The Forest Temple & Silence Terlais
Editor's Note: This is this week's Patreon essay, but I am crossposting it here as well.
~~~
The Forest Temple & Silence Terlais
The Forest Temple from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time holds a special place in my spark, for it is as dreamy and haunted, as twisty and serene a place as you may ever want to find.
Credit: Guttergoo
In some respects, the Forest Temple is the birthplace of Silence Terlais, my literary alter-ego and greatest and most passionate artistic creation. I have told this story many times, but, briefly: Silence came from many inspirations. Her appearance, her piratical past, and even to some extent her name all came from other worthy inspirations, by way of my own imagination of course. But her soul comes from the Forest Temple-from what I felt when I experienced this place for myself, in the summer of ‘99.
Part I: The Forest Temple
The Forest Temple is the darkest part of Link’s entire journey. Up till this point in the story, things have only gotten worse and worse for the land of Hyrule. All of Link’s noble efforts have been used against him. The land itself is destroyed and tormented. Many people are dead and gone, and many others are cursed to be ghosts wandering the mortal world.
Deceived and defeated by Ganondorf, the Great King of Evil (what a title!), the young Link has been trapped in time for seven years, and when he awakens-in the body of a full-grown adult-he is bewildered by the sheer extent of how terrible things have become. A lone friendly voice tells him that he must go to the Forest Temple to begin to set things right, but that, in his current state, he can’t even enter it, let alone prevail there.
This is Link at his most helpless, the world at its darkest, and the dramatic arc of the story at its lowest point.
It is also, thus, the turning point of the story.
To enter the Forest Temple, Link must first rob graves and cavort with the dead, to steal the old relic that will allow him to enter the temple and confront what awaits him there. Having done this dubious deed, he proceeds into the deepest heart of the Lost Woods, a place called the Sacred Forest Meadow. It is the special, secret hiding grounds of his beloved childhood best friend, Saria, who prophetically told him all those years ago that she knew this place would become very important someday. When he arrives as an adult, Saria is no longer there, and the sacred meadow has been defiled by beasts. But Link presses on, and ventures inside the temple which lies just beyond.
Credit: Tom Garden
The Forest Temple is, at first blush, an unassuming place. It does offer an impressive façade, but, within that façade, the main entrance itself is just a simple door. The Forest Temple lacks the ostentation of a palace, the battlements and defenses of a fortress, or the religiosity of a true temple. Rather, it has the air of an old, haunted mansion, overgrown by ivy and trees. Many of its ceilings are long since caved in, open to the sky-or whatever few parts of it are not obscured by the forest canopy above. Most of the enemies in this place are spirits and skeletons, spiders and wolves…the wild things of the forest, and the eerie phantoms that lurk just beyond the mortal realm.
It doesn’t take long for you, the player, to realize that this is, indeed, a special place. The boundaries of reality are thin here. Corridors twist their shape and spirits carry secret flames that divide darkness from light.
And that music…
The music for this place lacks any semblance of a classical structure. Its melodic themes have no end and no beginning. Every idea in the music is left unresolved, forcing the listener to find their own resolution. It is written in two different modes at once, both known for their exotic sound-mixolydian and phrygian dominant-with the various instruments playing their own, independent ideas that sometimes overlap in constructive ways and other times clash. The drum-an Indonesian angklung-sounds like the rattling of the bones of the woods. The harmonies of the glass harmonica sound like an angelic choir that has been exiled from Heaven and left to meander through endless fog. The impish flute sounds like the friendly beckoning of inscrutable voices just out of sight. The shouting mate sounds earthy, frenetic, and entranced.
The music is haunting like the cries of those who cannot rest, yet peaceful like a warm blanket and blessed sleep. It is idyllic like the wet forest floor and mossy stone, yet otherworldly like a bridge between realms separated by a billowing wind. Players call it both creepy and comforting, both friendly and dangerous. Foreboding but ancient. Fragile. Foreign. Serene.
In fact the music is so intriguing, at least to our Western-tuned ears-though for all I know this qualification may not be necessary-that you can find whole essays and video essays on it, including this 30-minute video essay that is merely the first part in a promised three, which I discovered this week and which inspired me to write, finally, this naked essay of my own spirit.
As Link enters the Great Hall of the Forest Temple, he sees four pillars of strangely-colored fire ringing an old, wooden crucible.
