an unnatural glitter
“Gobseck, impassive as ever, had taken up his magnifying glass, and was quietly scrutinizing the jewels. If I were to live for a hundred years, I should never forget the sight of his face at that moment. There was a flush in his pale cheeks; his eyes seemed to have caught the sparkle of the stones, for there was an unnatural glitter in them. He rose and went to the light, holding the diamonds close to his toothless mouth, as if he meant to devour them; mumbling vague words over them, holding up bracelets, sprays, necklaces, and tiaras one after another, to judge of their water, whiteness, and cutting; taking them out of the jewel-case and putting them in again, letting the play of the light bring out all their fires. He was more like a child than an old man; or, rather, childhood and dotage seemed to meet in him.”
—Honor’ de Balzac (1799–1850), from Gobseck, 1830.
GOLD
“‘If you had lived as long as I have, you would know that there is but one concrete reality invariable enough to be worth caring about and that is—GOLD. . . . When all sensations are exhausted, all that survives is Vanity—Vanity is the abiding substance of us, the I in us. Vanity is only to be satisfied by gold in floods. Our dreams need time and physical means and painstaking thought before they can be realized. Well, gold contains all things in embryo; gold realizes all things for us.’”
—Honor’ de Balzac (1799–1850), spoken by Gobseck in Gobseck, 1830.
yellow as a lemon
“‘Be quick and come, M. Derville,’ said he, ‘the governor is just going to hand in his checks; he has grown as yellow as a lemon; he is fidgeting to speak with you; death has fair hold of him; the rattle is working in his throat.’”
—Honor’ de Balzac (1799—1850), from the short story Gobseck, 1830.
dark side of the flower
“In the garden grows a flower
Bending low to the earth,
Its face in the dust.
I can see
The dark side of the flower.
Painted face.
Can you see the dark side of the flower? . . .
Many colors are your petals,
Signifying, what?
Perhaps you see their meaning
Through a chemical prism.
The dew on your petals called love
No longer seems to sparkle in the sun.
The dew seems to cling
Only to your leaves,
And ooze,
Not flowing to moisten
The life of your blossom,
But closing off its breath.”
—Pastor John Rydgren and Peter Tork, “Dark Side of the Flower”, from the very odd, not to say bizarre, late sixties double LP “Silhouette Segments.” Originally released on the Weird-Oh label, catalog number Weird-Oh 002.
love bombing
“Alison Peters, a former member of Children of God, recalled [the Moonie practice of] love bombing in shopping malls. She’d look for people who seemed, as she put it, ‘sheepy, people who looked lost and vulnerable.’. . . While she was talking to them, she would stare fixedly into their eyes, the classic technique of hard sell. As she described it, ‘It was the whole thing of exuding confidence, of maintaining direct communication so forceful that you’re always in complete control. In the pamphlet, they described it in biblical terms: you were supposed to ‘Let the Holy Spirit work through you.’ The eye-to-eye contact was called ‘letting the Light of Jesus come through your eyes into the other person’s eyes.’’”
—Willa Appel, from Cults in America: Programmed for Paradise, 1983.
“black sleep”
“Psychiatrist and cult watcher Dr. John Clark reports that ex-members have more than the normal number of nightmares, many of which are about their past in the cult. He also thinks that cult members frequently experience what has been called “black sleep,” sleep without dreams or without the usual form of dreams. Experiencing black sleep is like falling into utter blackness, into a pit, and coming out of it with a start, whout any consciousness of even having been asleep.”
—Willa Appel, from Cults in America: Programmed for Paradise, 1983.
white letters on a black background
“In [some] cults, as in the Third Reich, safety rests in utter conformity—in self-abnegation. The fate of individuals subjected to this environment is expressed simply in the following dream of a German woman in 1933: ‘In place of the street signs which had been abolished, posters had been set up on every corner, proclaiming in white letters on a black background the twenty words people were not allowed to say. The first was Lord—to be on the safe side I must have dreamt it in English. I don’t recall the following words and possibly didn’t even dream them, but the last one was I.’”
