Light Prism Quotes

May Light always surround you; Hope kindle and rebound you. May your Hurts turn to Healing; Your Heart embrace Feeling. May Wounds become Wisdom; Every Kindness a Prism. May Laughter infect you; Your Passion resurrect you. May Goodness inspire your Deepest Desires. Through all that you Reach For, May your arms Never Tire.

When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor. What we call "white" is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space. The prism sets them free. Love is the white light of emotion.

The Symbol of all Art is the Prism. The goal is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories it contains.

Light cannot be chained.

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act like a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with it’s path high above, and it’s two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of a gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The isolation spins its mysterious cocoon, focusing the mind on one place, one time, one rhythm - the turning of the light. The island knows no other human voices, no other footprints. On the Offshore Lights you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no one will say you're wrong: not the seagulls, not the prisms, not the wind.

What we believe about God is the most important truth we believe, and it's the one truth that does the most to shape us. God is the Sun too bright for us to see. Jesus is the Prism who makes the colors beautiful and comprehensible.

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water–-peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing–-the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.

The sun was shining with the kind of brilliant, silvery light you sometimes find in the middle of a truly beautiful day; an almost imperceptible iridescent mist hovered in the air and all the fresh colours of June were intensified, looked richer and softer, as if reflected through a prism.

All paths are seen, through the prism of fate

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper. — Ray Bradbury

I SEE thee better in the dark, I do not need a light. The love of thee a prism be Excelling violet. I see thee better for the years That hunch themselves between, The miner’s lamp sufficient be To nullify the mine. And in the grave I see thee best— Its little panels be A-glow, all ruddy with the light I held so high for thee! What need of day to those whose dark Hath so surpassing sun, It seem it be continually At the meridian?

And it all came to pass, all that she had hoped, but it did not fill her with rapture nor carry her away with the power or the fervor she had expected. She had imagined it all different, and had imagined herself different, too. In dreams and poems everything had been, as it were, beyond the sea; the haze of distance had mysteriously veiled all the restless mass of details and had thrown out the large lines in bold relief, while the silence of distance had lent its spirit of enchantment. It had been easy then to feel the beauty; but now that she was in the midst of it all, when every little feature stood out and spoke boldly with the manifold voices of reality, and beauty was shattered as light in a prism, she could not gather the rays together again, could not put the picture back beyond the sea. Despondently she was obliged to admit to herself that she felt poor, surrounded by riches that she could not make her own.

It was dusk and the light had an ultra-violet quality to it, a final burst of pigmentation as night and day rushed at each other in a clash of colour prisms before darkness finnaly, inevitably won out.

The Symbol of all Art is the Prism. The goal is unrealism. The method is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories which it contains. e.e. cummings

Just as a prism refracts light differently when you change its angle, each experience of love illuminates love in new ways, drawing from an infinite palette of patterns and hues.

They pointed at each other, with starlight burning in their limbs like daggers and icicles and fireflies, and then fell to judging their limbs again, each finding himself intact, hot, excited, stunned, awed, and the other, ah yes, that other over there, unreal, a ghostly prism flashing the accumulated light of distant worlds…. … Now Tomas laughed. “You’re blind!” “I see very well. You are the one who does not see.

To deal with the chaos of life, I escape into the prism of glass, dancing to the visual music in my mind. My photographs express my interior movement from darkness into light and back.

Refraction, he called it. The way light is broken up into component colors when it passes through a prism. I felt like a refraction of a person. So many different shades that layer to create the illusion of a solid thing.

From Michel Foucault these thinkers absorbed their idea of society not as an infinitely complex system of trust and traditions that have evolved over time, but always in the unforgiving light cast when everything is viewed solely through the prism of ‘power’. Viewing all human interactions in this light distorts, rather than clarifies, presenting a dishonest interpretation of our lives. Of course power exists as a force in the world, but so do charity, forgiveness and love. If you were to ask most people what matters in their lives very few would say ‘power’. Not because they haven’t absorbed their Foucault, but because it is perverse to see everything in life through such a monomaniacal lens.

How we hate to admit that we would like nothing better than to be the slave! Slave and master at the same time! For even in love the slave is always the master in disguise. The man who must conquer the woman, subjugate her, bend her to his will, form her according to his desires—is he not the slave of his slave? How easy it is, in this relationship, for the woman to upset the balance of power! The mere threat of self-dependence, on the woman’s part, and the gallant despot is seized with vertigo. But if they are able to throw themselves at one another recklessly, concealing nothing, surrendering all, if they admit to one another their interdependence, do they not enjoy a great and unsuspected freedom? The man who admits to himself that he is a coward has made a step towards conquering his fear; but the man who frankly admits it to every one, who asks that you recognize it in him and make allowance for it in dealing with him, is on the way to becoming a hero. Such a man is often surprised, when the crucial test comes, to find that he knows no fear. Having lost the fear of regarding himself as a coward he is one no longer: only the demonstration is needed to prove the metamorphosis. It is the same in love. The man who admits not only to himself but to his fellowmen, and even to the woman he adores, that he can be twisted around a woman’s finger, that he is helpless where the other sex is concerned, usually discovers that he is the more powerful of the two. Nothing breaks a woman down more quickly than complete surrender. A woman is prepared to resist, to be laid siege to: she has been trained to behave that way. When she meets no resistance she falls headlong into the trap. To be able to give oneself wholly and completely is the greatest luxury that life affords. Real love only begins at this point of dissolution. The personal life is altogether based on dependence, mutual dependence. Society is the aggregate of persons all interdependent. There is another richer life beyond the pale of society, beyond the personal, but there is no knowing it, no attainment possible, without firs traveling the heights and depths of the personal jungle. To become the great lover, the magnetiser and catalyzer, the blinding focus and inspiration of the world, one has to first experience the profound wisdom of being an utter fool. The man whose greatness of heart leads him to folly and ruin is to a woman irresistible. To the woman who loves, that is to say. As to those who ask merely to be loved, who seek only their own reflection in the mirror, no love however great, will ever satisfy them. In a world so hungry for love it is no wonder that men and women are blinded by the glamour and glitter of their own reflected egos. No wonder that the revolver shot is the last summons. No wonder that the grinding wheels of the subway express, though they cut the body to pieces, fail to precipitate the elixir of love. In the egocentric prism the helpless victim is walled in by the very light which he refracts. The ego dies in its own glass cage…

Love is the prism through which I view the world. I truly believe it binds and propels us. This isn’t a naive denial of the darkness that we know exists in the world; rather it is a refusal to allow the devastation, the horror, or the heartache to consume us. It is affirming the knowledge that there is light. Love is that light. Romance sweetens the casual bitterness we can encounter; it heightens the mundane and makes the terrestrial supernatural.