Credit: erenik
As soon as he does so, four ghosts take form and steal the light away, leaving the Great Hall shrouded in darkness and causing the crucible-in fact a kind of elevator-to descend into the floor. The mission is clear…and that’s the only thing that is clear.
We never learn this temple’s history, or the histories of the ghosts who guard it. Nothing. But we track down the ghosts, destroying their corporeal bodies and reclaiming the flame for our own purposes-with no commentary on what we have done, other than the game narrative’s implicit validation of our actions, for are we not the hero? These ambiguous themes, completely lost on many a younger mind, offer rich insights and perplexing questions to last a lifetime.
Once all four fires are restored to their pillars, the crucible emerges from its depth, and we ride upon it, down, down beneath the forest floor, far down, to…another place.
A strange place.
Filled with colors and primitive machines…reminiscent maybe of a carnival? Or a nursery? It’s impossible to say, and we’re never told.
But then we proceed even farther down, down a final set of stairs, into an eerie room with hexagonal walls, each wall displaying the same painting of dead trees and a distant, dark castle.
And there, in the center of the room…is the Triforce. The source of all providence in Hyrule, the living essence of the miracles wrought by the Goddesses who created the world, able to grant the wishes of anyone who touches it.
Or, rather, it is an image of the Triforce, painted onto the floor.
Credit: MoonGlint (with Triforce added by yours truly)
So this place is a temple after all. Or, at least, it was a temple once. But what kind of a temple, and for whom, who can say?
We see this curious representation of the Triforce, not on a pedestal or a ceiling, but on the floor, at the very bottom of the whole place, in a strange inversion of our expectations…and when we look back up-there he is, Ganondorf! The Great King of Evil. He is mounted on his black horse, and ready to do battle. Except he isn’t Ganondorf after all: He and his horse leap into one of the paintings on the wall, building up distance with which to make a charge. The battle is won, and the creature is revealed to be a Phantom of the true Ganondorf, who, speaking to us from across the entire breadth of Hyrule, taunts us…
And after defeating the Phantom of Ganondorf, Link emerges from the Forest Temple and, lo and behold, he finds himself startled by the sudden springing of a new Deku Sprout-a brazenly young, adorably friendly, impossibly cute sprout in the shadow of the recently deceased Great Deku Tree who guarded the entire forest.
Credit: kitsuneki
The tonal shift is so delightful that it makes you squee. It is in this moment that the bleak bottom of the story passes away. From this point on, Link’s efforts gather momentum toward the inevitable victory, and slowly the evil upon the land is dispelled. While Link still has grim tasks ahead of him, and must visit destinations that are far grimmer than anything the Forest Temple showed us, never again will his journey itself be as dark as it just was.
That is the Forest Temple. By its very nature it is a place of ambiguity and unresolvability. It defies our efforts to definitively categorize or sort it. It is a beautiful incarnation of the very notion of twisting, turning, bending, and uncertainty. To my seventeen-year-old self, it was a little bit world-shattering; a little bit mind-blowing. It was one of the most amazing experiences I ever had in a video game.
Days later, I would conceive The Curious Tale.
Part II: Silence Terlais
I have to assume that every longtime follower of mine understands by this point that Silence is a lifelong idée fixe that I’m just going to keep going on and on about forever. I can only hope you find the subject interesting!
Silence did not spring forth from my mind fully formed like Athena. In the beginning she wasn’t there at all. When she did appear, initially it was only as a generic background character. Her first explicit characterization drew much more heavily on some of those other inspirations I alluded to, bringing out a more playful and audacious Silence. It would take several months over the course of the RPG for me to eventually associate Silence with my experience in the Forest Temple.
But when I did, we got the ethereal, clear-eyed, brooding, inscrutable Silence that we know today-the Silence who went on to dominate the RPG and who still bears these characteristics in the Draft 10 era of the novelization. (The playful, audacious Silence is still there, but often overshadowed by her broody and inscrutable side, and by the hardships of the Galan Conquest era.)
I have said at least a couple of times over the years that Silence represents the fulfillment of human potential…but this doesn’t actually reveal much. I think it is much more revealing to say that Silence is the personification of what the Forest Temple meant to me. That inherent ambiguity in the music, and in the setting itself-with multiple, often-contradictory ideas and moods being forced to coexist; that is Silence. That sense of turning and twisting…with no line of sight to the endpoint; that is Silence. I have not painted her into many discrete categories, nor have I ever revealed to anyone what her ultimate purpose is-because the whole point is that it’s unknowable; she’s inscrutable; the rest of her life is still around the bend.
