Those who perceive colors accompanying sounds, sense clean cut lights
streaking the night-ground of these early word-pictures; sharp, hard,
reds and yellows. It is our later world which has produced green
tintings not to be told from gray, nor gray from blue, nor anything from
anything. In our fondness for smoothness and gradation we have attained
practical colorlessness.
If it appears to you that I am talking nonsense, permit me to tell you
it is because you have dulled your own powers of perception; in seeking
to become too intellectually appreciative, you have lost the power to
feel primitive things. Try to recover it.
Another source of interesting observation, especially in English
literature of early writing: this time the eye.
It is admitted by everybody that as a serviceable instrument for
expressing definite sounds in an expeditious and comprehensible manner,
English written language is a woeful failure. If any inventor of a
theory of symbols should, would, or could have devised such a ridiculous
conception of spelling, such a hodge-podge of contradictory jumbles, he
would properly have been adjudged to an insane asylum; and that, every
man who ever contrived an English spelling-book, and every teacher who
is obliged to worry this incongruous mess through the steadily revolting
reason-and-memory process of children, is ably convinced. But Man,
English-speaking Man, has actually--_executed_ such conception; (he
probably executed it first and conceived it afterward, as most of our
poor victims do when they start on that terrible blind road through the
spelling-book). Whether or no, the thing is here, and we've all to
accept it, and deal with it as best we may, sadly hoping that possibly
the tenth generation from now may at least be rid of a few unnecessary
"e's."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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