The blue of distance
Trip Start
Jul 10, 2006
1
60
79
Trip End
??? ??, 2007
Nanyuki,
Kenya
Saturday, October 28, 2006
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, the color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is 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 at the horizon but in the distance between you and the mountains. "Longing," says the poet Robert Hass, "because desire is full of endless distances." We treat desire as a problem to be solved, though I wonder whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance. Something of desire will only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them, and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away ...
The mental landscape of the young is like that of medieval paintings: a foreground full of vivid things and then a wall. The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel.