“Shut up!” I say, laughing hysterically. Alice transforms back to an inanimate jade piece as I toss her. My aim is off and she plops into Morpheus’s tea, splattering him and the chessboard. With a graceful sweep of his hand, he retracts his magic. Tea drizzles down his face as his inky eyes turn up to mine, alight with something both dangerous and daring, shifting moods faster than I can blink. “Careful, plum.” It’s his deep cockney accent now. He wipes his face with a napkin. “Don’t start something you have no intention of finishing.” “Oh, I’ll finish it,” I say—spurred by the dark confidence fluttering at the edge of my psyche. The side of me that knows I’m his match in every way. “And you know I’ll win.” I rise from my chair to scope out the room for weapons, vaguely aware of the prisms of glittery light reflected off my skin onto the surroundings. “I know I’ll let you win,” Morpheus says, standing up. “I won’t even put up a fight.” His white-toothed smile spans to something forebodingly provocative, as though mimicking the spread of his wings. “Well, perhaps a small one, just for sport.”

The first slow, scalding tears began to come. “Oh Johnny,” she said. “Everything was supposed to be different, wasn’t it? It wasn’t supposed to end like this.” She lowered her head, her throat working painfully - and to no effect. The sobs came anyway, and the bright sunlight broke into prisms of light. The wind, which had seemed so warm and Indian summery, now seemed as chill as February on her wet cheeks.

Color is not a trivial subject but one that has compelled, for hundreds of years, a passionate curiosity in the greatest artists, philosophers, and natural scientists. The young Spinoza wrote his first treatise on the rainbow; the young Newton’s most joyous discovery was the composition of white light; Goethe’s great color work, like Newton’s, started with a prism; Schopenhauer, Young, Helmholtz, and Maxwell, in the last century, were all tantalized by the problem of color; and Wittgenstein’s last work was his Remarks on Colour. And yet most of us, most of the time, overlook its great mystery.

She understood, I think, that most of what people said was meaningless. That people spoke to fill the silence or pass the time; that, despite our mastery of words and our ability to put them together in infinitely varied ways, most of us struggled to say what we really meant. Maude filtered conversation like a prism filters light. She broke it down so that each phrase could be understood as an articulation of something singular.

Remember the many compartments of the heart, the seed of what is possible. So much of who we are is defined by the places we hold for each other. For it is not our ingenuity that sets us apart, but our capacity for love, the possibility our way will be lit by grace. Our hearts prisms, chiseling out the colors of pure light.

I will take you down my own avenue of remembrance, which winds among the hazards and shadows of my single year as a plebe. I cannot come to this story in full voice. I want to speak for the boys who were violated by this school, the ones who left ashamed and broken and dishonored, who departed from the Institute with wounds and bitter grievances. I want also to speak for the triumphant boys who took everything the system could throw at them, endured every torment and excess, and survived the ordeal of the freshman year with a feeling of transformation and achievement that they never had felt before and would never know again with such clarity and elation. I will speak from my memory- my memory- a memory that is all refracting light slanting through prisms and dreams, a shifting, troubled riot of electrons charged with pain and wonder. My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essentional fire that is poetry itself. But i will try to isolate that one lonely singer who gathered the fragments of my plebe year and set the screams to music. For many years, I have refused to listen as his obsessive voice narrated the malignant litany of crimes against my boyhood. We isolate those poets who cause us the greatest pain; we silence them in any way we can. I have never allowed this furious dissident the courtesy of my full attention. His poems are songs for the dead to me. Something dies in me every time I hear his low, courageous voice calling to me from the solitude of his exile. He has always known that someday I would have to listen to his story, that I would have to deal with the truth or falsity of his witness. He has always known that someday I must take full responsibility for his creation and that, in finally listening to him, I would be sounding the darkest fathoms of myself. I will write his stories now as he shouts them to me. I will listen to him and listen to myself. I will get it all down. Yet the laws of recall are subject to distortion and alienation. Memory is a trick, and I have lied so often to myself about my own role and the role of others that I am not sure I can recognize the truth about those days. But I have come to believe in the unconscious integrity of lies. I want to record even them. Somewhere in the immensity of the lie the truth gleams like the pure, light-glazed bones of an extinct angel. Hidden in the enormous falsity of my story is the truth for all of us who began at the Institute in 1963, and for all who survived to become her sons. I write my own truth, in my own time, in my own way, and take full responsibility for its mistakes and slanders. Even the lies are part of my truth. I return to the city of memory, to the city of exiled poets. I approach the one whose back is turned to me. He is frail and timorous and angry. His head is shaved and he fears the judgment of regiments. He will always be a victim, always a plebe. I tap him on the shoulder. "Begin," I command. "It was the beginning of 1963," he begins, and I know he will not stop until the story has ended.

I remembered… …how acrid heartbreak tastes. I remembered the walk to the edge of the reincarnation cycle--the chill of marble, my plumed breath, betrayal prizing apart my heart. I remembered fury enthralling me body and bone. I remembered light lapping over my eyes and my soul unraveling, fracturing into prisms of amethyst, lapis, topaz. I remembered a needling twinge of regret and the secret, terrible knowledge that somewhere in Naraka my abandonment would leave behind a chasm of obsidian threads--a chronic rift.

His face burst into a prism of colors and light as her eyes welled with tears and when they fell down her cheeks it felt like fire.

In this faded world, Lyric was light through a prism. All that invisible joy and curiosity met a dash of sunshine, and then she was there, in all her color.

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper. Make your own individual spectroscopic reading.

Between them, Kirchhoff and Bunsen developed the spectroscope, which uses a prism to refract light. As Newton had

It is simply the light our prism emits naturally at this moment in time.

In the egocentric prism the helpless victim is walled in by the very light which he refracts. The ego dies in its own glass cage...

I could compare my music to white light which contains all colors. Only a prism can divide the colors and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.

I don’t understand what?” she asked. Damn it. “You’re light to me.” It slipped out. He couldn’t believe he’d said it out loud. His eyes went wide even before hers did.

We fly above the spectral shield that shall never be quite finished, but it's all right. We are our own prism of light now.

White men have created 95% of the cinematic images we’ve ever seen in American main stream films, have made all the micro-decisions related to the shots, the framing, the lighting, the sound design of movie images that we have ever seen. So powerful is the impact of film and so ubiquitous white men’s perspective in shaping it that their worldview has been normalized to the point of being considered the one true, accurate, and all-inclusive reflection of reality. It is not. It is one narrow prism through which we are all being forced to look.

Each crystal refracted the galaxy of city lights like a thousand prisms. The city of shattered light. The place Kaya had wanted to start her life over. Despite the rumors, Asa couldn't deny it was beautiful.

