The Blue Hour: stunning illustrated ode to nature's rarest color; pioneering composer and defiant genius Ethel Smyth on making music while going deaf

NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. View it in full.   If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, subscribe here — it's free.   Need to modify your subscription? You can change your email address or unsubscribe. Hello Reader! This is the weekly email digest of the daily online journal Brain Pickings by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — why we like what we like, an illustrated meditation on how to live with our human fragility, Toni Morrison's recipe for sanity, joy, and self-love — you can catch up right here. And if you missed my annual selection of favorite books this year, those are here. If my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider supporting it with a donation – for fourteen years, I have spent tens of thousands of hours, made many personal sacrifices, and invested tremendous resources in Brain Pickings, which remains free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: THANK YOU. The Blue Hour: A Stunning Illustrated Celebration of Nature's Rarest Color Blue, Rebecca Solnit wrote in one of humanity's most beautiful reflections on our planet's primary hue, is "the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here… the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world," a world of many blues — a pioneering 19th-century nomenclature of colors listed eleven kinds of blue, in hues as varied as the color of the flax-flower and the throat of the blue titmouse and the stamina of a certain species of anemone. Darwin took this guide with him on The Beagle in order to better describe what he saw. We name in order to see better and apprehend only what we know how to name, how to think about. But despite Earth's distinction as the Solar System's "Pale Blue Dot,", this planetary blueness is only a perceptual phenomenon arising from how our particular atmosphere, with its particular chemistry, absorbs and reflects light. Everything we behold — a ball, a bird, a planet — is the color we perceive it to be because of its insentient stubbornness toward the spectrum, because these are the wavelengths of light it refuses to absorb and instead reflects back. In the living world beneath our red-ravenous atmosphere, blue is the rarest color: There is no naturally occurring true blue pigment in nature. In consequence, only a slender portion of plants bloom in blue and an even more negligible number of animals are bedecked with it, all having to perform various tricks with chemistry and the physics of light, some having evolved astonishing triumphs of structural geometry to render themselves blue: Each feather of the bluejay is tessellated with tiny light-reflecting beads arranged to cancel out every wavelength of light except the blue; the wings of the blue morpho butterflies — which Nabokov, in his spree of making major contributions to lepidoptery while revolutionizing literature, rightly described as "shimmering light-blue mirrors" — are covered with miniature scales ridged at the precise angle to bend light in such a way that only the blue portion of the spectrum is reflected to the eye of the beholder. Only a handful of known animals, all species of butterfly, produce pigments as close to blue as nature can get — green-tinted aquamarines the color of Uranus. In The Blue Hour (public library), French illustrator and author Isabelle Simler offers a stunning joint celebration of these uncommon blue creatures and the common blue world they inhabit, the Pale Blue Dot we share. The book opens with a palette of blues strewn across the endpapers — from the delicate "porcelain blue" to the boldly iconic "Klein blue" to the brooding "midnight blue" — hues that come alive in Simler's vibrant, consummately cross-hatched illustrations of creatures and landscapes, named in spare, lyrical words. What emerges is part minimalist encyclopedia, part cinematic lullaby. The day ends. The night falls. And in between… there is the blue hour. We meet the famed blue morpho butterfly spreading its wings against the blue morning glory, the Arctic fox traversing the icy expanse in its blue-tinted coat, the blue poison dart frogs croaking at each other across the South American forest, the silvery-blue sardines glimmering beneath the surface of the blue ocean, the blue racer snake coiled around a branch, the various blue birds silent or singing in the gloaming hour. Given my uncommon love of snails, I was especially pleased to find the glass snail gracing this menagerie of blue-tinted living wonders. In the final pages, as the black of night drains the blue hour from the day, all the creatures grow silent and motionless, the hint of their presence consecrating the apparition of this blue world. Couple The Blue Hour — a large-scale splendor of paper and ink untranslatable to this small blue-reflecting screen — with Maggie Nelson's love letter to blue, then find a kindred painted celebration of the natural world in The Lost Spells. Illustrations by Isabelle Simler; photographs by Maria Popova Forward to a friend/Read Online/ donating=loving In 2020, I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping Brain Pickings going. For fourteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor made your life more livable in any way last year, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.   