There’s a lot more sex and penises in this book than I expected. I realized perhaps I initially misread the title, it’s not ABOUT blue but about BEING blue. Whether this explains my surprise or not, I don’t know.
Quotes: “In ‘go to hell' and ‘fuck you,’ the words have been glued together by thoughtless use and mindless custom. We do not speak them the way we speak ordinary sentences. They are not said, but recited, like ave marias…”
Furthermore, the sense of passion or of power, of depth and vibrancy, feeling and vision, we take away from any work is the result of the intermingling, balance, play, and antagonism between these: it is the arrangement of blues, not any blue itself, which lets us see the mood it formulates, whether pensive melancholy or thoughtless delight, so that one to whom aesthetic experience comes easily will see, as Schopenhauer suggested, sadness in things as readily as smoky violet or moist verdigris.
Yes, once blue signified, not sky, but Heaven, against which the figures of the gods burned like suns.
Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet thick dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.
So it always is as we approach the source of our desires. As Rilke observed, love requires a progressive shortening of the senses: I can see you for miles; I can hear you for blocks; I can smell you, maybe, for a few feet, but I can only touch on contact, taste as I devour.
A collection of writing about science fiction and fantasy from the 70s and early 80s. Lem is very cranky about the dismal state (in his mind) of science fiction, particularly American, writing up to that point. He thinks things entered practically a state of arrested development after H.G. Wells. Partly he blames the writers for not being bold enough to push the genre forward, but he also thinks the cultural disdain for science fiction, again especially in the US, shares a lot of the blame. Essentially, he argues, the genre is reduced to being a mass-produced, assembly-line product with little cultural cachet attached to it and no supporting structure of critical analysis you typically find with more highbrow literary output. I should add here, he also blames readers for accepting trash and not demanding higher quality work. It’s probably a little overheated, but if nothing else Lem is not one to mince words. Many of the titles let you know exactly what he’s thinking, e.g.:
“Philip K. Dick: A Visionary among Charlatans” & “Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case—with Exceptions”. 😂 Here he calls out PKD’s book Ubik and Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness.
Two of the essays, one about Borges and the other about Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers, were my favourite. He’s certainly a fan of both but nonetheless, even there, he’s not afraid to criticize.
Probably not essential reading except for the die hard Lem fan.