A person who has had the misfortune to fall victim to the spell of a philosophical system (and the spells of sorcerers are mere trifles in comparison to the disastrous effect of the spell of a philosophical system!) can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events, as they are; he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed. Thus, a Marxist of today is incapable of seeing anything else in the history of mankind other than the “class struggle”. What I am saying concerning mysticism, gnosis, magic and philosophy would be considered by him only as a ruse on the part of the bourgeois class, with the aim of “screening with a mystical and idealistic haze” the reality of the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie…although I have not inherited anything from my parents and I have not experienced a single day without having to earn my living by means of work recognised as “legitimate” by Marxists! Another contemporary example of possession by a system is Freudianism. A man possessed by this system will see in everything that I have written only the expression of “suppressed libido”, which seeks and finds release in this manner. It would therefore be the lack of sexual fulfillment which has driven me to occupy myself with the Tarot and to write about it! Is there any need for further examples? Is it still necessary to cite the Hegelians with their distortion of the history of humanity, the Scholastic “realists” of the Middle Ages with the Inquisition, the rationalists of the eighteenth century who were blinded by the light of their own autonomous reasoning? Yes, autonomous philosophical systems separated from the living body of tradition are parasitic structures, which seize the thought, feeling and finally the will of human beings. In fact, they play a role comparable to the psycho-pathological complexes of neurosis or other psychic maladies of obsession. Their physical analogy is cancer.

The laws of nature are sublime, but there is a moral sublimity before which the highest intelligences must kneel and adore. The laws by which the winds blow, and the tides of the ocean, like a vast clepsydra, measure, with inimitable exactness, the hours of ever-flowing time; the laws by which the planets roll, and the sun vivifies and paints; the laws which preside over the subtle combinations of chemistry, and the amazing velocities of electricity; the laws of germination and production in the vegetable and animal worlds, — all these, radiant with eternal beauty as they are, and exalted above all the objects of sense, still wane and pale before the Moral Glories that apparel the universe in their celestial light. The heart can put on charms which no beauty of known things, nor imagination of the unknown, can aspire to emulate. Virtue shines in native colors, purer and brighter than pearl, or diamond, or prism, can reflect. Arabian gardens in their bloom can exhale no such sweetness as charity diffuses. Beneficence is godlike, and he who does most good to his fellow-man is the Master of Masters, and has learned the Art of Arts. Enrich and embellish the universe as you will, it is only a fit temple for the heart that loves truth with a supreme love. Inanimate vastness excites wonder; knowledge kindles admiration, but love enraptures the soul. Scientific truth is marvellous, but moral truth is divine; and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light, has found the lost paradise. For him, a new heaven and a new earth have already been created. His home is the sanctuary of God, the Holy of Holies.

In time the glowing, cratered moon began its seeming rise from the sea, casting a prism of light across the slowly darkening water, splitting itself into a thousand different parts, each more beautiful than the last. At exactly the same moment, the sun was meeting the horizon in the opposite direction, turning the sky red and orange and yellow, as if heaven above had suddenly opened its gates and let all its beauty escape its holy confines. The ocean turned golden silver as the shifting colors reflected off it, waters rippling and sparkling with the changing light, the vision glorious, almost like the beginning of time. The sun continued to lower itself, casting its glow as far as the eye could see, before finally, slowly, vanishing beneath the waves. The moon continued its slow drift upward, shimmering as it turned a thousand different shades of yellow, each paler than the last, before finally becoming the color of the stars.

From around the corner's edge a grotesque light was trickling out, the first intimations of an ominous sunrise over a dark horizon. I dimly recognized this colored light, though not from my waking memory. It grew more intense, now pouring out in weird streams from beyond the solid margin of the building. And the more intense it grew, the more clearly I could hear the screaming voice that had called out to me in a dream. I shouted his name, but the swelling colored brightness was a field of fear which kept me from making any move toward it. It was no amalgam of colors comparable to anything in mortal experience. It was as if all natural colors had been mutated into a painfully lush iridescence by some prism fantastically corrupted in its form; it was a rainbow staining the sky after a poison deluge; it was an aurora painting the darkness with a blaze of insanity, a blaze that did not burn vigorously but shimmered with an insect-jeweled frailness. And, in actuality, it was nothing like these color-filled effusions, which are merely a feeble means of partially fixing a reality uncommunicable to those not initiated to it, a necessary resorting to the makeshift gibberish of the mystic isolated by his experience and left without a language to describe it. ("The Dreaming In Nortown")

Dixon, our, um, Lives? are in Danger?” “Hardly enough to interrupt a perfectly good—” Here he is silenc’d by an immense Thunder-Bolt from directly overhead, as their frail Prism is bleach’d in unholy Light. “— Saturday Night for, is it I ask you . . . ?” his Head emerging at last from beneath a Blanket, “Mason? Say, Mason,— are thee . . . ?” Mason, now outside, pushes aside the Tent-flap with his head, but does not enter. “Dixon. I will now seek Shelter beneath that Waggon out there, d’ye see it? If you wish to join me, there’s room.” “Bit too much Iron there for me, thanks all the same.

A woman enters a department store from the street, looking no doubt very mortal, her hair windblown, her own face visible. To reach the cosmetics counter, she must pass a deliberately disorienting prism of mirrors, lights, and scents that combine to submit her to the “sensory overload” used by hypnotists and cults to encourage suggestibility. On either side of her are ranks of angels—seraphim and cherubim—the “perfect” faces of the models on display. Behind them, across a liminal counter in which is arranged the magic that will permit her to cross over, lit from below, stands the guardian angel.

I like the disaster of the night sky, stars spilling this way and that as if they were upturned from a glass. I like the way good madness feels. I like the way laughter always spills. That's the word for it. It never just comes, it spills. I like the word 'again'. Again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. I like the quiet sound a coffee cup makes when it's set down on a wooden table. So hushed. So inviting. Like morning light yawning through the window and stretching out onto the kitchen floor. I like the way girls' lips look like they're stained with berries. I like the way morning light breaks like a prism through the empty wine bottles on our dusty apartment floor. Glasses empty except for the midnight hour. I like the way blueberries stain my fingers during the summer. I like the way light hits your eyes and turns it into a color that doesn't exist anywhere else other than in this moment. I want it all. I want the breeze to call my name as it rushes down my street, looking for me. I want to feel grass underneath my bare feet and I want to feel the sun kiss freckles onto my cheeks. I want to hear you yell hello as you make your way towards me, not goodbye as you have to go. That's just a little bit about me.

Julia doesn’t like James Gillen, but that’s not the point, not out here. In the Court, back in the Court any eye you catch could be Love peal-of-bells-firework-burst Love, all among the sweet spray of the music and the rainbowing prisms of the lights, this could be the one huge mystery every book and film and song is sizzling with; could be your one-and-only shoulder to lean your head on, fingers woven with yours and lips gentle on your hair and Our Song pouring out of every speaker. This could be the one heart that will open to your touch and offer up its never-spoken secrets, that has spaces perfectly shaped to hold all of yours.

He felt as though he were a prism, gathering up God’s love like white light and scattering it in all directions, and the sensation was nearly physical, as he caught and repeated as much of what everyone said to him as he could, soaking up the music and cadence, the pattern of phonemes on the fly, gravely accepting and repeating Askama’s quiet corrections when he got things wrong.

