February 2009 Archives

“‘Promise me you will never wear black satin,’ he said. I smiled then, and he laughed back at me, and the morning was gay again, the morning was a shining thing.”

—Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca, 1938.

“I picked up the book again, and this time it opened at the title-page, and I read the dedication. ‘Max—from Rebecca. May 17th,’ written in a curious, slanting hand. A little blob of ink marred the white page opposite, as though the writer, in impatience, had shaken her pen to make the ink flow freely. And then, as it bubbled through the nib, it came a little thick, so that the name Rebecca stood out black and strong, the tall and sloping R dwarfing the other letters.”

—Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca, 1938.

“Some doctors trying to diagnose an uncertain case ask, ‘Is this the worst pain you’ve ever felt?’ A ‘yes’ suggests a diagnosis of black widow bite.”

—Gordon Grice, ‘Black Widow,’ The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, 1998.

“They grow rapidly . . . shucking a skin every few days. They begin as swirls of light brown and cream, then darken with each molt, resolving into brown with white spots. A white hourglass is soon clear on the belly. In the females, a pale orange hue dawns in the center of the hourglass with succeeding molts; the brown rapidly darkens. The orange deepens to red, like a sunset, and spreads outward to infect the entire hourglass. As adults their black is broken only by the crimson hourglass and, depending on the individual, perhaps a few other specks or stripes of red or a white dot. The male may retain his infant colors, or he may grow black and sport a psychedelic array of red, gold, and white marks.”

—Gordon Grice, ‘Black Widow,’ The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, 1998.

“What is green?
The grass is green.
With small flowers between.”

—Christina Rossetti, ‘What Is Pink? A Rose Is Pink,’ 1872; quoted by Bruce R. Smith in The Key of Green, 2009.

“The Mind, the Ocean where each kind
Does streight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green Thought in a green Shade.”

—Andrew Marvell, ‘The Garden,’ 1681; quoted by Bruce R. Smith in The Key of Green, 2009.

“If they were good it would be seene,
Good is as visible as greene,
And to all eyes it selfe betrayes.”

—John Donne, ‘Communitie,’ 1633; quoted by Bruce R. Smith in The Key of Green, 2009.

“The occasion for [Marsilio] Ficino’s reasoning of green as the most pleasing color is a chapter in the second of his De Vita Libri Tres (1489) titled ‘The Conversation of the Old People Traversing the Green Fields under the Leadership of Venus.’. . . To Ficino’s way of seeing, green neither dilates the eye with too much light nor dulls the eye with too much darkness: rather, ‘the color green tempering most of all black with white, furnishes the one effect and the other, equally delighting and conserving the sight.’”

—Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green, 2009.

“Each human retina contains two sorts of photoreceptors: rods and cones. The 120 million rods (so called because of how they look under a microscope) absorb light waves across the entire visible spectrum. . . . [R]ods register distinctions only between light and dark—that is, distinctions in value. Distinctions in hue are triggered by a different set of receptors: the cones. The retina’s five to seven million cones (again, that’s what they look like when seen through a microscope) are clustered at the focal point opposite the eye’s lens.”

—Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green, 2009.

“The so-called extramission theory of vision has its origin, for western thinkers at least, in Plato’s explanation of color as the mixing in air of two beams of fire, one issuing from the viewer’s eyes and one from the object being viewed. Aristotle argued that color was carried in one direction only, on light reflected off objects, but versions of Plato’s extramission theory commanded the assent of Cicero, Euclid, Ptolemy, and Al-Kindi and were not refuted to the satisfaction of most serious thinkers until the optical experiments of Kepler, Descartes, Huygens, and Newton in the later seventeenth century. . . . Plato’s theory actually does make sense of what vision feels like. We experience vision as being directed at or to something: we decide (or so we think) where to cast our gaze.”

—Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green, 2009.

“The most basic distinctions in the world’s languages . . . seem to be among black, white, and red. All other discriminations follow from these.”

—Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green, 2009.

“What Aristotle and his Renaissance successors imagined was a range of colors, varying according to greater and lesser degrees of white combined with black:

black | gray | blue | leek-green | violet | red | yellow | white

. . . [S]omething like the same perception is still registered by speakers of many of the world’s languages, who distinguish color primarily in terms of ‘dark’ versus ‘bright.’ ”

—Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green, 2009.

“[T]he treatise On Plants attributed to Aristotle observe that ‘Greenness must the the most common characteristic of plant life’ and finds the reason in ‘concoction,’ the slight heat generated by the plants taking of nourishment out of earth and water.’ Green is ‘the intermediate color between that of earth and water,’ as can be witnessed in tree leaves, which grow out of the plant’s white pith and break through its blackish bark.”

—Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green, 2009.

“[Gerard] Legh, in the Accedence of Armorie [1612] . . . specifies what the combination of green and red means in heraldry. Alone, vert ‘signifiethe ioyfull loue, bountifull minde, and gladness, with continuance of the same.’ Combine vert with ‘Sanguine,’ and the affect is ‘to laugh, and weepe at once’.”

—Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green, 2009.

“I gave my name and looked about. Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a large shining map, marked with all the colours of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red—good to see any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn’t going into any of these. I was going into the yellow. Dead in the centre.”

—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1902.

“Were Adam’s eyes the green of paradise? Did they open on the vivid green of the Garden of Eden? God’s green mantle. Was green the first colour of perception?”

—Derek Jarman, “Green Fingers”, from Chroma: A Book of Color; quoted by Bruce R. Smith in The Key of Green, 2009.

“He shook my hand heartily and slapped me on the back and gave me a slice of cake. I had never had cake, and in retrospect it doesn’t make much sense that he would greet me at nine thirty in the morning with cake, but he did, and it was delicious. A white cream cake with stripes of sunflower orange.”

—Dave Eggers, What is the What, 2006.

“The night was bright, a half-moon high above us. Deng and I had watched it rise, first red then orange and yellow and then white and finally silver as it settled at the uppermost point of the dome of the sky.”

—Dave Eggers, What is the What, 2006.

“The sky darkens from ultramarine to indigo. God bless the namers of oil paints and high-class women’s underwear, Snowman thinks. Rose-Petal Pink, Crimson Lake, Sheer Mist, Burnt Umber, Ripe Plum, Indigo, Ultramarine—they’re fantasies in themselves, such words and phrases. It’s comforting to remember that Homo sapiens sapiens was once so ingenious with language. . . .”

—Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 2003.

“It’s discouraging how grubby everyone gets without mirrors. Still they’re amazingly attractive, these children—each one naked, each one perfect, each one a different skin color—chocolate, rose, tea, butter, cream, honey—but each with green eyes. Crake’s aesthetic.”

—Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 2003.

“Slow as sheep they moved, tranquil, impassable, filling the passages, contemplating the fretful hurrying of those in urban shirts and collars with the large, mild inscrutablitiy of cattle or of gods, functioning outside of time, having left time lying upon the slow and imponderable land green with corn and cotton in the yellow afternoon.”

—William Faulkner, Sanctuary, 1931.