time reconnecting all of that back into a single painting: Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

I loved this woman who spent (how long, a summer? a year? don't remember the time span) sitting in front of a painting. Looking. Hard. So hard that everything else in her life began to spring up inside that painting. Or maybe it's that the painting began to spring up inside of everything else in her life...
which ever.

it was awesome.

(my one gripe... in a few occasions her own poetic ramblings cycled a bit too much into redundancy, a verging on madness... but I think that, perhaps, that may have been the point. She did wonder if she was going mad, if this painting was taking her over. If she was losing it.)

[Karen deVries · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just couldn't stay with this book even though I like it. I've been reading Terry Tempest Williams various books to find more about her relationship to Mormonism. I think her strategy is to leave tidbits of information here and there, but it's not her explicit engagement. Joanna Brooks, author of the blog, Ask Mormon Girl, is probably a better place to turn. But I love Terry Tempest Williams brand of environmentalism so much that I'm longing for her to do an explicit engagement of the two. My thirst shall go unquenched.

About this book in particular, I might have been able to stick with it had pictures. It's structured around her meditations on Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Delights. I love Bosch's work. So much potential, but it just didn't deliver. I can't decide if I'm unable to listen to what TTW has to say because I'm wanting her to engage in a different conversation OR if the writing is just not that engaging. Perhaps I'll revisit later. For now, I'm giving up.

[Ariane · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few fascinating parts like the conversation with the Phillip II historian and the Prado painting restorers but like other Tempest books, I found myself skimming over the verbose parts. But this was difficult because I didn't want to miss the Mormon thingeys, of which there were a lot. Nor did I want to miss her detailed (but still not enough) naturalist accounts. I could appreciate her sadness over the Stadium fiasco, the dichotomy of love of ancestors, what they went through, the call of the bleakness of the west with our family histories, etc. juxtaposed against the pain of not believing the orthodoxy any more. But her romantic view of Joseph was just too nauseating. Maybe she just hasn't read enough of the real history yet.

[Terisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you sift through the excess, there is a diamond in the rough here. It can be gorgeous, stirring, articulate, and thought-provoking, but you have to be patient. She is revealing her personal evolution in a way that enlists you to ride with her through its process; though that process can be discordant, overly abstracted, and verbose--she seems to be trying to reflect what our thoughts can be like before we distill them into epiphanies, distinct directions, and then decisions--her process also produces and then offers a generous amount of solid, intelligent, beautifully-articulated gems to admire, question, and contemplate.

[Rachel Teferet · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read the first few chapters and put it down. Ungrounded, flowery prose was beautiful but did not get me interested in the narrator. I also did not find the Mormon references very interesting. Honestly, the religious thing left me feeling cold. I just couldn't sink my teeth into this one, which is too bad, because the premise seemed interesting and I adore the painting that is the subject of the story. There just wasn't enough substance for me to grab on to. :(

[Whitney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was surprised that Terry Tempest Williams's writing style reminded me of nothing so much as Jeanette Winterson's, with a blend of real life and surreality/stream-of-consciousness. I will be interested to read more and see if this a consistent trait of her writing or unique to this book.

[Photina · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book feels disconnected. Hopping from one topic or thought to another. It feels disjointed and lacks focus. I didn't enjoy reading this as a whole Certain parts, when her dad visits to see the painting, how paintings are restored, some of the imagery, were interesting though. Overall though. I wouldn't recommend this book.

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't like this one as much as other TTW works I've read but I still found many of her ideas fascinating. Besides that, I am intrigued by the Bosch painting even if I lost interest in some of her analyses.

Yet I found myself wanting more narrative and less stream of consciousness writing. And I wanted more personal details and less Bosch information.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned a great deal from this book, about art and Spain and Mormons and Williams herself, but it was also the language of the book itself that moved me as a reader. As a reader, you can immerse yourself in Williams' words as she did in Bosch's painting, and the art is similarly beautiful, challenging and enlightening.

[Marissa Ricchetti · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I'm not fond of Williams' flowery writing style, Leap was still an enjoyable experience. With Bosch's triptych as inspiration, Williams artfully use stream of consciousness to blend images of Hell, consumerism and ecological destruction. The result is a powerful statement on where the earth is headed if we don't collectively reevaluate what is most important to us.

[Bryce · Rating 5 out of 5]

TTW is my favorite author. This book made me want to go to Spain just to see Hieronymus Bosch's painting in the Prado.

A personal and emotional journey about love and sexuality as we are taken through a world famous painting and the heart of the author.