Week 7: A Quote

Seeing as we were talking about color theory so recently, I wanted to share a passage I came across in my reading for a writing class this past week:

"And my mind is filled with the things I've learned, thing I never thought to wonder about the world. When sunlight falls through a chip in the studio skylight, bands of color fall on the floor, climb a little way up the wall. Sam told me how the rough edge of the chip separated the colors so that we saw them, but they were there all the time, in the everyday light around us. Then he picked up the blue glass dish that held the river stone and the dried rose petals, emptied those things into his cupped hand and asked me did I know why the dish was blue. I didn't know what to say, but it didn't matter because Sam was already explaining. He said that when light fell on the dish some of the colors, those invisible colors that made up the light, were absorbed by it. Fell into it and were trapped there, forever. But the blue part of the light, for some reason that I forget, bounces back to our eyes and makes us think that the dish is the color we call blue. I looked around the studio, looked at all the colors there, the dull red settee and the cushion on the cane chair, the sky-blue shirt hanging on the doorknob and the rich leather folders on the shelf. And I thought about the light falling on all of them at the same time, but each thing being different in what it took into itself, in what it would not accept, but flung back at our eyes."
- The Boys in the Trees, by Mary Swan.

The book uses light as a parallel a great deal, but I thought that passage in particular spoke to the magic of some of the things we have been talking about. As I work on colors myself, the passage particularly strikes me as capturing something of the scientific mystery. As I have recorded in my notebook from the first day of D157, in the wise words of Lonnie: "Light is magic, and that's okay."