Gorge the Gaze on God’s Gift

by in Aesthetics, Color, Literature, Quotations and tagged , , , , ,

“The fact is, that, of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.” — John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Vol. 2 (1853)

3 thoughts on “Gorge the Gaze on God’s Gift”

  1. Some are more gifted by God than others. Tetrachromats are born with four color receptors instead of the usual three, and can perceive colors better.

    https://www.thecut.com/2015/02/what-like-see-a-hundred-million-colors.html

    I see colors in other colors. For example, I’m looking at some light right now that’s peeking through the door in my house. Other people might just see white light, but I see orange and yellow and pink and green and some magenta and a little bit of blue. So white is not white; white is all varieties of white. You know when you look at a pantone and you see all the whites separated out? It’s like that for me, but they are more intense. I see all those whites in white but I resolve all these colors in the white, so it’s almost like a mosaic. They are all next to each other but connected. As I look at it, I can differentiate different colors. I could never say that’s just a white door, instead I see blue, white, yellow-blue, gray.

    Reply

    • I see your tetrachromats and raise you dodecachromaticism:

      The mantis shrimp is a small marine crustacean known for the aggressive and lightning-fast ways they capture prey. Humans can process three channels of colour (red, green and blue), while mantis shrimps perceive the world through 12 channels of colour, and can detect UV (ultra violet) and polarised light, aspects of light humans can’t access with the naked eye. — All eyes on the reef

      Reply

      • Well, that’s horrifying. Not sure I’d want that many.

        From Wiki: “The eyes of the mantis shrimp are mounted on mobile stalks and can move independently of each other”…”can tune the sensitivity of their long-wavelength colour vision to adapt to their environment.”…”able to detect circularly polarised light, which has not been documented in any other animal”…”Some of their biological quarter-waveplates perform more uniformly over the visual spectrum than any current man-made polarising optics, and this could inspire new types of optical media that would outperform early 21st century Blu-ray Disc technology.”

        All that, just to catch small fish and burrow holes in the sand. They’re like those rich teenagers who drive a $6,000 car with a $10,000 sound system installed. A bit excessive, tbh. (Horseshoe crabs could be compared to classic car enthusiasts.)

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.