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The Secondary Colors: Three Essays
A collection of three meditations on purple, orange, and green encompassing poetry, song, fable, gossip, and trivia
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
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444 people want to read
About the author
Alexander Theroux
50 books189 followersAlexander Theroux is a novelist, poet, and essayist. The most apt description of the novels of Theroux was given by Anthony Burgess in praise of Theroux's Darconville's Cat: Theroux is 'word drunk', filling his novels with a torrent of words archaic and neologic, always striving for originality, while drawing from the traditions of Rolfe, Rabelais, Sterne, and Nabokov.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 4, 2014
This book opens with: “Orange is a bold, forritsome color.” And this book closes with: “Green in its virtuosity is like an aria, the basic and essential cantata, its elemental color, providing a melodic skeleton or frame, as it were, completed by the song of nature in spectral and splendiferous bel canto from her vast repertoire of ornaments, graces, roulades, trills, embellishments, portamenti, arpeggios, octave skips, slurs, and rapid scale passages. Green in its jubiliance is lyrical, though variations can be dark and deficient, its cadences iridescent and born of the ideal. Its personality, its powers, defining our world, announcing itself in every lake and leaf, midge and mountain, blossom and bugwing, is so beguiling, it softens our hearts with its soothing chroma and lets us sleep—or flares and cries, ‘Be bright! Be bright!’ I have always felt, even at the worst of times, that if only the largeness of life could ever be overpoweringly felt, how green, how deeply green, how very deeply green it would be. And what a sign of grace.” Alexander Theroux, ladies and gentlemen.
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May 20, 2017Colors are the deeds
and sufferings of light.
--Goethe
A Review via three secondary colors and their introductory paragraphs.
Orange
“Orange is a bold, forritsome color. It sells, it smiles, it sings, it simpers, combining the aura of Hollywood musicals, the leisure of sunshiny Florida--Moon Over Miami in Technicolor--and South American festivals. Orange is ‘hot,’ gives back light, and sits at the center of one’s ch’i (cosmic or vital energy). It is an active, warm, advancing earthy color, indicative of and supposedly preferred by social types with an agreeable, good-natured, and gregarious personality, glad-handing and salesman-hearty, yammering and bumptious and irrepressible, although it carries the added connotations, predominantly in its mode of near-phosphorescence, of fickleness, vacillation, lack of steadiness, and, many even insist, a lack of warmth. But, surely, it is nothing if not unshy and bottomlessly flippant and even pagan, a color that takes place, in the parlance of twenties journalism, in full view of the spectators.”
Purple
“Purple is the magisterium. It is a color combining blue (spirituality and nobility) and red (courage and virility), and symbolizes, among other things, wit, intelligence, knowledge, religious devotion, sanctity, humility, temperance, sobriety--amethysts (from a- plus methyein, to be drunk) were once worn as an anti-alcoholic--penitence, and sorrow. It can seem, on the one hand, sad as a sunless twilight, in which, as a hue, it invariably predominates, or startlingly strong on the other, for it encompasses dusk (‘When purple-colored curtains mark the end of the day,’ sang the Platters) and dawn (‘Iris had dipt the woof,’ writes John Milton of the celestial robe of the archangel Michael, the colors of the goddess of dawn), as well as old age, venerableness, love of truth, and revered memories. It is an elite, at times histrionically pious, severe color, a hue, like blue, that, absorbing light, is passive, retreating, and cold. There is nevertheless a dignity to the color that is as formal and fastidious and as fine as the Faubourg St. Germain. Mountain ranges are purple (‘purple mountain’s majesties’), and so are molehills. In psychology, vanity is purple, as is hauteur--Shelley refers to ‘purple pride’--and of decadence, as well. Purple ranks eighth as a child’s color preference, an adult’s sixth, stands for foundation in the Hebrew Kabbala, and possesses of all other colors the highest frequency in the visible spectrum. Law wears a purple doctoral hood, and lilac is worn for dentistry. Virtue and faith in Egypt are purple. It is the color traditionally worn when reciting the Odyssey to signify, with respect, the sea wanderings of Odysseus.”
