Peripheral Visions

perhaps in need of comfort or perhaps, like Wordsworth’s, offering intimations of immortality. We could equally speak of communion with parents long gone, through maturing identification.
    I was encouraged as a child to write stories and poetry, which I dictated to my mother. Once upon a time, I said in one of these stories, there was a sad, dreary kingdom that had no colors. Everything was black or white or gray, gray skies, a white-hot sun, black leaves. Even the flowers, although they had beautifully shaped petals and fragrant sweetness, seemed to the people of that kingdom to be no more than different shades of gray. Although the people had no idea that it could be different, still they lived gray and joyless lives. That was just the way things were.
    But after a while the king and queen of that kingdom had a baby girl, and she seemed different from all the other children of the kingdom, who were solemn and docile. She was playful and full of laughter and curiosity. By the time she was a few years old, everyone knew there was something special about her, and she herself began to understand that the people around her, whom she loved, did not see the world with the same eyes of happiness. Gradually, too, she learned that in many cases where she saw differences other people saw sameness. Two kinds of flowers that they saw as the same she saw as different. The same was true of birds and butter and books and bedspreads. In fact, she was the only person in the whole kingdom with color vision.
    At first she felt that she must be in the wrong and all the others right. She was a good child and had grasped early on the responsibility her parents and teachers felt to explain the world and bring her up to be a queen, so she tried to behave herself more sedately, but still she sometimes couldn’t resist crying out with delight. She dressed with a shudder in the clothes laid out for her by her nurse, and tried to be polite about it. It took many years before it occurred to her that she might know more than others, and then that she might be able to make her vision of the world available to them. What would it be like if all these dour people also saw the world as brilliant and sparkling? The grown-ups, busy about her education, never even thought of learning from her, although of course the servants had to listen politely since she was a princess. Even younger children shook their heads in bewilderment when she talked about what she saw, and often she floundered for lack of words.
    One day she stopped asking who might be able to imagine that she knew better and simply asked herself who loved her best. She went and sat in the queen’s lap and said, “Look into my eyes and tell me what you see.” “Why, you have beautiful gray eyes,” said the queen, “as pale gray as egg yolks or lettuce leaves.” “No,” she said, “look more deeply.” They sat for long minutes, and finally the queen said, “I see something I have never seen before. And what I see is different from egg yolks or lettuce leaves.” So the princess said, “What you see is called blue. If you look now at an egg yolk, you will see that it is yellow, and the lettuce leaves are green.” (The six-year-old making up this story is female, blue-eyed, and striding back and forth dictating authoritatively to her mother at the typewriter, but the words of this version are those of an adult who remembers only the plot, not the language.)
    The princess took her mother by the hand and, leading her around the palace and the palace gardens, taught her to see color. Then they went to the king and taught him to see color, and bit by bit everyone in that kingdom learned to see color. Indoors and out, they all started laughing aloud at how much more variety they could see in the world than they had ever imagined.
    The premise of the story breaks down at the end, for as a child I never quite penetrated the princess’s dilemma. Somehow the word blue and the concept of color are ready to hand as soon as the loving magic transforms the mother’s vision, but children have no words for their private knowledge. Perhaps I should have imagined the process of inventing names for the new experience, words for colors that were really names of objects, like orange , or a scholarly debate about the nature of the new experience, something like the transition that took place, within a few years of the vivid experience of Jesus’ friends, to the invention of trinitarian theology.