Even Silence herself doesn’t know what she wants to do with all this power she is accumulating. There is a direction-the Forest Temple is why Silence wears green, and why she was associated even from the days of the RPG with nature, forests, and “life”-but there is no conclusion. Many of her exercises in the course of her life leading up to the events of After The Hero are desperate, blind attempts at creation. She wants to create new forms of life and new possibilities of existence…and she has many impressive failures behind her. She is obsessed with defying the boundaries of existence; she insists on building and then crossing bridges beyond the mortal plane. She is the only one with the audacity, vision, and strength to summon the Gods themselves to converse. But even such qualities-reckless creation, defiance against reality, and communion with the Gods-do not spell out a purpose, at least other than the self-referencing purpose of “doing it for its own sake,” which is definitely not Silence’s intent.
And, so, the Forest Temple is why Silence is often depicted as being almost otherworldly, casting doubt as to whether she is truly “just a viutar,” or whether she perhaps contains something more. I’ve gone on the record as saying that, yes, she is “just” a viutar-the Relancii human analogue, a mortal being of Kindred flesh. But this does not actually provide the assurance that one might imagine…because what we can become is every bit as complicated beyond what we presently are as are the Gods themselves.
And that music…
For nearly all of my adult life, until rather recently in fact, I have always felt uncomfortable and self-conscious whenever I listen to that music. Because that is Silence’s music; it is sacred music to me. That music denotes her presence. That music with no end and no beginning, which doesn’t go anywhere, and is both haunting and serene at once: That is the aural manifestation of Silence Terlais!
Passion is vulnerability. Intense passion is intense vulnerability. When I hear that music I feel exposed. I inevitably think of her, without fail. And I feel her striving, against she knows not what. I see the aura that surrounds her. I can taste her ardor, smell her intensity. The music reveals everything. The music exposes who Silence is, and I empathetically feel vulnerable through her exposure, because she is my passion after all, and not an independent being.
Indeed, human social nature doesn’t usually know what to make of people who are intensely focused on the figments of their own imagination. It’s one thing to assess somebody who obsesses over an externalized figment, like Jesus, but another matter altogether to be accepting of and comfortable around someone whose idée fixe is internal. Most such people are dismissed as cuckoo, or genius, or both, and society as a whole frowns on such postures on grounds of their antisocial quality. It’s never happened-though it will someday if I live long enough to continue to publish-but if someone were to attack me through Silence it would sting far beyond what might reasonably be expected. Such is the inevitable consequence of being so exposed, so vulnerable.
Objectively, the Forest Temple music is structurally brilliant and artistically elite-something to write home about. But I realize it’s not on the level of, say, a Beethoven symphony. The subjectivity of the Forest Temple music, and of my whole experience in the Forest Temple in its entirety, is by far the stronger contributor to my reverence for this music and this setting, and of course the association with Silence is completely subjective. So when you listen to it and inevitably think “Yeah, it’s fine, but not all that extraordinary,” I do get it. And I also know you can look at the same idea from the other side and draw the reciprocal conclusion: “Yeah, Josh, I don’t experience it that way, but I get why you do.”
Several of Silence’s actual, official musical themes in The Curious Score, which I have composed myself, have risen to a comparable level of vulnerability and nakedness for me as the Forest Temple music, and this makes me happy for (as they say) all the reasons. It is satisfying to have been able to create music that re-achieves that degree of sacredness and passionate intensity. Indeed, some of these themes hit stronger nowadays than the Forest Temple music itself does.
But I recognize that I am beginning to ramble.
Conclusion
Considering that I am not a religious mate, you would be forgiven for interpreting the above as having a certain spiritualism to it. You wouldn’t be wrong. While rationality firmly anchors me to the world of our objective reality, I am blazingly aware of the power of creation that exists in the world of the mind’s perceptions and interpretations of our reality and its objects, and my years on the Mountain with Amy taught me of the viability of holy reverence and worship of the non-objective immaterial. It is certainly not controversial or unprecedented to love an idea. To apprehend one with spiritual reverence is not so different, so long as no objective declarations are made which are binding on reality generally or other humans in particular.
The Forest Temple is sacred to me. Its music is especially sacred to me. The temple’s game design limitations and matter-of-factness (or mundanity!) of gameplay have long faded. But the feel of the place…that’ll be with me for as long as I live.
And it will live on in Silence Terlais forever, until all things Nintendo have crumbled to dust and the last, decrepit Curious Tale computer files and dusty pages are put away, never to be read by seeing eyes again.
