Tell me, if a man were to light a lamp, could it provide light the whole night long
“In the Buddhist scriptures, [there is] a famous dialogue between a king named Milinda and the Buddhist sage Nagesena. The king asked Nagesena this . . . question: When someone is reborn, is he the same as the one who just died, or is he different Nagasena replied: He is neither the same nor different. . . . Tell me, if a man were to light a lamp, could it provide light the whole night long The king said, Yes.
Nagasena asked: Is the flame then which burns in the first watch of the night the same as the one that burns in the second . . . or the last The king said, No. Nagasena asked again, Does that mean there is one lamp in the first watch of the night, another in the second, and another in the third The king answered, No, its because of that one lamp that the light shines all night. Then Nagasena said, Rebirth is much the same: one phenomenon arises and another stops, simultaneously. So the first act of consciousness in the new existence is neither the same as the last act of consciousness in the previous existence nor is it different.”
—Jonathan Cott, from On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering, 2005.
Mnemosyne
“Let us, however, give Mnemosyne her due. Because of her I am able to remember inspiring and rapturous communal momentsfor example, the Free Speech Movement rallies in Berkeley, California, in 1965 or the gathering in Central Park in 1980 commemorating the death of John Lennonas well as passionate and numinous personal moments. . . . It would have been insuperable for me to have forgotten lying flat on my back with arms outspread on a field filled with wooly harrow, buckwheat, and live forever overlooking the Pacific Ocean swelling against sculptured rocks in Nothern California on a glorious autumn afternoon, or many nights spent in a lake cottage in western Massachusetts watching the lakes ineffable changes as moon and clouds and stars passed by overhead and noticing the traveling lights of fireflies and tiny planes and their reflections in the water. I remember thinking: Like the flickering stars, the fireflys light leaves a memory of itself.”
—Jonathan Cott, from On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering, 2005.
the Purkinje shift
“Walking around Berkeley at dusk last week, we saw a hydrangea that almost seemed to glow. It was an example of the Purkinje shift. The effect is named after Johannes Purkinje, a nineteenth-century Bohemian physiologist who discovered the Purkinje cell and the Purkinje fiber; Purkinje also gave blood plasma its name and was the first person to classify fingerprints. Purkinje noted the shift when looking at an Oriental rug one evening; as dusk settled, some colors appeared to grow relatively brighter. In low-light conditions, the rod receptors in your eye (scotopic sensitivity) take over from the cone receptors (photopic sensitivity). Rods and cones are most sensitive to different wavelengths of light, so as it gets darker, we perceive colors as changing in brighteness as reds and oranges grow relatively dimmer and greens and blues grow relatively brighter. . . . Unlike many optical illusions . . . the Purkinje shift is not based upon fooling the brain. It’s a result of the mechanics of the eye. The eye doesn’t work the same way as mental models of the eye, as telescopes or cameras. It’s a slightly eerie notion; upon his discovery of the blind spot in 1668, Edme Mariotte was disturbed by the conflict between what he had just observed and Kepler’s model of the eye as a natural lens. It wasn’t until 1819 that scientific exploration of the blind spot really took off, both because nerves were poorly understood and because no one had a model of the eye good enough to displace Kepler’s that also accounted for the blind spot and the weird way it seemed to flow into the background. Nineteenth century philosophy, of all things, began to provide this model. Schopenhauer sums it up at the beginning of On Seeing and Colors: We see nothing, save through reason.”
the eloquent and apparently well-informed Steve at Snarkout.org, August 10, 2002. Thank you, dude!
Simultaneous contrast.
If a given color is observed simultaneously in varied colored environments, it will often look different. When seen against a magenta-like background a red will appear more orange than the same red seen in front of a yellow-red background. This varying perception of one and the same color is known as simultaneous contrast.
—Color Systems in Art and Science, edited by Klaus Stromer, translated from the German by Randy Cassada, 1999.
Pure colors.
Colors which contain no other color. In the case of light, these are colors which are determined by one wavelength only.
—Color Systems in Art and Science, edited by Klaus Stromer, translated from the German by Randy Cassada, 1999.
Primary colors.
Colors obtained by artists or scientists as the basis of mixtures to obtain other colors (secondary or tertiary colors). Primary colors cannot be reduced further and are the basis of all color systems. Each system starts out with its own primary colors.
—Color Systems in Art and Science, edited by Klaus Stromer, translated from the German by Randy Cassada, 1999.
Secondary colors.
The colors in a color system which arise through mixing the primary colors.
—Color Systems in Art and Science, edited by Klaus Stromer, translated from the German by Randy Cassada, 1999.
Prism.
A glass body with triangularly arranged surfaces which can separate sunlight into its spectral colors.
—Color Systems in Art and Science, edited by Klaus Stromer, translated from the German by Randy Cassada, 1999.
Prismatic colors.
Another term for spectral colors.
—Color Systems in Art and Science, edited by Klaus Stromer, translated from the German by Randy Cassada, 1999.
Spectral colors.
The colors which become visible when sunlight is allowed to pass through a prism.
—Color Systems in Art and Science, edited by Klaus Stromer, translated from the German by Randy Cassada, 1999.