truly forever amber
“Amber is the time capsule par excellence: truly forever amber. It formed initially as a resinous blob oozing from a wound or cut on one of several kinds of trees. . . . Insects and other creatures get caught in the ooze. Time darkens it and hardens it. After a few hundred years it becomes copal (often yellow and slick); then after a million or so it acquires the indefinably deep, golden-brown colour of amber. Amber is a resistant material that eventually finds its way into sedimentary rocks. But amber beads still carry within them the trapped insects, sealed until the end of time istself.”
—Richard Fortey, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, 1998.
Jewel beetles
“Then there are Jewel beetles (Buprestidae), which in the living fauna shine with iridescent greens and blues as precious as emerald: and so they do in the Messel [fossil] specimens, a dance of colours preserved so perfectly as to mock time.”
—Richard Fortey, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, 1998.
White bread and tea
“White bread and tea passed, in the course of a hundred years, from the luxuries of the rich to become the hall-marks of a poverty-line diet. Social imitation was one reason, though not the most important. . . . White bread, though it was better with meat, butter or cheese, needs none of these; a cup of tea converted a cold meal into something like a hot one, and gave comfort and cheer besides.”
—J. Burnett, Plenty and Want, 1966; Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, 1985.
White-handed mistress
“White-handed mistress, one sweet word with thee.
Honey, and milk, and sugar; there is three.”
William Shakespeare, As You Like It.
the western mystery
“This is the land the sunset washes,
These are the banks of the Yellow Sea;
Where it rose, or whither it rushes,
These are the western mystery!”
—Emily Dickinson, This is the land the sunset washes.
its too rouge
“I cant be dying,its too rouge,
The dead shall go in white.
So sunset shuts my question down
With clasps of chrysolite.”
—Emily Dickinson, It cant be summer,that got through.
a color called Frolic green
“Freddy Wallaces boat, the Queen Conch, 34 feet long, with a V number out of Tampa, was painted white; the forward deck was painted a color called Frolic green and the inside of the cockpit was painted Frolic green. The top of the house was painted the same color.”
—Ernest Hemingway, To Have And Have Not, 1937.
the green visored-man
“Oh, nerts to you, she was saying to the third tourist, who had a rather swollen reddish face, a rusty-colored mustache, a white cloth hat with a green celluloid visor. . . .
How charming, said the green visored-man. Id never hear the expression actually used in converstaion. I thought it was an obsolete phrase, soemthing one saw in print inerthe funny papers but never heard.”
—Ernest Hemingway, To Have And Have Not, 1937.
New Orleans Street Signs, part 2
Photos by Kari Cesta. For similarly shocking pictures and more information, scroll down to part 1 of this continuing series.
a tincture
“. . . a tincture
Of force to flush old age with youth, or breed
Gold, or imprison moonbeams till they change
to opal shafts!”
—Robert Browning, Paracelsus, 1835.