Loose pigments are used only in pastels...

Loose pigments are used only in pastels, which have to be protected by glass, since the color grains are captured by the roughened base of the flesh side of parchment or by the layer of size on paper, but remain as sensitive to touch as the colored dust on the wing of a butterfly. The butterfly’s brilliant colors are created by a system built up in layers, in which iridescent effects are produced by the interplay between the pigment and the various physical structures of the scales. Painters used to imitate this process from nature. Although there were one or two pigments they could obtain ready-made from the apothecary or from a monastery, they were also familiar with the material from which their paintings were made in its raw form. In front of their very eyes they had the metals, minerals, earths, plants, woods, bones, lice, shells, and snails needed, and they knew the processes by which to transform these into pigments. They knew which materials could be sublimated, calcined, smelted, eluted, ground, pounded, precipitated, boiled, dried, and distilled, and in their apprenticeships they had all spent endless hours grinding pigments with the muller against the slab. Compared with today, only a few colors were available—but the complex systems for using them in the fifteenth century make today’s techniques look like child’s play. We have forgotten what every butterfly “knows”: that the visual effect of colors is created by the interplay of tone and body. The color tone is one thing, and the shape and structure of the color are another. Each pigment has a different body, which refracts, reflects, and absorbs light in a different way. The blue tone of artificial ultramarine, produced industrially since 1830, is apparently indistinguishable from that of natural ultramarine, laboriously obtained from the semiprecious stone lapis lazuli. A glance through the microscope reveals the difference, which emerges so clearly in the painting that it is visible even to the untrained eye. The synthetic pigment, with its small, homogeneous round crystals, produces a uniformly consistent blue surface, while genuine ultramarine—the most expensive of all the pigments, with its large, irregular crystals of varying transparency and with naturally embedded particles of calcite, pyrite, mica, and quartz—appears like a glittering firmament. Above all, the transparent splinters of the calcite crystals embedded in the lapis lazuli sparkle like stars within the deep blue.
-- The Art of Arts (2001), Anita Albus (trans. by Michael Robertson)

Menard’s fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes’. Cervantes crudely juxtaposes the humble provincial reality of his country against the fantasies of the romance, while Menard chooses as his “reality” the land of Carmen during the century that saw the Battle of Lepanto and the plays of Lope de Vega. What burlesque brushstrokes of local color that choice would have inspired in a Maurice Barres or a Rodriquez Larreta! Yet Menard, with perfect naturalness, avoids them. In his work, there are no gypsy goings-on or conquistadors or mystics of Philip IIs or autos da fe. He ignores, overlooks—or banishes—local color. That disdain posits a new meaning for the “historical novel.” That disdain condemns Salammbo, with no possibility of appeal.

--Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, Jorge Luis Borges (1941).

Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor, surely, need one be obliged to note that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.
“My purpose is merely astonishing,” he wrote me on September 30, 1934, from Bayonne. “The final term of a theological or metaphysical proof—the world around us, or God, or chance, or universal Forms—is no more final, no more uncommon, than my revealed novel. The sole difference is that philosophers publish pleasant volumes containing the intermediate stages of their work, while I am resolved to suppress those stages of my own.” And indeed there is not a single draft to bear witness to that years-long labor.

--Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, Jorge Luis Borges (1941).

Annular forms of lichens...

Annular forms of lichens fiery green that sprawled across the stones like tiny jade volcanoes. The scalloped fungus that ledged old rotted logs, flangeous mammary growths with a visceral consistency and pale indianpipes in pulpy clusters among the debris of humus and rich decay and mushrooms with serrate and membraneous soffits where under toads are reckoned to siesta. Or elves, he said. In breeks of kingscord, shirts paned up of silk tailings, no color like the rest. A curious light lay in the forest. He was squatting in the rich and murky earth, the blanket about his shoulders. He wondered could you eat the mushrooms, would you die, do you care. He broke one in his hands, frangible, mauvebrown and kidneycolored. He'd forgotten he was hungry.

-- Suttree (1979), Cormac McCarthy

Just once in my life...

Just once in my life -- oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life.

-- Memoir (2005), Amy Hempel