True Love in this differs from gold and clay, That to divide is not to take away. Love is like understanding, that grows bright Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light, Imagination! which from earth and sky, And from the depths of human fantasy, As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills The Universe with glorious beams, and kills Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow Of its reverberated lightning. Epipsychidion

The edge of something mostly buried in the sand caught the sun, and I bent to pick up a pearl nautilus. Simple and uncomplicatedly lovely, a pearl nautilus whispered its beauty. It wasn’t showy like a cameo or frog shell, with their twists and nubs and variations. It never competed for attention, but it held and reflected a prism of light that perfectly complimented its surroundings. Someone else may have overlooked a pearl nautilus, but I preferred it. - Nicole Abbot (Whisper of Light)

A moment out of time .lights whirling and spinning in a cotton candy universe .down a bottomless funnel roundly sectioned like a goat' s horn .a cornucopia that rose up cuculiform smooth and slick as a worm belly .endless nights that pealed ebony funeral bells .out of fog .out of weightlessness .suddenly total cellular knowledge .memory running backward .gibbering spastic blindness .a soundless owl of frenzy trapped in a cave of prisms .sand endlessly draining down .billows of forever .edges of the world as they splintered .foam rising drowning from inside .the smell of rust .rough green corners that burn .memory the gibbering spastic blind memory .seven rushing vacuums of nothing .yellow .pinpoints cast in amber straining and elongating running like live wax .chill fevers .overhead the odour of stop .this is the stopover before hell or heaven .this is limbo .trapped and doomed alone in a mist-eaten nowhere .a soundless screaming a soundless whirring a soundless spinning spinning spinning .spinning .spinning .spinning .spinning

Of course, I should have known the kids would pop out in the atmosphere of Roberta's office. That's what they do when Alice is under stress. They see a gap in the space-time continuum and slip through like beams of light through a prism changing form and direction. We had got into the habit in recent weeks of starting our sessions with that marble and stick game called Ker-Plunk, which Billy liked. There were times when I caught myself entering the office with a teddy that Samuel had taken from the toy cupboard outside. Roberta told me that on a couple of occasions I had shot her with the plastic gun and once, as Samuel, I had climbed down from the high-tech chairs, rolled into a ball in the corner and just cried. 'This is embarrassing,' I admitted. 'It doesn't have to be.' 'It doesn't have to be, but it is,' I said. The thing is. I never knew when the 'others' were going to come out. I only discovered that one had been out when I lost time or found myself in the midst of some wacky occupation — finger-painting like a five-year-old, cutting my arms, wandering from shops with unwanted, unpaid-for clutter. In her reserved way, Roberta described the kids as an elaborate defence mechanism. As a child, I had blocked out my memories in order not to dwell on anything painful or uncertain. Even as a teenager, I had allowed the bizarre and terrifying to seem normal because the alternative would have upset the fiction of my loving little nuclear family. I made a mental note to look up defence mechanisms, something we had touched on in psychology.

With a sharp inhale, Bryce rallied her magic. On the exhale, she sent a stream of her starlight into the prism, her power faster than ever before. Starlight hit the prism, passed through it, and— “Huh.” It wasn’t a rainbow that emerged from the other side. Not even close. It took her a moment to process what she was seeing: a gradient beam of starlight. Where the rainbow would have been full of color, this one began in shimmering white light and descended into shadow. An anti-rainbow, as it were. Light falling into darkness, droplets of starlight raining from the highest beam into the shadowy band at the bottom, devoured by the darkness below.

He must turn to something solid, because if he didn't, who knew where his mind or his soul could blow away to, like a balloon without ballast.... He raised the binoculars and scoured the island for more signs of life: he needed to see the goats, the sheep; to count them. Stick to the solid. To the brass fittings which had to be polished, the glass which had to be cleaned—first the outer glass of the lantern, then the prisms themselves. Getting the oil in, keeping the cogs moving smoothly, topping up the mercury to let the light glide. He gripped each thought like the rung of a ladder by which to haul himself back to the knowable; back to this life.

It was quiet as I settled in to read alongside Sherlock Holmes and David Copperfield. But for the crackle of the fire and the ever-present whistle of the wind outside, it was as quiet as it had been in the city, after everything changed. And for a moment, the space between heartbeats, I felt I could glimpse the world Charley saw. A world of light and shadow, of fact, truth and story, each blurring into one another as sleep and wakefulness blur in the early morning. The moments of our lives unfolding as pages in a book. And everything connected, everyone joined, by an ever-shifting web of language, by words that caught us as prisms caught light and reflected back at ourselves.

Only humour - the splendid invention of those highly talented but unfortunte individuals who are frustrated in the pursuit of the highest ideals, figures bordering on the tragic - only humour (possibly the most original and brilliant of humankind's achievements) can accomplish the otherwise impossible feat of uniting all spheres of human life by bathing them in the iridescent light of its prisms. To live in the world as though it were not the world, to respect the law but to remain above it, to have possessions 'as if not possessing', to renounce things as though it were no renunciation: - all things asked of us in such well-loved and frequently expressed words of wisdom can only be put into practice through humour.

They are aficionados at this point, and are hoping to see the green flash at sunset. Apparently Earth’s gravity, or atmosphere, they argue about which, bends the light from the sun in such a way that just before it dips under the horizon and disappears, the Earth is actually physically between the observer and the sun, but the sunlight is curving around the globe because of the atmosphere, or gravity, and as blue light curves more than red light, this curve around the Earth splits the light as if passing it through a prism, and this means that the last visible point of sunlight turns, not blue, which would be too much of a bend and too much like the sky’s color, but green, said to be a pure brilliant emerald green. “This we have to see!” Aram declares. Badim agrees. “Strange to be as old as we are, and see it for the first time.” He turns and calls to Freya. “Girl, come see this green flash that may occur!” “You’re not that old,” she says to him. “You’re like the hundredth-oldest person in the ship.” “Well, even that would be old, but in fact I think I’m down to about fifteenth now. But let’s stay focused on the sunset. I’m told when the sun is three-quarters gone, you can look at it without damaging your eyes. Not for long, mind you, but long enough to see the green flash when it comes.

Only then did he hear the small gasp—a soundless cry—and feel his mother’s cold fingers tightening on his arm. He turned toward her. Saw the red stain spreading across the front of her dress where the sword had driven in. Through him. Through her. There, just above her heart. The too-small hole of a too-great wound. His mother’s eyes met his. “Rhy,” she said, a small, disconcerted crease between her brows, the same face she’d made a hundred times whenever he and Kell got into trouble, whenever he shouted or bit his nails or did anything that wasn’t princely. The furrow deepened, even as her eyes went glassy, one hand drifting toward the wound, and then she was falling. He caught her, stumbled as the sudden weight tore against his open, ruined chest. “No, no, no,” he said, sinking with her to the prismed floor. No, it wasn’t fair. For once, he’d been fast enough. For once, he’d been strong enough. For once— “Rhy,” she said again, so gently—too gently. “No.” Her bloody hands reached for his face, tried to cup his cheek, and missed, streaking red along his jaw. “Rhy …” His tears spilled over her fingers. “No.” Her hand fell away, and her body slumped against him, still, and in that sudden stillness, Rhy’s world narrowed to the spreading stain, the lingering furrow between his mother’s eyes. Only then did the pain come, folding over him with such sudden force, such horrible weight, that he clutched his chest and began to scream.

