As a hue it is powerful - but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. This color has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. Goethe writes in the section allotted to blue:Īs yellow is always accompanied with light, so it may be said that blue still brings a principle of darkness with it. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.) Color chart by Patrick Syme for Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours: Adapted to Zoology, Botany, Chemistry, Mineralogy, Anatomy, and the Arts. But its conceptual aspects fascinated and inspired generations of philosophers and scientists ranging from Arthur Schopenhauer to Kurt Gödel. “We love to contemplate blue,” Goethe wrote, “not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.” The treatise, composed as a refutation of Newton, turned out to have no scientific validity. In his sixty-first year, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (August 28, 1749–March 22, 1832), by then Europe’s reigning intellect, published Theory of Colors ( public library | public domain) - his effort to unearth the psychological link between color and emotion nearly a century before the dawn of psychology as a formal field of study, penned just before his compatriot Abraham Gottlob Werner released his seminal scientific nomenclature of color, which Darwin would later take on The Beagle.
Gathered here is a posy of blue from some of my favorite encounters with this more-than-color in the literature of the past two centuries.
With Carl Sagan’s poetic Pale Blue Dot on my mind lately, I have found myself dwelling on the color blue and the way our planet’s elemental hue, the most symphonic of the colors, recurs throughout our literature as something larger than a mere chromatic phenomenon - a symbol, a state of being, a foothold to the most lyrical and transcendent heights of the imagination.
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