The world is blue at its edges and 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. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to
be the color of whatever lies underneath 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 be
dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at
the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, 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, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of
anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, 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 in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric
distance between you and the mountains.
Rebecca Solnit
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