With the introduction of radio, we now had a superfast. convenient, and wireless way of communicating over long distances. Historically, the lack of a fast and reliable communication system was one of the great obstacles to the march of history. (In 490 BCE, after the Battle of Marathon between the Greeks and the Persians, a poor runner was ordered to spread the news of the Greek victory as fast as he could. Bravely, he ran 26 miles to Athens after previously running 147 miles to Sparta, and then, according to legend, dropped dead of sheer exhaustion. His heroism, in the age before telecommunication, is now celebrated in the modern marathon.) Today, we take for granted that we can send messages and information effortlessly across the globe, utilizing the fact that energy can be transformed in many ways. For example, when speaking on a cell phone, the energy of the sound of your voice converts to mechanical energy in a vibrating diaphragm. The diaphragm is attached to a magnet that relies on the interchangeability of electricity and magnetism to create an electrical impulse, the kind that can be transported and read by a computer. This electrical impulse is then translated into electromagnetic waves that are picked up by a nearby microwave tower. There, the message is amplified and sent across the globe. But Maxwell's equations not only gave us nearly instantaneous communication via radio, cell phone, and fiber-optic cables, they also opened up the entire electromagnetic spectrum, of which visible light and radio were just two members. In the 166os, Newton had shown that white light, when sent through a prism, can be broken up into the colors of the rainbow. In 1800, William Herschel had asked himself a simple question: What lies beyond the colors of the rainbow, which extend from red to violet? He took a prism, which created a rainbow in his lab, and placed a thermometer below the color red, where there was no color at all. Much to his surprise, the temperature of this blank area began to rise. In other words, there was a "color" below red that was invisible to the naked eye but contained energy. It was called infrared light. Today, we realize that there is an entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, most of which is invisible, and each has a distinct wavelength. The wavelength of radio and TV, for example, is longer than that of visible light. The wavelength of the colors of the rainbow, in turn, is longer than that of ultraviolet and X-rays. This also meant that the reality we see all around us is only the tiniest sliver of the complete EM spectrum, the smallest approximation of a much larger universe

The masses of dense foliage all round became prison walls, impassable circular green ice-walls, surging towards her; just before they closed in, I caught the terrified glint of her eyes. On a winter day she was in the studio, posing for him in the nude, her arms raised in a graceful position. To hold it for any length of time must have been a strain, I wondered how she managed to keep so still; until I saw the cords attached to her wrists and ankles. Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all round. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour. Frozen by the deathly cold emanating from the ice, dazzled by the blaze of crystalline ice-light, she felt herself becoming part of the polar vision, her structure becoming one with the structure of ice and snow. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world. Fear was the climate she lived in; if she had ever known kindness it would have been different. The trees seemed to obstruct her with deliberate malice. All her life she had thought of herself as a foredoomed victim, and now the forest had become the malign force that would destroy her. In desperation she tried to run, but a hidden root tripped her, she almost fell. Branches caught in her hair, tugged her back, lashed out viciously when they were disentangled. The silver hairs torn from her head glittered among black needles; they were the clues her pursuers would follow, leading them to their victim. She escaped from the forest at length only to see the fjord waiting for her. An evil effluence rose from the water, something primitive, savage, demanding victims, hungry for a human victim. It had been night overhead all along, but below it was still daylight. There were no clouds. I saw islands scattered over the sea, a normal aerial view. Then something extraordinary, out of this world: a wall of rainbow ice jutting up from the sea, cutting right across, pushing a ridge of water ahead of it as it moved, as if the flat pale surface of sea was a carpet being rolled up. It was a sinister, fascinating sight, which did not seem intended for human eyes. I stared down at it, seeing other things at the same time. The ice world spreading over our world. Mountainous walls of ice surrounding the girl. Her moonwhite skin, her hair sparkling with diamond prisms under the moon. The moon’s dead eye watching the death of our world.

When I try to distil my thoughts into cogent, straightforward prose, I see Aubrey in my mind’s eye, and everything seems to go slightly out of focus. It’s not an entirely unpleasant sensation. I would liken it to reaching for a pair of reading glasses and picking up a prism instead. You wouldn’t be able to read a newspaper through it, but you’d be treated to a beautiful array of light and color, all the same…

Pure love, can be observed similar to white light flowing through a prism bringing forth its seven primary colours, like a rainbow. To deeply know and be love, like the rainbow colours, you have to experience all of its parts to become all of it. - Denis J

The prism of time refracts the light into thousands of rays. I stand with my hands open and embrace them. p. 94

The Haunt The haunt walks counting the bodies held in cubicle chambers; each night the rattle of his keys reminds one of the living dead who are keyless. The Turnkey continues his nightly watch to ensure none of the living dead commits suicide. To be truly dead is forbidden, unless the State sanctions the kill. This ritual first began as a means of penitence, and Auburn was the first N.Y.S. penitentiary and silence was the means to repentance, silence and reading the bible. Back then, the penitent memorized the portions of the bible: when Cain killed Abel, Joshua’s war on Jericho, and all about Ruth, Mary, and Esther — with little thought of God. Over 100 years, the haunt walks with the sanctimonious sentiments of a sentinel, with self-righteous indignation which the living dead attempt to repel with false braggadocio — but when the lights go out, the sudden screams, and all- night talk to prohibit nightmares — awaiting the dawn — permit the haunt to smile with arrogant knowing. The torture of the night is the haunt’s pleasure, making the rounds smelling the decay of dreams deferred, the putrid stench of justice, like the full bowels of slave ships. Gun towers stand reminiscent of the hanging trees with its strange fruit that the haunt picks at leisure appraising its ripeness in terms of life sentences. As steel bangs against steel, chains clang with the echoes of gangs dressed in strips of day and night, black and white; the fright prohibits flight as jail cells constrict and severely depict the absence of liberty. The haunt of Auburn, year by year decade by decade, in a century has never escaped the nightly count of tormented souls, himself chained to the ball of the imprisoned — a spirit’s horror of lost freedom.

When a thin stream of white light passes through a prism, the light is separated into the respective colours of the rainbow on the opposite side. The human body has the energetic structure of two white equilateral triangles; one upright and one inverted, on top of each other. These triangular prisms construct the shape of a Star Tetrahedron or a 3D Star of David. If you can visualize a stream of white light shining down into your energetic structures and separating the light into the seven colors of the rainbow, then you can now understand what gives us the respective colors of the seven Primary Chakras. The white light shining down upon us represents Unconditional Love and the colors of the rainbow represent all of our collective emotions, behaviours, wants, needs and spiritual abilities. Our filters are allowing certain colors to shine more predominantly while at the same time dimming others due to inactivity. Our filters are therefore limitations that are giving us an incomplete form of existence. Those who are considered Enlightened have learned to focus on the pure white light behind our energetic structures.

