Melville on God

Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!—pause!—one word!—whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? 

wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single word with thee! Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the loom; the fresher-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it.

The Veil

Rick Moody’s memoir, The Black Veil, draws on Hawthorne’s story, “The Minister’s Black Veil.” We want to see what we feel will disturb us, what others hide. But it’s the veil that disturbs, not what lies beneath it. Under the veil likes a perfectly ordinary face. The veil haunts, and people beg for the minister to remove it. But who doesn’t veil their true nature, the face they see in the mirror, from others? And who is bold enough to lift the veil from another’s face. In Hawthorne’s story, and in Moody’s memoir, no one dares.
Are there things that can only be seen through a veil?

Poe defines art as the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.