the part of me that was on-the-beam
“Around four in the afternoon, after I’d walked about ten miles, I came to this roadhouse. I went on past it a little ways, walking slower and slower, arguing with myself. I lost the argument—the part of me that was on-the-beam lost it–and I went back.”
—Jim Thompson, After Dark, My Sweet, 1955.
The concrete pasture
“The concrete pasture. I mean, that’s what it seems like to me. You keep going and going, and it’s always the same everywhere. Wherever you’ve been, wherever you go, everywhere you look. Just greyness and hardness, as far as you can see.”
—Jim Thompson, After Dark, My Sweet, 1955.
the silver at Darlington Hall
“I am glad to be able to recall numerous occasions when the silver at Darlington Hall had a pleasing impact upon observers. For instance, I recall Lady Astor remarking, not without a certain bitterness, that our silver ‘was probably unrivalled.’ I recall also watching Mr George Bernard Shaw, the renowned playwright, at dinner one evening, examining closely the dessert spoon before him, holding it up to the light and comparing its surface to that of a nearby platter, quite oblivious to the company around him.”
—Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, 1989.
a peculiar fondness for orange
“Of my Auntie Dora (who died when I was very young), I remember nothing except for the color orange—whether this was the color of her complexion or hair, or of her clothes, or whether it was the reflected color of the firelight, I have no idea. All that remains is a warm, nostalgic feeling and a peculiar fondness for orange.”
—Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, 2001.
heavier than lead
“I loved the yellowness, the heaviness, of gold. My mother would take the wedding ring from her finger and let me handle it for a while, as she told me of its inviolacy, how it never tarnished. ‘Feel how heavy it is?’ she would add. ‘It’s even heavier than lead.’”
—Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, 2001.
‘the limelight’
“[G]as flames, with their glowing carbon particles, were scarcely brighter than candle flames. One needed something additional, a material that would shine with special brilliance when heated ina gas flame. Such a substance was calcia—calcium oxide, or lime—which shone with an intense greenish white light when heated. This “limelight,” Uncle Dave said, was discovered in the 1820s and used to illuminate the stages in theaters for many decades—that was why we still talked about “the limelight,” even though we no longer used lime for incandescence.”
—Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, 2001.
white-hot tungsten
“If someone could look at the earth from outer space, see how it rotated every twenty-four hours into the shadow of night, they would see millions, hundreds of millions, of incandescent bulbs light up nightly, glowing with white-hot tungsten, in the folds of that shadow—and know that man had finally conquered the darkness.”
—Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, 2001.
the history of “cold” light
“I was drawn into the history of “cold” light—luminescence—which started perhaps before there was any language to record things, with observations of fireflies and glowworms and phosphorescent seas; of will-o’-the-wisps, those strange, wandering, faint globes of light that would, in legend, lure travelers to their doom. And of Saint Elmo’s fire, the eerie luminous discharges that could stream in stormy weather from a ship’s masts, giving its sailors a feeling of bewitchment. There were the auroras, the Northern and Southern Lights, with their curtains of color shimmering high in the sky. A sense of the uncanny, the mysterious, seemed to inhere in these phenomena of cold light—as opposed to the comforting familiarity of fire and warm light.”
—Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, 2001.
“canary glass”
“[I]f one dissolved uranyl salts in water, the solutions would be fluorescent–one part in a million was sufficient. The fluorescence could also be transferred to glass, and uranium glass or “canary glass” had been very popular in Victorian and Edwardian houses. . . . Canary glass transmitted yellow light and was usually yellow to look through, but fluoresced a brilliant emerald green under the impact of the shorter wavelengths in daylight, so it would often appear to shimmer, shifting between green and yellow depending on the angle of illumination.”
—Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, 2001.
a yellow book
“As he was arrested [in 1895, for homosexual acts, Oscar] Wilde was spotted carrying a yellow book—in fact a yellow-backed French novel, but reported in the press as The Yellow Book. That reference and Wilde’s and Beardsley’s erstwhile collaboration on Salome were enough to besmirch [Aubrey] Beardsley in the scandal. . . .
Hostile stone-throwing mobs gathered outside the offices of The Yellow Book’s publisher John Lane, and several of Lane’s authors—fearful for their own reputations—demanded Beardsley’s dismissal. Overnight from being the illustrator most in demand, his name had become a byword for degeneracy: he was at once almost unemployable.”
—Patrick Bade, Aubrey Beardsley, 2001.