The Imprismed Self Past women in my life become prisms through which I re-filter my self-image as different wavelengths of light. The purer the light, the greater the radiance, the righter the woman.

Beauty lies between you and you and eye and eye Do not compare beauty, For it resides in all, Try if you will, But a slave to the mind you shall be. To compare a dandelion to a lily, And to say the lily is of greater beauty Is a sin we often see. The dandelion is everywhere to be seen, But it is not picked from the ground on a whim. A weed, it was labeled in those grown-up minds, Minds, which have been weeded through time. The same minds which cut lilies from the ground, And stare as they wonder ‘how sad that beauty dwindles down’. They let their thoughts haunt them, And get trapped in the world around them. The truth masked as lies of the eyes. The dandelion and lily, When left to be, Dance in the wind with such beauty, Free. Compare beauty and you'll eclipse your sun's light, And because you only know the stars That come to life when they die, You'll have to wait for the dandelion to fly, Specking light in your darkened mind's eye. Explain beauty and you'll stay for eternity, Trying to capture infinity. Only then will you look into the stilling river, And cry from the open wounds you hide. Bandaging your reflection, you try. Only when it drowns in the murky crinkling water, Do you realize That the stars won't offer the same blinding light, And the darkness has given you sight. Your comparisons’ prism lives only in your eyes, But it travels down your stem, Like a Serpent, Coiling around your breath, With your tongue, Sharper than the air of death, Shedding words you've been fed. Like the grey, Settling deep within your Soul, And the shade, That makes you feel whole. Perhaps you'll try to save the mirrored water, But as you thrash about in infinity, Do not break stems anymore. Instead cut the chains keeping you shackled to the shore. Still, as you roam free, Do not forget to remember, (Infinity said while knocking at eternity’s door) A rigid mind leads to a life lived hollow, But do dip into the mind’s eye knowingly, For the strongest light casts the darkest shadow.

Your olfactory sense can split complex mixtures into their constituent chemicals, just as a prism can split white light into its constituent colors. To do this, it must detect the precise arrangement of atoms within a molecule.

What is the opposite of suffering— The prism, or the prism's light?

The rhythm of the "Blue Danube" waltz rippled and rang and sang in his head, the lights of a thousand chandeliers glinted and prismed, and for a heartbeat Shadow was a child again, and all it took to make him happy was to ride the carousel: he stayed perfectly still, riding his eagle-tiger at the center of everything, and the world revolved around him.

This argument, however, is far from proving that the reality is unknowable, or that it lies hidden behind appearances or presentations. Take, for instance, a reality which appears as a ray of the sun. When it goes through a pane of glass it appears to be colourless, but it exhibits a beautiful spectrum when it passes through a prism. Therefore you assume that a reality appearing as the rays of the sun is neither colourless nor coloured in itself, since these appearances are wholly due to the difference that obtains between the pane of glass and the prism. We contend, however, that the fact does not prove the existence of the reality named the sun's ray beyond or behind the white light, nor its existence beyond or behind the spectrum. It is evident that the reality exists in white light, and that it is known as the white light when it goes through a pane of glass; and that the same reality exists in the spectrum, and is known as the spectrum when it goes through the prism. The reality is known as the white light on the one hand, and as the spectrum on the other. It is not unknowable, but knowable. Suppose

Difficulties are no match for the optimist, who does not fly from them, but welcomes them. He has a mental prism which can separate the insipid white light of existence into bright hues. He has a mental alchemy by which he can produce golden instruction out of the dross of failure. He has a spiritual magic which makes the nectar of joy out of the tears of sorrow. He has a clairvoyant eye that can perceive the existence of hope through the iron walls of despair. Prosperity tends to make one forget the grace of Buddha, but adversity brings forth one's religious conviction.

Life was filled with so many twists and turns, like the sides of a prism, giving off light; what seemed wrong before seemed almost right when viewed from a different angle.

Ninth Floor she ran across the parquet slipped the flokati mat crashed the window no she stood at the window prism looked up at sky bruise night spread her no she tilted dived swanning spinning tip-toed ink air broke fingers first no she climbed the small gap the window gave hung her finger joints clotted the view with frightened breath fell ligament torn and sorry no she wandered to the glass hatch to watch tranquilised lights sputtering leaned too hard fell faster than a bottle of Jack no this is how it was: drunk screaming she crashed the parquet with grief roared the ungiving window frames which gave she spangled spaghetti-like ribbon-voiced street lights crashed on her no. She did nothing.

The reintroduction of fairy tales to my redeemed imagination helped me to see the Maker, his Word, and the abounding human (but sometimes Spirit-commanded) tales as inter-connected. It was like holding the intricate crystal of Scripture up to the light, seeing it lovely and complete, then discovering on the sidewalk a spray of refracted colors. The colors aren't Scripture, nor are they the light behind it. Rather, they're an expression of the truth, born of the light beyond, framed by the prism of revelation, and given expression on solid ground.

So far we have considered the effects of varying the type of illumination, so at this point we can sum up how one specimen can be imaged in four separate ways. In a conventional microscope with bright field illumination, contrast comes from absorbance of light by the sample (Figure 7a). Using dark field illumination, contrast is generated by light scattered from the sample (Figure 7b). In phase contrast, interference between different path lengths produces contrast (Figure 7c), and in polarizing microscopy it is the rotation of polarized light produced by the specimen between polarizer and analyser (Figure 7d). This is ‘converted’ into an image that has colour and a three dimensional appearance by the use of Wollaston prisms in differential interference microscopy. For virtually any specimen, hard or soft, isotropic or anisotropic, organic or inorganic, biological, metallurgical, or manufactured, there will be a variety of imaging modes that will produce complementary information. Some of the types of light microscopy we have looked at above have direct parallels in electron microscopy (Chapter 4).

The Wonder of Life and Light turns on the low basic floor.

(p. 129) When Van Gogh began in September 1889 at the asylum in Saint-Rémy to entertain ideas of returning to the north, he wrote to Theo: "You know that I came the south and threw myself into work for a thousand reasons. To want to see another light, to believe that looking at nature under a brighter sky can give us a more accurate idea of the Japanese way of feeling and drawing. Wanting, finally, to see this stronger sun, because one feels that without knowing it one couldn't understand the paintings of Delacroix from the point of view of execution, technique, and because one feels that the colors of the prism are veiled in mist in the north. All of this remains somewhat true" [801].

