“Where is my cyanometer,” Thoreau exclaimed in his journal on a blue-skied spring day, referring to the curious device invented by the Swiss scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure a century earlier to measure the blueness of the sky.
Here are some of the most beautiful meditations on blue from 200 years of literature, including Thoreau, Goethe, Toni Morrison, Rachel Carson, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca Solnit, Georgia O'Keeffe, and other titans of the world in words.
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed?
