purple tide
“The Rhine was red with human blood,
The Danube rolled in purple tide,
O’er the Euphrates Satan stood,
And over Asia stretched his pride”
—William Blake, from Jerusalem.
a bright piece of yellow chalk
“In a corner Mona and Paddy were sitting, huddled togehter, a few torn school primers before them. They were writing down little sums onto an old chipped slate, using a bright piece of yellow chalk. I was close to them, propped up by a few pillows against the wall, watching.
It was the chalk that attracted me so much. It was a long, slender stick of vivid yellow. I had never seen anything like it before, and it showed up so well against the black surface of the slate that I was fascinated by it as much as if it had been a stick of gold.
Suddenly, I wanted desperately to do what my sister was doing. Then—without thinking or knowing exactly what I was doing, I reached out and took the stick of chalk out of my sister’s hand—with my left foot.”
—Christy Brown, from My Left Foot, his autobiography, 1954.
the starting point
“Dostoevski once wrote ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted’; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point.”
—Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, 1948.
what we call “seeing the sun”
“Modern physics and physiology throw a new light upon the ancient problem of perception. If there is to be anything that can be called “perception,” it must be in some degree an effect of the object perceived, and it must more or less resemble the object if it is to be a source of knowledge of the object. . . . Light-waves travel from the sun to the earth, and in doing so obey their own laws. . . . When they reach our atmosphere, they suffer refraction, and some are more scattered than others. When they reach a human eye, all sorts of things happen which would not happen elsewhere, ending up with what we call “seeing the sun.” But although the sun of our visual experience is very different from the sun of the astronomer, it is still a source of knowledge as to the latter, because “seeing the sun” differs from “seeing the moon” in ways that are causally connected with the difference between the astronomer’s sun and the astronomer’s moon.”
—Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 1945. From the chapter entitled The Philosophy of Logical Analysis.
Sneakers get red hot
“The very language of tody’s advertisements is charged with sexuality. Products in the more innocent fifties were “new and improved,” but everything in the eighties is “hot!”—as in “hot woman,” or sexual heat. Cars are “hot.” Movies are “hot.” An ad for Valvoline pulses to the rhythm of a “heat wave, burning in my car.” Sneakers get red hot in a magazine ad for Travel Fox athletic shoes in which we see male and female figures, clad only in Travel Fox shoes, apparently in the act of copulation—an ad that earned one of Adweek’s annual “badvertising” awards for shoddy advertising.”
—Jack Solomon, from The Signs of Our Times: The Secret Meanings of Everyday Life, 1990.
“If you were a car . . .”
“‘If you were a car, what kind of car would you be?’ As a candy-red Porsche speeds along a rain-slick forest road, the ad’s voice-over describes all the specifications you’d want to have if you were a sports car. ‘If you were a car,’ the commercial concludes, ‘you’d be a Porsche.’”
—Jack Solomon, from The Signs of Our Times: The Secret Meanings of Everyday Life, 1990.
a cathedral of ice
“[Albert] Speer’s most impressive architectural accomplishment was probably his stage-management of the 1934 Nuremurg Rally, for which most of Goering’s stock of searchlighs was brought to the Zeppelin Field:
‘The hundred and thirty sharply defined beams, placed around the field at intervals of forty feet, were visible to a height of twenty to twenty-five thousand feet. . . . The feeling was of a vast room, with the beams serving as mighty pillars of infinitely high outer walls. Now and then a cloud moved through this wreath of lights, bringing an element of surrealistic surprise to the mirage. . . . The effect . . . was like being in a cathedral of ice.’”
—Bill Risebero, The Story of Western Architecture, 1979. The source of the quote within is unstated.
real white sheets
“ZABEL: My dream?
JEAN: Dream on your feet and you’ll fall down. . . .
ZABEL: My dream is to sleep just one night between real white sheets. One on top, and another one under me.”
—from the subtitles of Port of Shadows, Le Quai des brumes, directed by Marcel Carn’, 1938.
Dress in rose color
“Dress in rose color and say little.”
—Benozzo Gozzoli, The Journey of the Magi; Cosimo de’ Medici’s advice to a friend on a mission to another city. As quoted in Leonardo, by Robert Payne, 1978.
in all his finery
“Only the Florentines and the Venetians could dress like popinjays without looking ridiculous. And although Leonardo [da Vinci] wrote somewhat contemptuously abut the absurd and wonderful fashions of his time, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that on occasion he dressed up in all his finery, like any dandy. That he favored rose color, which was reserved for the nobility, suggests that he regarded himself as belonging to the nobility, by descent from his mother’s side.”
—Robert Payne, from Leonardo, 1978.