Green
“Green is power, nature’s fuse, the color of more force and guises than are countable, a messenger announcing itself, paradoxically, as the hue of both renewal and reproduction or infirmity and illness. It is at once the preternaturally ambiguous color of life and death, the vernal sign of vitality, and the livid tinge of corruption, a ‘dialectical lyric’ (to borrow a term from Kierkegaard), responding with the kind of answers that perhaps depend less on itself than on the questions we ask of it. Many people still insist that green is a primary color. Why not? M. Voltaire has a character from Micromegas, a visiting inhabitant from Sirius, assert that on that planet, they have thirty-nine primary colors! The color green is compounded of blue and yellow, heaven connecting with earth, a color combining the cold blue light of intellect--it slows down the pulse--with the deep emotional warmth of the yellow sun to produce the wisdom of equality, hope, and resurrection. As the color of Venus and Mercury, devoted lovers, green is peace, vegetation, gladness, and rebirth. It is associated with the number five and is the fairy color, the primal wash, the heraldic tint of envy, of nausea and of hope, of solid gems and eerie mists, of sea cabbage, eelgrass, salt thatch, subaqueous plants, algae, and sea lettuce bearding the rocky shore. ‘Green derives from blue and surpasses it,’ says an old Chinese proverb, referring to the student who, learning from a teacher, grows to surpass him. Did you know that ‘greenth’ is a legitimate word, although rare, meaning verdure? To ‘green’ is even a verb, in Scotland, meaning to yearn. So many hues and shades and tints of green exist in the natural world, so multifarious are its guises, it is impossible ever fully to know them. It is in its numinous energies as infederated as Burma and as various and unpredictable as nature herself. It is ironic, furthermore, that the color green cannot even claim primacy in nature, at least according to Robert Frost in his poem ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay.‘ ‘Nature’s first green is gold,’ he writes, ‘The hardest to hold.’ (Shakespeare always thought green and gold went together.)”
and sufferings of light.
--Goethe
A Review via three secondary colors and their introductory paragraphs.
Orange
“Orange is a bold, forritsome color. It sells, it smiles, it sings, it simpers, combining the aura of Hollywood musicals, the leisure of sunshiny Florida--Moon Over Miami in Technicolor--and South American festivals. Orange is ‘hot,’ gives back light, and sits at the center of one’s ch’i (cosmic or vital energy). It is an active, warm, advancing earthy color, indicative of and supposedly preferred by social types with an agreeable, good-natured, and gregarious personality, glad-handing and salesman-hearty, yammering and bumptious and irrepressible, although it carries the added connotations, predominantly in its mode of near-phosphorescence, of fickleness, vacillation, lack of steadiness, and, many even insist, a lack of warmth. But, surely, it is nothing if not unshy and bottomlessly flippant and even pagan, a color that takes place, in the parlance of twenties journalism, in full view of the spectators.”
Purple
“Purple is the magisterium. It is a color combining blue (spirituality and nobility) and red (courage and virility), and symbolizes, among other things, wit, intelligence, knowledge, religious devotion, sanctity, humility, temperance, sobriety--amethysts (from a- plus methyein, to be drunk) were once worn as an anti-alcoholic--penitence, and sorrow. It can seem, on the one hand, sad as a sunless twilight, in which, as a hue, it invariably predominates, or startlingly strong on the other, for it encompasses dusk (‘When purple-colored curtains mark the end of the day,’ sang the Platters) and dawn (‘Iris had dipt the woof,’ writes John Milton of the celestial robe of the archangel Michael, the colors of the goddess of dawn), as well as old age, venerableness, love of truth, and revered memories. It is an elite, at times histrionically pious, severe color, a hue, like blue, that, absorbing light, is passive, retreating, and cold. There is nevertheless a dignity to the color that is as formal and fastidious and as fine as the Faubourg St. Germain. Mountain ranges are purple (‘purple mountain’s majesties’), and so are molehills. In psychology, vanity is purple, as is hauteur--Shelley refers to ‘purple pride’--and of decadence, as well. Purple ranks eighth as a child’s color preference, an adult’s sixth, stands for foundation in the Hebrew Kabbala, and possesses of all other colors the highest frequency in the visible spectrum. Law wears a purple doctoral hood, and lilac is worn for dentistry. Virtue and faith in Egypt are purple. It is the color traditionally worn when reciting the Odyssey to signify, with respect, the sea wanderings of Odysseus.”