Sophie had to force herself to breathe slower to keep her head from getting woozy. “I’m sure I speak for everyone,” Keefe grunted, “when I say: Are we there yet?” “Almost,” Tiergan promised. “Everyone dig deep—and don’t look down.” “Steaming sasquatch poop—that’s a long way to fall!” Keefe announced. Fitz moved closer to Sophie, his new cologne tickling her nose as he whispered, “I almost forgot. I brought you a present.” Her heart skipped at least five beats when he slipped an orange velvet satchel into her palm. He’d been bringing her lots of tiny gifts lately—and she’d been trying hard not to read too much into it. “Ugh, anyone else ready to vomit from the Fitzphie?” Keefe asked. “I am,” Dex said, as Linh asked, “Did Fitzphie become an actual thing?” “I don’t even know what ‘Fitzphie’ is supposed to mean,” Tiergan noted. “Want me to explain it?” Tam offered. “No,” Sophie said, opening the satchel and pulling out a fist-size crystal prism. It was heavy like a paperweight, and when she held it up to the light, rainbow sparkles flashed across her fingers, highlighting words carved across the base, along with the Foxfire seal. Alvar Soren Vacker “That’s called a Radiant,” Fitz explained. “It’s the highest honor any prodigy can receive when they complete the basic levels at Foxfire. Alvar was so disgustingly smug about earning one that he told my mom she should keep it on the mantel in our main sitting room, so it could inspire Biana and me to work harder.” “Ugh, I forgot about that,” Biana grumbled. “I can’t believe Mom did it.” “I know. So I think it’s time to destroy it. And considering where we are, maybe it’d be fun to let it take a really nasty fall.” “Gotta give you credit,” Tam told Fitz. “That’s pretty much a perfect gift.” It was. Though Sophie felt bad taking it. “Shouldn’t you or Biana do the honors?” “Nope. Alvar was there when they took your parents,” Biana argued. “And when you were kidnapped.” “Just throw it extra hard, for us,” Fitz added. Sophie glanced at Dex. “Alvar helped kidnap you, too.” “So boost your throw with the Sucker Punch I made you,” he suggested. They seemed pretty sure, so Sophie gathered whatever mental energy she could muster and channeled it into her arm muscles. A burst of force from the Sucker Punch gave her throw extra oomph as she hurled the Radiant down the center of the curving stairs, where none of the bodyguards would be standing. A satisfying

Before 1800 the word “light,” apart from its use as a verb and an adjective, referred just to visible light. But early that year the English astronomer William Herschel observed some warming that could only have been caused by a form of light invisible to the human eye. Already an accomplished observer, Herschel had discovered the planet Uranus in 1781 and was now exploring the relation between sunlight, color, and heat. He began by placing a prism in the path of a sunbeam. Nothing new there. Sir Isaac Newton had done that back in the 1600s, leading him to name the familiar seven colors of the visible spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. (Yes, the colors do indeed spell Roy G. Biv.) But Herschel was inquisitive enough to wonder what the temperature of each color might be. So he placed thermometers in various regions of the rainbow and showed, as he suspected, that different colors registered different temperatures.† Well-conducted experiments require a “control”—a measurement where you expect no effect at all, and which serves as a kind of idiot-check on what you are measuring. For example, if you wonder what effect beer has on a tulip plant, then also nurture a second tulip plant, identical to the first, but give it water instead. If both plants die—if you killed them both—then you can’t blame the alcohol. That’s the value of a control sample. Herschel knew this, and laid a thermometer outside of the spectrum, adjacent to the red, expecting to read no more than room temperature throughout the experiment. But that’s not what happened. The temperature of his control thermometer rose even higher than in the red. Herschel wrote: [I] conclude, that the full red falls still short of the maximum of heat; which perhaps lies even a little beyond visible refraction. In this case, radiant heat will at least partly, if not chiefly, consist, if I may be permitted the expression, of invisible light; that is to say, of rays coming from the sun, that have such a momentum as to be unfit for vision.

You are a three-part being - body, mind and spirit - and you never, ever are anything less or anything else. As you move from the metaphysical to the physical and back again, you simply disintegrate and reintegrate these aspects of Who You Are. To help you understand how such a thing is possible, think of what you call "white light". This is actually a combination of lights of different wave-lenghts in the electromagnetic spectrum. If you send white light through a dispersive prism, you will see its spectral colors, which are its constituent parts. Now think of physicality as the "prism" of Ultimate Reality. When the soul passes through the prism into physicality, it breaks into its constituent parts: body, mind and spirit. When it passes back through the prism the other way - or as humans put it, when you "pass away" - the soul becomes one element again. That one element is You.

the world presents itself as tantalizing fragments of a lost whole. Caught in the foreground, he can’t see the underlying background. Caught in the “myriads of forms,” as the Hindus say, he can’t find the Oneness that would bring him calm and stability. Living on the finite side of the prism, he can only experience light in its dazzling but fractured rainbow hues.

Newton spent under quarantine at home in rural Lincolnshire, sheltering from the Plague that was ravaging his chosen home cities of London and Cambridge, has come to be thought of today as his annus mirabilis – his ‘year of wonders’. It’s when he formulated what would become calculus and the laws of motion, for example, and it’s when he worked out the nature of light – this is when he performed his famous prism experiment that demonstrated how white light could be split into all the colours of the rainbow, a discovery so monumental that it would later be memorialised on a Pink Floyd album cover.

There is only one, Absolute Self. The Relative self enquires, "Who, am I?" and the inner, Being replies with a smile, "Who, am I not?" What makes this realisation so joyful is the comprehension that the Absolute Self is expressed through the prism of an actualised individual's unique perspective and lived experience. It's a joyful, glorious playground of light and colour, a kaleidoscope of Being.

A golden attitude turns even the most ordinary days into extraordinary tales of triumph. Like a prism transforming light into a spectrum of colors, our attitude can unveil the myriad beauties hidden in everyday life

And lastly, you must always remember to cover your crystal ball with a dark cloth when it’s not in use.” Hermione uncharacteristically snorted again. “I suppose it’s to keep the spirits from gaining a foothold in the land of the living,” she sarcastically added. Professor Trelawney slowly turned her shawl clad frame to the Gryffindor and gave her a stern look. “It’s because the ball is crystal and if the light hits it just right, the prisms will filter it and burn your house down…

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on the page.

