The far mountains are blue, though the rock in your hand is grey. Distance has a color, and it is the color of longing.
The Blue of Distance
Why is the far-off world blue: the mountain, the sea, the horizon we never reach? A short walk into light and longing.
grounds of Move 1 — Rayleigh scattering: short blue wavelengths scatter most, so the air between us and the far thing glows faintly blue.
echoes of Move 2 — The painters had the recipe centuries before the physics had the equation.
the objects seen at a great distance, as mountains are, appear blueish like the air, by means of the great quantity of air that interposes between the eye and such mountains.
Leonardo da Vinci, A Treatise on Painting, translated by John Francis Rigaud (1802)
illustrates of Move 3 — Near light and far light, reconciled in one color.
Starry Night Over the Rhone
Vincent van Gogh, 1888WIKIMEDIAVincent van Gogh (1888), public domainPublic Domain Mark 1.0 · Report rights or attribution
transposes of Move 4 — The ear has a blue too: the flattened note we bend toward, because the true one will not say it.
Sheet music: Blue Note, key C, 4/4 time
deepens of Move 1 — We never arrive at the blue. It is made of distance itself.
The blue of distance is the color of where you are not. Walk to it, and it turns to green grass and grey stone; the blue has moved on to the next ridge.
illustrates of Move 6 — The king runs for the far square and the gap will not close, a chase defined by never ending.
names of Move 6 — The margin that fades forever as we move.
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
concludes of Move 8
So we keep the blue by keeping our distance, and the picture, the bent note, and the poem are all ways of loving what we agree not to seize.
The dialogue is concluded
Blue is the world keeping a little of itself just out of reach, so that we keep looking.