modernity, purity, and absolute whiteness

“[A] white slurry [is] poured out onto a stainless steel table and dried to a fine, superwhite powder—cornstarch. Cornstarch comprised wet milling’s sole product when the industry got its start in the 1840s. At first the laundry business was its biggest customer, but cooks and early food processors soon began adding cornstarch to as many recipes as they could: It offered the glamour of modernity, purity, and absolute whiteness.”

—Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 2006.

white clover

“When [a cow] moves into a new paddock, she doesn’t just see the color green; she doesn’t even see grass. She sees, out of the corner of her eye, this nice tuft of white clover, the emerald-green one over there with the heart-shaped leaves, or, up ahead, that grassy spray of bluish fescue tightly cinched at ground level. These . . . entities are as different in her mind as vanilla ice cream is from cauliflower, two dishes you would never conflate just because they both happen to be white.”

—Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 2006.

wall-to-wall morels

“As soon as Ben announced he’d spotted his first morel, I began, exclusively and determinedly, looking down. There I found a thick carpet of pine needles amid the charred carcasses of pine. A morel resembles a tanned finger wearing a dark and deeply honeycombed dunce cap. They’re a decidedly comic-looking mushroom, resembling leprechauns or little penises. The morel’s distinctive form and patterning would make it easy to spot if not for its color, which ranges from dun to black and could not blend in more completely with a charred landscape. . . .
    I found that if I actually got down on the ground . . . I could see the little hats popping up here and there, morels that a moment before had been utterly invisible. . . .
    And then there was the ‘screen saver’—the fact that after several hours interrogating the ground for little brown dunce caps, their images will be burned on your retinas. ‘You’ll see. When you get into bed tonight,’ Ben said, ‘you’ll shut your eyes and there they’ll be again—wall-to-wall morels.’ ”

—Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, 2006.

the hue of Azora

“Jet and japan were tawny and without lustre, when compared to the hue of Azora.”

Harvey Ball

cyanobacteria

—Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003.

Chromosomes

—Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003.

the lovely Carolina parakeet

—Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003.

She sells seashells

The Man With The Sky Blue Eyes

“His eyes were an improbably vivid sky blue, not made for looking outward but for steeping themselves in the cerulean essence of dreams. . . .

The man with the sky blue eyes invites everyone to keep on working, fabricating, jointly creating: we are all of us dreamers by nature, after all, brothers under the sign of the trowel, destined to be master builders.”

—Bruno Schulz, “The Republic of Dreams”, The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, 1934; translated by Celina Wieniewska.