Pride of Place: All is Calm, All is Bright

By Augusto Villalon
Philippine Inquirer

MANILA, Philippines - When my copy of the last edition of Town and Country arrived, I started leafing through it from back to front, as I usually do.
But I never got past Monique Villonco’s full-page photograph of saffron-robed monks walking on one of the long galleries of Angkor Wat on the issue’s last page.
Manuel Chavez’s caption, “All is calm, all is bright,” summed up what Angkor is today and what, for me, Angkor has always been, a place of total peace.
I went into the Cambodian jungle to see Angkor in 1968 when I was an architecture student, totally unprepared for the grandeur of temples resisting the onslaught of nature.
It was a place where giant trees violently asserted nature’s power by insisting on growing over immense stone constructions that for centuries nobly fought back the forces of nature to survive.
The sense of timeless dignity of temples in the dense jungle was unforgettable.
Laced with intricate stone detailing, long walkways with exquisitely carved stone statuary and stunning bas-relief on every single wall formed a network of corridors that led pilgrims quietly and meditatively away from the wide open temple exterior toward the inner sanctum, a place where “all is calm, all is bright.”
Angkor was quiet in 1968. I felt as if I was the only person there. There was a sense of peace I had never experienced before.
Return
When I returned 37 years later, I was one of thousands of picture-taking tourists.
The statuary I remembered so vividly had vanished. The little that remained was decapitated, dismembered, and, in many instances, eyes were violently gouged out.
The temples were skeletons of what I remembered them to be, their corridors now bare. Architectural details, stone flooring and bas-relief were all brutally hacked away during what was a terrible period of war.
Corridors, now filled with ranks of flashbulb-popping tourists, no longer spoke with the serene silence of lost Angkor, or so I thought, until I saw in Monique’s photograph evidence that the recent wave of turbulence weathered by Angkor during this stage of its life was over.
Although it is no longer the Angkor that I knew, from revisiting it I now recognize that the brutal experience the Cambodian people have survived had caused a search for a new, different place where “all is calm, all is bright.”
This is the season for us to end turmoil and come back to our own place where all is calm, all is bright.
Best wishes for a calm and bright Christmas.