Brain Food #552
Blue Monday
Thoughts of the day
Today is Blue Monday, allegedly the saddest day of the year. Coined by an advertising agency that aimed to sell more holidays, it takes place on the third Monday of January, at a distance too far removed from the joy of the festive season, and not close enough to an upcoming milestone to look forward to.
In psychology, blue often refers to feelings of serenity, and stability. How can a colour that represents sadness also represent calm? The answer may be simple, that blue can mean what we see in it.
Beyond Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Rebecca Solnit also beautifully wrote about the colour blue, how its symbolism can be elusive and shape-shifting.
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. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but 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. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.
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.
In Field Guide to Getting Lost, blue is the colour of distance and desire, and the colour of being lost, though for Solnit, being lost is a necessary act of living. As she advises in the opening essay of the book:
“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That's where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”
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