three readings

Three things I have recently read and loved, that I pass onto you, and urge you to read, oh faithful subscriber:

1. from A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, printed in Harpers magazine, July 2005.

The world is blue at its edges and blue in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies beneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water, the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to dissolve into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, the color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not at the horizon but in the distance between you and the mountains. "Longing," says the poet Robert Hass, "because desire is full of endless distances". We treat desire as a problem to be solved, though I wonder whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance. Something of desire will only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them, and the blue instead tints the beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.

Simone Weil wrote to a friend on another continent, "Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated." For Weil, love is the atmosphere that fills and colors the distance between herself and her friend. Even when that friend arrives on the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote. The far seeps in even to the nearest.

(...)

For the elderly the nearby and recent often become vague and only the faraway in time and space is vivid. But for children it's the distance that holds little interest. It is a concept foreign to childhood: for a baby a mother in the other room is gone forever, for a child the time until a birthday is endless. For children whatever is absent is impossible, irretrievable, unreachable. Gary Paul Nabhan writes about taking his children to the canyons of Colorado, where he realized "how much time adults spend scanning the land for picturesque panoramas and scenic outlooks. While the kids were on their hands and knees, engaged with what was immediately before them, we adults travelled by abstraction." Whenever they approached a promontory, his son and daughter would "abrubtly release their hands from mine, to scour the ground for bones, pinecones, sparkly sandstone, feathers, or wildflowers." The mental landscape of the young is like that of medieval paintings: a foreground full of vivid things and then a wall. The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings, and finds beauty in the faraway.

2. Exact transcript of instructions from the packaging from a free gift (pencil, ruler and protractor) I found yesterday in my box of Temmy's Sweet Flakes cereal. Temmy's is a cheap Arabic cereal company, but the 'toy' is a product of Taizhou Huitong Trading Co, LTD, China.

Matters Needing Attention:
*This product was easy to burning, aloof the high temperature,please. because maybe beget any danger and the product's definition distort.
*The product have some keenness part, so need to prevent bruise.
*The product only befit measure and study, unable to do other definition's mensure.
* Needed the paterfamilias accompany. if the children haven't 3 years.

3. Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon College Commencement Address, dated May 21, 2005, given by David Foster Wallace. Kenyon is a liberal arts college in Ohio.
Thankyou (oh, thankyou!) to brazen and bold Mark Seman for sending this thing to me by email.
Click here, because its kinda long, but read it, read it, read it.

http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html