From the Southeast I took with me its mountains. The sight of fog like gliding through the rock. The infinite row of mounts fading into the background. The winding roads, the deathly cliffs, the rice paddies. But the color, that deep and faded blue, is what struck me the most.
Just recently I've been able to put it into words, although they weren't mine. These are Rebecca Solnit's:
"The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. (...) The blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. (...) For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in..." Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
laotramaga
The sight of fog like gliding through the rock. The infinite row of mounts fading into the background. The winding roads, the deathly cliffs, the rice paddies. But the color, that deep and faded blue, is what struck me the most.
Just recently I've been able to put it into words, although they weren't mine.
These are Rebecca Solnit's:
"The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. (...) The blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance.
(...) For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in..."
Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
Digital Photo.
Vietnam, 2020