Color is among the most challenging aspects of our experience to describe. Spectrophotometers and colorimeters can quantify light waves, yet their measurements have little impact on our feeling for color. As the philosopher Zeno Vendler put it, “Vincent van Gogh loved the color yellow—and certainly not because of its wavelength.” Color is infamous for its variability in language and perception. How can we know that what we are seeing is the same as what someone else sees? How can we separate what we are seeing from the thing itself? Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein asked in his Remarks on Colour, “Where do we draw the line here between logic and experience?” In the Remarks, written the year before his death in 1951, the philosopher’s thoughts about color invariably lead back to the study of philosophy. What things are knowable? How are they known? What can be determined through philosophical reasoning? Wittgenstein reflected, “Colors are a stimulus to philosophizing.”
It has been years since my mother roasted a salmon head. But I can still hear that tick-tocking toaster oven, a sign of the dish’s imminent arrival at our dinner table. The “head” part of it all was scary to me as a child, but as an adult, I find myself craving the fishy butteriness of the cheek meat, what I call the bone marrow of the sea. Stirred through a bowl of freshly steamed Calrose rice (maybe with a dab of doenjang, that salty dream of a soybean paste), roasted salmon head is easily in my Top 10 favorite things to eat. But without the rice? Not so much.
Hernan Diaz’s new book, “Trust,” is about an early 20th-century investor. Or at least it seems to be. Everything about this cunning story makes a mockery of its title. The only certainty here is Diaz’s brilliance and the value of his rewarding book.
Translating Myself and Others is a reminder, no matter your relationship to translation, of how alive language itself can be. In her essays as in her fiction, Lahiri is a writer of great, quiet elegance; her sentences seem simple even when they're complex. Their beauty and clarity alone would be enough to wake readers up. "Look," her essays seem to say: Look how much there is for us to wake up to.