She draws from the fact of blue - a physical phenomenon, rooted in the chemistry, biology, and physics of the material world - poetic truth imbued with what Rachel Carson called “an odd and hard-to-describe feeling, with so many overtones beyond the facts themselves.” It is not uncommon for a passage to begin with a cool report of fact and end with an existential observation:įifteen days after we are born, we begin to discriminate between colors. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. Nelson begins with the elemental consideration of what it means to fall in love with a color:Ī voluntary delusion, you might say. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.) Color chart from the pioneering 19th-century guide Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, which inspired Darwin. (I might say “somehow missed,” but somehow implies a level of surprise at the fact, and it is hardly surprising that when one spends one’s days with dead poets, philosophers, scientists, and artists, the living cease to be one’s forte.) I had missed Bluets ( public library) by Maggie Nelson - a slim, splendid collection of 240 numbered arguments? meditations? incantations? about the color blue, about its tentacled reach into nearly every chamber of Nelson’s life and into universal questions of desire and destiny, compulsion and choice, the disorienting delusions of memory, the delicious delusions of love.

“We love to contemplate blue,” Goethe observed in his theory of color and emotion, “not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.” This particular color - or, rather, this universe of hues - seems to have drawn after it more minds than any other, inking the body of culture with a written record of adulation bordering on the religious.Īfter my recent excursion into the color blue across the past two hundred years of literature, a number of readers pointed out that I had missed an invaluable contemporary addition to the cerulean canon.

Bluets book