On Being Blue ─ A Philosophical Inquiry

On Being Blue is a book about everything blue—sex and sleaze and sadness, among other things—and about everything else. It brings us the world in a word as only William H. Gass, among contemporary American writers, can do.

Gass writes:
Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of the exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright think quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.

William H. Gass is an American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, and emeritus professor of philosophy. His first novel, Omensetter’s Luck, about life in a small town in Ohio in the 1890s, was published in 1966. Since then he has published several more works of fiction, including In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, The Tunnel, and Middle C. He has also published several collections of essays, including Fiction and the Figures of Life, Habitations of the Word, Finding a Form, and Life Sentences. Gass has received many awards and honors, including grants from the Rockefeller and Solomon R. Guggenheim foundations, four Pushcart Prizes, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the American Book Award, and three National Book Critics Circle Awards for Criticism. In 2000, he was honored with the PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achievement Award.

Michael Gorra teaches English Literature at Smith College. He is the author of After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie. His most recent book is Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.