Lost Blue

Further reading on the chapter titled The Blue of Distance in A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.  

She says "The world is blue at its edges and in its depth.  This blue is the light that got lost.    .....but the blue of 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 places where you can see for miles, the blue of distance."      Also.."The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and desire, the color of there seen from here,  the color of where you are not.  And the color of where you can never go.   Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, the blue world."


I thought about some of my photos of this blue.  Standing on the mountain overlook, the sky and mountains are always shades of blue (our mountains are called the Blue Ridge Mountains for this reason).  If you traveled toward this distance, you would lose that blue and be among the green of the forest. Never in the blue.   At a hill looking out over the fields to beyond where there is the ocean and further beyond barely visibly are some other islands.  If I traveled across the water to those other islands, I would lose that blue.     

But blue is not the only color that is lost.   Late evening color is there on the horizon along the marsh in the third photo but I would never be able to get to that color.  It is a soothing color for me.  

I don't agree about the melancholy aspect of the blue color.  I guess mostly because I am not a melancholy kind of person.  The desire or longing is there...longing to travel to the area but not to be lost in the blue.  

She closes this chapter with this statement, "Some things we have only as long as they are lost...."