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Promise me you will never wear black satin

“‘Promise me you will never wear black satin,’ he said. I smiled then, and he laughed back at me, and the morning was gay again, the morning was a shining thing.”

—Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca, 1938.

a curious, slanting hand

“I picked up the book again, and this time it opened at the title-page, and I read the dedication. ‘Max—from Rebecca. May 17th,’ written in a curious, slanting hand. A little blob of ink marred the white page opposite, as though the writer, in impatience, had shaken her pen to make the ink flow freely. And then, as it bubbled through the nib, it came a little thick, so that the name Rebecca stood out black and strong, the tall and sloping R dwarfing the other letters.”

—Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca, 1938.

Is this the worst pain you’ve ever felt?

“Some doctors trying to diagnose an uncertain case ask, ‘Is this the worst pain you’ve ever felt?’ A ‘yes’ suggests a diagnosis of black widow bite.”

—Gordon Grice, ‘Black Widow,’ The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, 1998.

They begin as swirls of light brown and cream

“They grow rapidly . . . shucking a skin every few days. They begin as swirls of light brown and cream, then darken with each molt, resolving into brown with white spots. A white hourglass is soon clear on the belly. In the females, a pale orange hue dawns in the center of the hourglass with succeeding molts; the brown rapidly darkens. The orange deepens to red, like a sunset, and spreads outward to infect the entire hourglass. As adults their black is broken only by the crimson hourglass and, depending on the individual, perhaps a few other specks or stripes of red or a white dot. The male may retain his infant colors, or he may grow black and sport a psychedelic array of red, gold, and white marks.”

—Gordon Grice, ‘Black Widow,’ The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, 1998.

Visible light

What is green?

“What is green?
The grass is green.
With small flowers between.”

—Christina Rossetti, ‘What Is Pink? A Rose Is Pink,’ 1872; quoted by Bruce R. Smith in The Key of Green, 2009.

a green Thought in a green Shade

“The Mind, the Ocean where each kind
Does streight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green Thought in a green Shade.”

—Andrew Marvell, ‘The Garden,’ 1681; quoted by Bruce R. Smith in The Key of Green, 2009.

Good is as visible as greene

“If they were good it would be seene,
Good is as visible as greene,
And to all eyes it selfe betrayes.”

—John Donne, ‘Communitie,’ 1633; quoted by Bruce R. Smith in The Key of Green, 2009.

The Conversation of the Old People Traversing the Green Fields under the Leadership of Venus

“The occasion for [Marsilio] Ficino’s reasoning of green as the most pleasing color is a chapter in the second of his De Vita Libri Tres (1489) titled ‘The Conversation of the Old People Traversing the Green Fields under the Leadership of Venus.’. . . To Ficino’s way of seeing, green neither dilates the eye with too much light nor dulls the eye with too much darkness: rather, ‘the color green tempering most of all black with white, furnishes the one effect and the other, equally delighting and conserving the sight.’”

—Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green, 2009.

rods and cones

“Each human retina contains two sorts of photoreceptors: rods and cones. The 120 million rods (so called because of how they look under a microscope) absorb light waves across the entire visible spectrum. . . . [R]ods register distinctions only between light and dark—that is, distinctions in value. Distinctions in hue are triggered by a different set of receptors: the cones. The retina’s five to seven million cones (again, that’s what they look like when seen through a microscope) are clustered at the focal point opposite the eye’s lens.”