~~~
The Forest Temple & Silence Terlais
The Forest Temple from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time holds a special place in my spark, for it is as dreamy and haunted, as twisty and serene a place as you may ever want to find.
Credit: Guttergoo
In some respects, the Forest Temple is the birthplace of Silence Terlais, my literary alter-ego and greatest and most passionate artistic creation. I have told this story many times, but, briefly: Silence came from many inspirations. Her appearance, her piratical past, and even to some extent her name all came from other worthy inspirations, by way of my own imagination of course. But her soul comes from the Forest Temple-from what I felt when I experienced this place for myself, in the summer of ‘99.
Part I: The Forest Temple
The Forest Temple is the darkest part of Link’s entire journey. Up till this point in the story, things have only gotten worse and worse for the land of Hyrule. All of Link’s noble efforts have been used against him. The land itself is destroyed and tormented. Many people are dead and gone, and many others are cursed to be ghosts wandering the mortal world.
Deceived and defeated by Ganondorf, the Great King of Evil (what a title!), the young Link has been trapped in time for seven years, and when he awakens-in the body of a full-grown adult-he is bewildered by the sheer extent of how terrible things have become. A lone friendly voice tells him that he must go to the Forest Temple to begin to set things right, but that, in his current state, he can’t even enter it, let alone prevail there.
This is Link at his most helpless, the world at its darkest, and the dramatic arc of the story at its lowest point.
It is also, thus, the turning point of the story.
To enter the Forest Temple, Link must first rob graves and cavort with the dead, to steal the old relic that will allow him to enter the temple and confront what awaits him there. Having done this dubious deed, he proceeds into the deepest heart of the Lost Woods, a place called the Sacred Forest Meadow. It is the special, secret hiding grounds of his beloved childhood best friend, Saria, who prophetically told him all those years ago that she knew this place would become very important someday. When he arrives as an adult, Saria is no longer there, and the sacred meadow has been defiled by beasts. But Link presses on, and ventures inside the temple which lies just beyond.
Credit: Tom Garden
The Forest Temple is, at first blush, an unassuming place. It does offer an impressive façade, but, within that façade, the main entrance itself is just a simple door. The Forest Temple lacks the ostentation of a palace, the battlements and defenses of a fortress, or the religiosity of a true temple. Rather, it has the air of an old, haunted mansion, overgrown by ivy and trees. Many of its ceilings are long since caved in, open to the sky-or whatever few parts of it are not obscured by the forest canopy above. Most of the enemies in this place are spirits and skeletons, spiders and wolves…the wild things of the forest, and the eerie phantoms that lurk just beyond the mortal realm.
It doesn’t take long for you, the player, to realize that this is, indeed, a special place. The boundaries of reality are thin here. Corridors twist their shape and spirits carry secret flames that divide darkness from light.
And that music…
The music for this place lacks any semblance of a classical structure. Its melodic themes have no end and no beginning. Every idea in the music is left unresolved, forcing the listener to find their own resolution. It is written in two different modes at once, both known for their exotic sound-mixolydian and phrygian dominant-with the various instruments playing their own, independent ideas that sometimes overlap in constructive ways and other times clash. The drum-an Indonesian angklung-sounds like the rattling of the bones of the woods. The harmonies of the glass harmonica sound like an angelic choir that has been exiled from Heaven and left to meander through endless fog. The impish flute sounds like the friendly beckoning of inscrutable voices just out of sight. The shouting mate sounds earthy, frenetic, and entranced.
The music is haunting like the cries of those who cannot rest, yet peaceful like a warm blanket and blessed sleep. It is idyllic like the wet forest floor and mossy stone, yet otherworldly like a bridge between realms separated by a billowing wind. Players call it both creepy and comforting, both friendly and dangerous. Foreboding but ancient. Fragile. Foreign. Serene.
In fact the music is so intriguing, at least to our Western-tuned ears-though for all I know this qualification may not be necessary-that you can find whole essays and video essays on it, including this 30-minute video essay that is merely the first part in a promised three, which I discovered this week and which inspired me to write, finally, this naked essay of my own spirit.
As Link enters the Great Hall of the Forest Temple, he sees four pillars of strangely-colored fire ringing an old, wooden crucible.
Credit: erenik
As soon as he does so, four ghosts take form and steal the light away, leaving the Great Hall shrouded in darkness and causing the crucible-in fact a kind of elevator-to descend into the floor. The mission is clear…and that’s the only thing that is clear.
