WHY, INDEED, HAVE writers been so drawn to the color? According to surveys, blue is by far the world’s most popular hue, regardless of geography or gender — mostly owing to our favorable associations with it, or so researchers posit. Not surprisingly, people love cerulean skies and aquamarine seas, moody gemstones — sapphires, lapis lazuli, the 45.52-carat Hope Diamond — and blue inventions, like denim jeans and ballpoint pens. But as Perry notes, “blue is contrapuntal. It is itself and its opposite: sweet and bitter.” It has long been associated with melancholy — we get the blues, after all. A modern abbreviation of “blue devils,” the term dates to the 17th century and refers to depression, as well as to the hallucinations of alcoholism’s delirium tremens. In several of their respective etchings, both George and Isaac Cruikshank personified that affliction as menacing blue demons.
As I pondered the writerly obsession with blue, I happened upon an Instagram post by the novelist and critic Vince Passaro. He’d put up a photo of a notebook page blotted with squares of sapphire fountain-pen ink, accompanied by a caption that said he, too, was “trying to write something coherent about blue,” so I phoned him to ask about it. “I think writers are pulled toward blue as a subject because it is the most metaphorical of colors,” said Passaro, whose 2021 novel is called “Crazy Sorrow,” a blue title if ever there was one. “And like complex metaphor, it demands deeper consideration than other colors require or can sustain.” Klein felt similarly, noting, “Blue has no dimensions. It is beyond the dimensions of which other colors partake.” Fascinated by infinitude, the artist used blue — the color of the ocean and sky, in all their mysterious vast blueness — to convey it, making roughly 300 monochrome paintings in his signature International Klein Blue.
Not unlike the ocean — beautiful and tranquil one moment; stormy, choppy, even deadly the next — blue is metaphorically elastic, one might even say capricious. Didion writes of blue nights, the long twilights in the days around the summer solstice, as a metaphor for the passage of time, for aging, illness and death (“the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness”) and the loss and sadness they herald. For Solnit, the “deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue of the horizon” represents the rather more pleasant sensation of desire, yearning, pining — “the color of where you can never go.” And for Gass, blue, in all its bawdy and whimsical permutations (“afflictions of the spirit — dumps, mopes, Mondays — all that’s dismal — lowdown, gloomy music …”) lays bare the workings of language itself: “A random set of meanings,” he writes, “has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects.”