one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Dignity, Daring, and Disability: The Pioneering Queer Composer and Defiant Genius Ethel Smyth on Making Music While Going Deaf "Tell me nothing of rest," the young Beethoven bellowed when he began losing his hearing, resolving to "take fate by the throat" despite his disability. A century later, another trailblazing composer of uncommon artistic ability took her own fate by the throat as she faced the same embodied disability. Ethel Smyth, early 1900s As a young woman, Ethel Smyth (April 22, 1858–May 8, 1944) had weathered her father's wrath at the clarity with which she saw music as her life and the determination with which she pursued it, animated by one of her musical heroes' credo that "to live by music, you must live in music." And so she lived in it and by it, against the tide of her time — bicyclist, mountaineer, golfer, always with a large dog at her side, counterculturally clad in tweed suits and men's hats, a woman of inconvenient genius and indecorous passions, writing staggering sonatas for violin, symphonies for cello, raptures for orchestra. Still a self-described "half-baked neophyte," she met Brahms (who dismissed her), Clara Schumann (who inspired her), and Tchaikovsky (who — perhaps because he was raised a proto-feminist and perhaps because he sensed another queer person of talent against an even greater tide of convention — actively encouraged her to find her voice). Having perfected her craft in Florence, Smyth made her debut as a composer of orchestral music in London's Crystal Palace with her soulful Serenade in D. She was thirty-two. But it wasn't until late middle age, when she was already losing her hearing, that her work finally began gaining the commensurate recognition. Her 1911 choral suite "Songs of Sunrise" became the official anthem of the suffrage movement, known as "The March of the Women." Ethel Smyth at a 1912 meeting at the Women's Social & Political Union, to whom she dedicated her "March of the Women." (The Women's Library collection, London School of Economics Library.) Across the Atlantic, The New York Times did not hesitate to scintillate with reports of Smyth arrested and accused of arson for her activism. While they published no notable reviews of her music, they ran an obtuse review of her memoir under the headline "A Militant Victorian." In the journalistic equivalent to the posthumous Royal pardon for the gruesome mistreatment of computing pioneer Alan Turing, the paper would make belated reparations a century later. Dame Ethel Smyth, 1922 In 1922, Smyth became the first female composer granted damehood. Half a century later, long after her death, she was granted the more substantive honor of a seat at artist Judy Chicago's iconic Dinner Party project. Ethel Smyth placemat from Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, 1974-1979. (Photograph by Jook Leung Photography, Brooklyn Museum.) But although by the end of her life she was as highly regarded as Tchaikovsky and Brahms, Smyth was sidelined by the collective selective memory we mistake for history and was all but forgotten within a generation — partly because, unlike other queer women of her epoch and every epochs before and many epochs since, she refused to yield to the cultural pressure to marry a man anyway, thus leaving no heirs to steward her intellectual property and artistic legacy; partly because her music was never recorded in her lifetime — something conductor James Blachly and his inspired Experiential Orchestra set out to remedy a century later in the world's first crowdfunded symphony orchestra reanimation of a previously unrecorded piece, triumphantly earning Smyth a posthumous Grammy nomination. Virginia Woolf was smitten with Smyth, as one artist with another, smitten with her uncommon "gift for solidifying the connection between [the composer] and the audience," and tried to procure for her via her Bloomsbury connections the era's most admired gramophone — the handmade acoustic E.M.G. behemoth, with its enormous papier-mâché horn. Woolf was also smitten with Smyth as a woman, writing to the seventy-three-year-old composer after returning home from a visit with her: Look dearest Ethel…. Please live 50 years at least; for now I've formed this limpet childish attachment it can't but be part of my simple anatomy for ever — wanting Ethel — I say, live, live, and let me fasten myself upon you, and fill my veins with charity and champagne. Smyth had dedicated her 1919 autobiography to the memory of Lady Mary Ponsonby — her great love of a quarter century, who had died three years earlier and who had once been Maid of Honor to Queen Victoria. She dedicated her final memoir to Woolf. Virginia Woolf with Ethel Smyth (New York Public Library archives) In the last stretch of winter in 1934, a Jubilee Festival celebrated Smyth's seventy-fifth birthday with two of her most sweeping works — the orchestral masterpiece The Prison and The Mass in D, a choral enchantment — performed at Royal Albert Hall under the benediction of the era's most influential conductor and music impresario, Thomas Beecham, who had just co-founded the London Philharmonic and who had previously politely snubbed Smyth's work. It was a bittersweet triumph for her — by then, she was completely deaf, unable to register how the man whose musicianship she so admired, whom the world so admired, was rendering her work. From across the hall, Woolf observed Smyth seated next to the Queen in the Royal Box and made a heartbreaking note in her diary of how the composer leapt to her feet at the wrong moment, thinking that the National Anthem was being played. Despite her warmhearted confidence and exuberant vitality, Smyth sorrowed at the humiliation of her deafness and was always touched by those who simply treated her as a person and not as a person-sized disability to be set aside from ordinary life and managed. After visiting her friend Violet Gordon-Woodhouse — the visionary keyboard player who became the first person to record and broadcast harpsichord music — Smyth wrote in a letter: I can never tell you how adorable it was of you having me — and letting me feel I shouldn't wear you out by my deafness. It touched me to the marrow. And I think of all you made possible for me… It made my heart ache to think I am cut off from what is my most overwhelming musical joy — your playing — but I won't dwell on that. Only don't think that because I say nothing… well, you know. In her late seventies, writing in the final memoir As Time Went On (public domain), Smyth notes that neither she nor anyone she knows dare class themselves with Beethoven in matters of his ability or disability, but she shares in his orientation to the creative