—Willa Appel, from Cults in America: Programmed for Paradise, 1983.
isochronous vibrations (pulsus) of the aether
“Assuming with Euler that colours are isochronous vibrations (pulsus) of the aether, as tones are of the air set in vibration by sound, and, what is most important, that the mind not alone perceives by sense their effect in stimulating the organs, but also by reflection, the regular play of the impressions, (and consequently the form in which different representations are united,)—which I, still, in no way doubt—then colour and tone would not be mere sensations. They would be nothing short of formal determinations of the unity of a manifold of sensations, and in that case could even be ranked as intrinsic beauties.
But the purity of a simple mode of sensation means that its uniformity is not disturbed or broken by any foreign sensation. It belongs merely to the form; for abstraction may there be made from the quality of the mode of such sensations (what colour or tone, if any, it represents). For this reason all simple colours are regarded as beautiful so far as pure. Composite colours have not this advantage, because, not being simple, there is no standard for estimating whether they should be called pure or impure. . . .
To say that the purity alike of colours and of tones, or their variety and contrast, seem to contribute to beauty, is by no means to imply that, because in themselves agreeable, they therefore yield an addition to the delight in the form and one on a par with it. The real meaning rather is that they make this form more clearly, definitely, and completely intuitable, and besides stimulate the representation by their charm, as they excite and sustain the attention directed to the object itself.”
—Immanuel Kant, “Analytic of the Beautiful” from The Critique of Judgement, 1790. Translated by James Creed Meredith.
are then the beautiful red and purple we see on yonder clouds really in them?
“HYLAS. Each visible object hath that color which we see in it.
PHILONOUS. How! is there anything visible but what we perceive by sight?
HYLAS. There is not. . . .
PHILONOUS. My reason for asking was, because in saying, each visible object hath that color which we see in it, you make visible objects to be corporeal substances; which imples either that corporeal substances are sensible qualities, or else that there is something beside sensible qualities perceived by sight: but, as this point was formerly agreed between us, and is still maintained by you, it is a clear consequence, that your corporeal substance is nothing distinct from sensible qualities.
HYLAS. You may draw as many absurd consequences as you please, and endeavor to perplex the plainest things, but you shall never persuade me out of my senses. I clearly understand my own meaning. . . .
PHILONOUS. What! are then the beautiful red and purple we see on yonder clouds really in them? Or do you imagine they have in themselves any other form than that of a dark mist or vapor?
HYLAS. I must own, Philonous, those colors are not really in the clouds as they seem to be at this distance. They are only apparent colors.
PHILONOUS. Apparent you call you them, how shall we distinguish these apparent colors from real?
HYLAS. Very easily. Those are to be thought apparent which, appearing only at a distance, vanish upon a nearer approach.
PHILONOUS. And those, I suppose, are to be thought real which are discovered by the most near and exact survey.
HYLAS. Right.
PHILONOUS. Is the nearest and exactest survey made by the help of a microscope, or by the naked eye?
HYLAS. By a microscope, doubtless.
PHILONOUS. But a microscope often discovers colors in an object different from those perceived by the unassisted sight. And, in case we had microscopes magnifying to any assigned degree, it is certain that no object whatsoever, viewed through them, would appear in the same color which it exhibits to the naked eyes.
HYLAS. And what will you conclude from all this? You cannot argue that there are really and naturally no colors on objects: because by artificial managements they may be altered, or made to vanish.
PHILONOUS. I think it may evidently be concluded from your own concessions, that all the colors we see with our naked eyes are only apparent as those on the clouds, since they vanish upon a more close and accurate inspection which is afforded us by a microscope.”
—George Berkeley, from Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, 1713.
the freshest and most beautiful pictures
“On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written, the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted.”
—Chairman Mao, April 15, 1958. Found in Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse’Tung, the famous little red book (with the beautiful plastic cover) of China. From an English translation published by Bantam Books in 1967.