We never learn this temple’s history, or the histories of the ghosts who guard it. Nothing. But we track down the ghosts, destroying their corporeal bodies and reclaiming the flame for our own purposes-with no commentary on what we have done, other than the game narrative’s implicit validation of our actions, for are we not the hero? These ambiguous themes, completely lost on many a younger mind, offer rich insights and perplexing questions to last a lifetime.
Once all four fires are restored to their pillars, the crucible emerges from its depth, and we ride upon it, down, down beneath the forest floor, far down, to…another place.
A strange place.
Filled with colors and primitive machines…reminiscent maybe of a carnival? Or a nursery? It’s impossible to say, and we’re never told.
But then we proceed even farther down, down a final set of stairs, into an eerie room with hexagonal walls, each wall displaying the same painting of dead trees and a distant, dark castle.
And there, in the center of the room…is the Triforce. The source of all providence in Hyrule, the living essence of the miracles wrought by the Goddesses who created the world, able to grant the wishes of anyone who touches it.
Or, rather, it is an image of the Triforce, painted onto the floor.
Credit: MoonGlint (with Triforce added by yours truly)
So this place is a temple after all. Or, at least, it was a temple once. But what kind of a temple, and for whom, who can say?
We see this curious representation of the Triforce, not on a pedestal or a ceiling, but on the floor, at the very bottom of the whole place, in a strange inversion of our expectations…and when we look back up-there he is, Ganondorf! The Great King of Evil. He is mounted on his black horse, and ready to do battle. Except he isn’t Ganondorf after all: He and his horse leap into one of the paintings on the wall, building up distance with which to make a charge. The battle is won, and the creature is revealed to be a Phantom of the true Ganondorf, who, speaking to us from across the entire breadth of Hyrule, taunts us…
And after defeating the Phantom of Ganondorf, Link emerges from the Forest Temple and, lo and behold, he finds himself startled by the sudden springing of a new Deku Sprout-a brazenly young, adorably friendly, impossibly cute sprout in the shadow of the recently deceased Great Deku Tree who guarded the entire forest.
Credit: kitsuneki
The tonal shift is so delightful that it makes you squee. It is in this moment that the bleak bottom of the story passes away. From this point on, Link’s efforts gather momentum toward the inevitable victory, and slowly the evil upon the land is dispelled. While Link still has grim tasks ahead of him, and must visit destinations that are far grimmer than anything the Forest Temple showed us, never again will his journey itself be as dark as it just was.
That is the Forest Temple. By its very nature it is a place of ambiguity and unresolvability. It defies our efforts to definitively categorize or sort it. It is a beautiful incarnation of the very notion of twisting, turning, bending, and uncertainty. To my seventeen-year-old self, it was a little bit world-shattering; a little bit mind-blowing. It was one of the most amazing experiences I ever had in a video game.
Days later, I would conceive The Curious Tale.
Part II: Silence Terlais
I have to assume that every longtime follower of mine understands by this point that Silence is a lifelong idée fixe that I’m just going to keep going on and on about forever. I can only hope you find the subject interesting!
Silence did not spring forth from my mind fully formed like Athena. In the beginning she wasn’t there at all. When she did appear, initially it was only as a generic background character. Her first explicit characterization drew much more heavily on some of those other inspirations I alluded to, bringing out a more playful and audacious Silence. It would take several months over the course of the RPG for me to eventually associate Silence with my experience in the Forest Temple.
But when I did, we got the ethereal, clear-eyed, brooding, inscrutable Silence that we know today-the Silence who went on to dominate the RPG and who still bears these characteristics in the Draft 10 era of the novelization. (The playful, audacious Silence is still there, but often overshadowed by her broody and inscrutable side, and by the hardships of the Galan Conquest era.)
I have said at least a couple of times over the years that Silence represents the fulfillment of human potential…but this doesn’t actually reveal much. I think it is much more revealing to say that Silence is the personification of what the Forest Temple meant to me. That inherent ambiguity in the music, and in the setting itself-with multiple, often-contradictory ideas and moods being forced to coexist; that is Silence. That sense of turning and twisting…with no line of sight to the endpoint; that is Silence. I have not painted her into many discrete categories, nor have I ever revealed to anyone what her ultimate purpose is-because the whole point is that it’s unknowable; she’s inscrutable; the rest of her life is still around the bend.