impulse beneath the physical limitation. While recognizing that what helped Beethoven soar through his deafness was that it struck him when he was "a young man and in the full tide of inspiration," Smyth declares with a defiant buoyancy that the musician in her "won through in the end," for inspiration lives outside the bounds of time and age: If you are still in possession of your senses, gradually getting accustomed, as some people do, to a running accompaniment of noises in your head; if instead of shrinking from the very thought of music you suddenly become conscious of desire towards it… why, then anything may happen… and once more you begin to dream dreams. Ethel Smyth (National Portrait Gallery, London) Complement with some of humanity's greatest writers on the power of music and the legendary cellist Pablo Casals, writing at age ninety-three, on creative vitality and how working with love prolongs your life, then revisit What Color Is The Wind? — a most unusual serenade to the senses, inspired by a blind child — and the story of how the trailblazing queer sculptor Harriet Hosmer paved the way for women in art a generation before Smyth. Forward to a friend/Read Online/ Conchology, or, the Natural History of Shells: Stunning 19th-Century Illustrations from the World's First Pictorial Encyclopedia of Mollusks A century-old annual report by one of the greatest public-good institutions our civilization has produced — New York's Cooper Union, site of the speech that bewinged Lincoln's ascent to the presidency, alma mater to some of the most visionary artists and thinkers of the past century and a half, founded by the inspired mechanic Peter Cooper the year Darwin published On the Origin of Species — begins with this plainspoken benediction of a mission statement: For over half a century the Cooper Union has given, in order to advance Science and Art, education to over 180,000 men and women, regardless of race or creed, without money and without price. In 1893, moved to aid this ennobling endeavor, the wealthy widow Mary Stuart established a $10,000 annual fund — close to $300,000 today — devoted to acquiring important, scrumptiously illustrated rare books for the Cooper Union library. Among them is the world's first comprehensive illustrated encyclopedia of shell-dwelling animals: Conchology, or, The Natural History of Shells — a work I discovered by a sidewise research trail during my tender adventures in snailhood. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Born in 1771, the English naturalist and malacologist George Perry became the era's preeminent scholar of shell-bearing mollusks. In 1811, he published his research in this exquisite 266-page treasure, featuring sixty-two color plates of strange and wondrous creatures, illustrated by the English artist and engraver John Clarke, "executed from the natural specimens and including the latest discoveries" — the mobile homes of marine creatures turned voluptuaries of geometry and color, elaborate living urns, lavish lampshades for the palace of some sea god, miniature Hindu temples, gorgeous drag queens of the deep, otherworldly amphoras from the bottom of this spectacular world. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Perry notes how deeply and widely shells have permeated the human cultural experience over the ages — from the drinking cups used in ancient religious rituals to the purple dye extracted from a delicate Mediterranean shell of the genus Polyplex, with which the early poets produced the oldest surviving writings, to the volutes gracing the iconic capital columns of Grecian architecture, which borrow their shape from the geometry of the ram's horn squid, the only surviving member of the genus Spirula. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. In an era when the chief purpose of science was seen as a confirmation of the perfection of a Creator-god, half a century before Darwin began shattering the brittle creationist mythology of unreason with the anvil of his elegantly reasoned evolutionary revelation, Perry opens the book with a poetic sentiment reverencing the aesthetic and spiritual rewards of shells beyond their science: The study of Shells, or testaceous animals, is a branch of natural history which, although not greatly useful to the mechanical arts, or the human economy, is, nevertheless, by the beauty of the subjects it comprises, most admirably adapted to recreate the senses, to improve the taste or invention of the Artist, and, finally and insensibly, to lead to the contemplation of the great excellence and wisdom of the Divinity in their formation. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Working with the copy digitized by the wonderful Biodiversity Heritage Library, I have restored and color-corrected the finest, most beautiful, most otherworldly of these visual serenades to the diverse splendor of our irreplaceable world to make them available as prints and face masks — part of the growing collection of vintage science face masks, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Available as a print and as a face mask, benefiting The Nature Conservancy. Complement with some psychedelic fishes from the world's first encyclopedia of marine life in color, some candy-colored corals from the world's first encyclopedia of the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem, and the astonishing butterfly drawings of two nineteenth-century Australian teenage sisters who fomented one of the greatest conservation triumphs of the twenty-first century. Forward to a friend/Read Online/ donating=loving In 2020, I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping Brain Pickings going. For fourteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor made your life more livable in any way last year, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.   one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 ALSO, NEW CHILDREN'S BOOK BY YOURS TRULY: The Snail with the Right Heart: A True Story You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles. 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