Is Our World Black and White?

On Wednesday morning the outdoor world appeared black and white to my winter-weary eyes. Stark. Empty of color. Warmer air and absence of wind were pleasant, but I found it hard to celebrate what struck me as a morose, monochrome landscape. Sunday's blue sky and sunlight -- so joyous! -- only made the return of grey skies that much harder to bear. I pulled my phone out of my pocket to capture the scene -- but the truth is that I edited today’s opening photograph to bleed out its color. The original looked like this:

 

Not only the deep green of pines but that subtle, rosy-plummy color of the cherry branches. I had to admit it: there was color in the winter palette. Not exactly a rainbow, but color nonetheless.

I love black-and-white photography and often find b/w images more striking (do we see those images as "timeless" because we associate them with photographs and snapshots predating color processing?), but I’ll go in the other direction today for a rule to live by: Nothing is ever black and white. We can always find color if we look for it. 

 

(Lately I’ve been dreaming in startlingly vivid hues. One dream segued from soothing, muted tones to garish red and gold. In the dream, I protested the hideous decor, yet that startling scene is the one I remember.)

 

Children’s books, bright with illustrations, draw us into their pages at an early age, and as adults we can still be seduced by beautiful books of photographs or drawings, but think about black lines of type on the page of an unillustrated book and how easily they disappear when you read, converted to lively, moving images you "see" as if you were amidst them. “Make mind movies,” the grade school teachers now say to their pupils, because just as a movie screen takes over imaginations and erases for a time our immediate physical surroundings, so the room around us can vanish when we let ourselves be captured by a story on pages we turn one by one, barely conscious that we are turning pages. 

 

And so I’ve been far from Michigan lately, reading two biographical/autobiographical books, a hybrid term I use because the author of Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn, Jonathan Cott, intersperses his chronological narration of Hearn’s life with many long excerpts from the subject’s own writing. Hermann Hesse’s Autobiographical Writings, on the other hand, contains short pieces all his own. Although both Hearn and Hesse led interesting lives, Hearn’s to me was fascinating, and his writing much more vivid. His early journalism, in fact, was downright lurid, his appreciation for beauty and simplicity coming to the fore in his years in Japan. But I was saving Wandering Ghost for bedtime reading, so it was the Hesse compilation I took to my neighborhood tavern, the Happy Hour, on Tuesday afternoon, anticipating that my friend would be a few minutes behind me for our rendez-vous.

How much did I read while waiting? Very little, of course! Surrounded by warmth and memories, curious about strangers at the bar and in the other booth, I spent more time soaking in the familiar, well-loved atmosphere than turning pages. How many happy hours did the Artist and I spend at the Happy Hour? And his exceeded ours together, as he often stopped on the way home from Northport while I was still in my bookstore. He was a regular....

 

Another friend once told me that she studied library science because she loved books, only to discover that her first job as a librarian left her little if any time to read on the job. Such is not the fate of a northern Michigan bookseller in winter. The only problem facing me most days is which book to pick up next, with so many tempting choices within reach, and I am always carrying volumes back and forth between home and bookstore. Soon, though, I will begin my second reading of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters, because that lushly sensual story is a perfect antidote for winter's silent, superficially monochrome reality.