Even Silence herself doesn’t know what she wants to do with all this power she is accumulating. There is a direction-the Forest Temple is why Silence wears green, and why she was associated even from the days of the RPG with nature, forests, and “life”-but there is no conclusion. Many of her exercises in the course of her life leading up to the events of After The Hero are desperate, blind attempts at creation. She wants to create new forms of life and new possibilities of existence…and she has many impressive failures behind her. She is obsessed with defying the boundaries of existence; she insists on building and then crossing bridges beyond the mortal plane. She is the only one with the audacity, vision, and strength to summon the Gods themselves to converse. But even such qualities-reckless creation, defiance against reality, and communion with the Gods-do not spell out a purpose, at least other than the self-referencing purpose of “doing it for its own sake,” which is definitely not Silence’s intent.
And, so, the Forest Temple is why Silence is often depicted as being almost otherworldly, casting doubt as to whether she is truly “just a viutar,” or whether she perhaps contains something more. I’ve gone on the record as saying that, yes, she is “just” a viutar-the Relancii human analogue, a mortal being of Kindred flesh. But this does not actually provide the assurance that one might imagine…because what we can become is every bit as complicated beyond what we presently are as are the Gods themselves.
And that music…
For nearly all of my adult life, until rather recently in fact, I have always felt uncomfortable and self-conscious whenever I listen to that music. Because that is Silence’s music; it is sacred music to me. That music denotes her presence. That music with no end and no beginning, which doesn’t go anywhere, and is both haunting and serene at once: That is the aural manifestation of Silence Terlais!
Passion is vulnerability. Intense passion is intense vulnerability. When I hear that music I feel exposed. I inevitably think of her, without fail. And I feel her striving, against she knows not what. I see the aura that surrounds her. I can taste her ardor, smell her intensity. The music reveals everything. The music exposes who Silence is, and I empathetically feel vulnerable through her exposure, because she is my passion after all, and not an independent being.
Indeed, human social nature doesn’t usually know what to make of people who are intensely focused on the figments of their own imagination. It’s one thing to assess somebody who obsesses over an externalized figment, like Jesus, but another matter altogether to be accepting of and comfortable around someone whose idée fixe is internal. Most such people are dismissed as cuckoo, or genius, or both, and society as a whole frowns on such postures on grounds of their antisocial quality. It’s never happened-though it will someday if I live long enough to continue to publish-but if someone were to attack me through Silence it would sting far beyond what might reasonably be expected. Such is the inevitable consequence of being so exposed, so vulnerable.
Objectively, the Forest Temple music is structurally brilliant and artistically elite-something to write home about. But I realize it’s not on the level of, say, a Beethoven symphony. The subjectivity of the Forest Temple music, and of my whole experience in the Forest Temple in its entirety, is by far the stronger contributor to my reverence for this music and this setting, and of course the association with Silence is completely subjective. So when you listen to it and inevitably think “Yeah, it’s fine, but not all that extraordinary,” I do get it. And I also know you can look at the same idea from the other side and draw the reciprocal conclusion: “Yeah, Josh, I don’t experience it that way, but I get why you do.”
Several of Silence’s actual, official musical themes in The Curious Score, which I have composed myself, have risen to a comparable level of vulnerability and nakedness for me as the Forest Temple music, and this makes me happy for (as they say) all the reasons. It is satisfying to have been able to create music that re-achieves that degree of sacredness and passionate intensity. Indeed, some of these themes hit stronger nowadays than the Forest Temple music itself does.
But I recognize that I am beginning to ramble.
Conclusion
Considering that I am not a religious mate, you would be forgiven for interpreting the above as having a certain spiritualism to it. You wouldn’t be wrong. While rationality firmly anchors me to the world of our objective reality, I am blazingly aware of the power of creation that exists in the world of the mind’s perceptions and interpretations of our reality and its objects, and my years on the Mountain with Amy taught me of the viability of holy reverence and worship of the non-objective immaterial. It is certainly not controversial or unprecedented to love an idea. To apprehend one with spiritual reverence is not so different, so long as no objective declarations are made which are binding on reality generally or other humans in particular.
The Forest Temple is sacred to me. Its music is especially sacred to me. The temple’s game design limitations and matter-of-factness (or mundanity!) of gameplay have long faded. But the feel of the place…that’ll be with me for as long as I live.
And it will live on in Silence Terlais forever, until all things Nintendo have crumbled to dust and the last, decrepit Curious Tale computer files and dusty pages are put away, never to be read by seeing eyes again.