His father curled a finger toward him. “I have need of your gift.” “Why?” His Starborn abilities were little more than a sparkle of starlight in his palm. His shadow talents were the more interesting gift. Even the temperature monitors on the high-tech cameras in this city couldn’t detect him when he shadow-walked. His father held up the prism. “Direct a beam of your starlight through this.” Not waiting for an answer, his father again put an eye to the metal viewing contraption atop the prism. It ordinarily took Ruhn a good amount of concentration to summon his starlight, and it usually left him with a headache for hours afterward, but … He was intrigued enough to try. Setting his index finger onto the crystal of the prism, Ruhn closed his eyes and focused upon his breathing. Let the clicking metal of the orrery guide him down, down, down into the black pit within himself, past the churning well of his shadows, to the little hollow beneath them. There, curled upon itself like some hibernating creature, lay the single seed of iridescent light. He gently cupped it with a mental palm, stirring it awake as he carefully brought it upward, as if he were carrying water in his hands. Up through himself, the power shimmering with anticipation, warm and lovely and just about the only part of himself he liked. Ruhn opened his eyes to find the starlight dancing at his fingertip, refracting through the prism. His father adjusted a few dials on the device, jotting down notes with his other hand. The starlight seed became slippery, disintegrating into the air around them. “Just another moment,” the king ordered. Ruhn gritted his teeth, as if it’d somehow keep the starlight from dissolving. Another click of the device, and another jotted note in an ancient, rigid hand. The Old Language of the Fae—his father recorded everything in the half-forgotten language their people had used when they had first come to Midgard through the Northern Rift. The starlight shivered, flared, and faded into nothing. The Autumn King grunted in annoyance, but Ruhn barely heard it over his pounding head. He’d mastered himself enough to pay attention as his father finished his notes. “What are you even doing with that thing?” “Studying how light moves through the world. How it can be shaped.” “Don’t we have scientists over at CCU doing this shit?” “Their interests are not the same as mine.” His father

Goethe refused to view color as a static quantity, to be measured in a spectrometer and pinned down like a butterfly to cardboard. He argued that color is a matter of perception. “With light poise and counterpoise, Nature oscillates within her prescribed limits,” he wrote, “yet thus arise all the varieties and conditions of the phenomena which are presented to us in space and time.” The touchstone of Newton’s theory was his famous experiment with a prism. A prism breaks a beam of white light into a rainbow of colors, spread across the whole visible spectrum, and Newton realized that those pure colors must be the elementary components that add to produce white. Further, with a leap of insight, he proposed that the colors corresponded to frequencies. He imagined that some vibrating bodies—corpuscles was the antique word—must be producing colors in proportion to the speed of the vibrations. Considering how little evidence supported this notion, it was as unjustifiable as it was brilliant. What is red? To a physicist, it is light radiating in waves between 620 to 800 billionths of a meter long. Newton’s optics proved themselves a thousand times over, while Goethe’s treatise on color faded into merciful obscurity.

Goethe had actually performed an extraordinary set of experiments in his investigation of colors. Goethe began as Newton had, with a prism. Newton had held a prism before a light, casting the divided beam onto a white surface. Goethe held the prism to his eye and looked through it. He perceived no color at all, neither a rainbow nor individual hues. Looking at a clear white surface or a clear blue sky through the prism produced the same effect: uniformity. But if a slight spot interrupted the white surface or a cloud appeared in the sky, then he would see a burst of color. It is “the interchange of light and shadow,” Goethe concluded, that causes color. He went on to explore the way people perceive shadows cast by different sources of colored light. He used candles and pencils, mirrors and colored glass, moonlight and sunlight, crystals, liquids, and color wheels in a thorough range of experiments. For example, he lit a candle before a piece of white paper at twilight and held up a pencil. The shadow in the candlelight was a brilliant blue. Why? The white paper alone is perceived as white, either in the declining daylight or in the added light of the warmer candle. How does a shadow divide the white into a region of blue and a region of reddish-yellow? Color is “a degree of darkness,” Goethe argued, “allied to shadow.” Above all, in a more modern language, color comes from boundary conditions and singularities.

From Michel Foucault these thinkers absorbed their idea of society not as an infinitely complex system of trust and traditions that have evolved over time, but always in the unforgiving light cast when everything is viewed solely through the prism of ‘power’. Viewing all human interactions in this light distorts, rather than clarifies, presenting a dishonest interpretation of our lives. Of course power exists as a force in the world, but so do charity, forgiveness and love.

The loop and dive of a seagull in its own private dance. The way the sun caught the tips of white on a furious wave and threw out endless prisms of light.

I glance around, staring at the framed pictures that fill this temporary home. Every place I have been, memorialized forever on glossy paper. Through the prism of a camera lens, I have seen the beauty of the world. Monuments created by humans stand in competition with art sculpted by nature. Each image serves as a reminder that a light shines through so many people, and yet, no matter how far I run, I cannot seem to escape my shadow.

a prism in a beam of bright sunlight, and the light will split into its colors, or wavelengths: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and finally violet, the shortest wavelength of the visible spectrum. The rainbow is revealed because the prism bends the light of each wavelength a little more

We must pass through the prism of our own destruction to see a new and better light.

The “quantum theory” came into being as an effort to cure the wave theory of light of these defects. It has been completely successful. It has shewn that Newton was not wholly wrong in regarding light as corpuscular, for it has proved that a beam of light may be regarded as broken up into discrete units, called “light-quanta” or “photons,” with almost the definiteness with which a shower of rain may be broken up into drops of water, a shower of bullets into separate pieces of lead, or a gas into separate molecules. At the same time, the light does not lose its undulatory character. Each little parcel of light has a definite quantity, of the nature of a length, associated with it. We call this its “wave-length,” because when the light in question is passed through a prism, it behaves exactly as waves of this particular length of wave would do. Light of long wavelength is made up of small parcels, and vice-versa, the amount of energy in each parcel being inversely proportional to this wave-length, so that we can always calculate the energy of a photon from its wave-length, and vice-versa.

As she stares into the cool prisms of blues and whites, and the clear parts which fracture the light, she notices something deeper. It is a light from within the ice. It's beautiful; so she stays.

There was little sense in attempting anything like subtlety, so I donned my bottle green spectacles, focused my supernatural senses, and began a slow survey of the entire place. The energy known as magic exists on a broad spectrum, much like light. Just as light can be split into its colors by a sufficient prism, magical energy can be more clearly distinguished by using the proper tools. The spectacles gave me a chance to view the energy swirling around the crowded room. It was strongly influenced by the presence of human emotion, and various colors had gathered around individuals according to their current humor.

Try. It’s more efficient. You can’t go through life doing this the wrong way. The wasted minutes could add up to days. Weeks.” An unexpected giggle escaped her, as if she were a young girl being teased. “I don’t use a pencil that often.” Devon reached around her, his hands engulfing hers. And she let him. She stood still, her body wary but compliant. A fragile trust had been established during their earlier encounter--no matter what else she might fear from him, she seemed to understand that he wouldn’t hurt her. The pleasure of holding her washed through him in repeated waves. She was petite and fine-boned, the delicious fragrance of roses rising to his nostrils. He’d noticed it when he’d held her earlier…not a cloying perfume, but a light floral essence swept with the sharp freshness of winter air. “All it takes is six cuts,” he said near her ear. She nodded, relaxing against him as he guided her hands with precision. One deep stroke of the lade neatly removed an angled section of wood. They rotated the pencil and made another cut, and then a third, creating a precise triangular prism. “Now trim the sharp edges.” They concentrated on the task with his hands still bracketed over hers, using the blade to chamfer each corner of wood until they had created a clean, satisfying point. Done. After one last luxurious inhalation of her scent, Devon released her slowly, knowing that for the rest of his life, a single breath of a rose would bring him back to this moment.