In the car yesterday:
Sam: What do colors look like not in the light and not in the dark?
me: ???
Sam: (repeats question 3 or 4 more times)
me: You mean, like, if it's just a little bit light?
Sam: I just want to know what colors look like when it's not light and not dark. I want to experience what that's like.
I still can't tell exactly what he's talking about. I think maybe the fact that colors are perceived differently in different illumination (and some related awareness that color is therefore not as simple as it initially appears). We talked about this a little bit. One of my favorite quotes, from Wm. Blake: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Those are great moments, when you can tell their minds are working on something complex and that their powers of perception are expanding before your eyes...and perhaps beyond the limits of your own learned, adult ways of explaining the universe's phenomena. Maybe he doesn't yet know how to describe something that's readily describable to those who have learned the words--or maybe he has a dim glimpse of Flatland... Cool.
ReplyDeleteGEB-- exactly!
ReplyDelete