Green
“Green is power, nature’s fuse, the color of more force and guises than are countable, a messenger announcing itself, paradoxically, as the hue of both renewal and reproduction or infirmity and illness. It is at once the preternaturally ambiguous color of life and death, the vernal sign of vitality, and the livid tinge of corruption, a ‘dialectical lyric’ (to borrow a term from Kierkegaard), responding with the kind of answers that perhaps depend less on itself than on the questions we ask of it. Many people still insist that green is a primary color. Why not? M. Voltaire has a character from Micromegas, a visiting inhabitant from Sirius, assert that on that planet, they have thirty-nine primary colors! The color green is compounded of blue and yellow, heaven connecting with earth, a color combining the cold blue light of intellect--it slows down the pulse--with the deep emotional warmth of the yellow sun to produce the wisdom of equality, hope, and resurrection. As the color of Venus and Mercury, devoted lovers, green is peace, vegetation, gladness, and rebirth. It is associated with the number five and is the fairy color, the primal wash, the heraldic tint of envy, of nausea and of hope, of solid gems and eerie mists, of sea cabbage, eelgrass, salt thatch, subaqueous plants, algae, and sea lettuce bearding the rocky shore. ‘Green derives from blue and surpasses it,’ says an old Chinese proverb, referring to the student who, learning from a teacher, grows to surpass him. Did you know that ‘greenth’ is a legitimate word, although rare, meaning verdure? To ‘green’ is even a verb, in Scotland, meaning to yearn. So many hues and shades and tints of green exist in the natural world, so multifarious are its guises, it is impossible ever fully to know them. It is in its numinous energies as infederated as Burma and as various and unpredictable as nature herself. It is ironic, furthermore, that the color green cannot even claim primacy in nature, at least according to Robert Frost in his poem ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay.‘ ‘Nature’s first green is gold,’ he writes, ‘The hardest to hold.’ (Shakespeare always thought green and gold went together.)”
July 13, 2013
Another greatly impressive book by Alexander Theroux. I enjoyed it just as much as I liked Theroux's The Primary Colours. This essay collection talks about the secondary colours orange, purple and green. Like in the last book, it goes into what these colours symbolize, and how they are represented, in a wide range of subjects, such as art, history, linguistics and literature.
It's actually delightful to read Alexander Theroux's essays as it's obvious that he loves words, and his enthusiasm shows.
Some quotes:
“There is a weirdness, a vagueness, an otherworldliness- a kind of lunar numinousness- to the colour purple, from pounce paper to the violet-tinged nimbus of gaslight to the closed, hothouse vibrations of Prince’s “Purple Rain” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”…"
“Green is power, nature’s fuse, the colour of more force and guises than are countable…”
“Orange is a bold, forritsome color. It sells, it smiles,it sings, it simpers…”
It's actually delightful to read Alexander Theroux's essays as it's obvious that he loves words, and his enthusiasm shows.
Some quotes:
“There is a weirdness, a vagueness, an otherworldliness- a kind of lunar numinousness- to the colour purple, from pounce paper to the violet-tinged nimbus of gaslight to the closed, hothouse vibrations of Prince’s “Purple Rain” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze”…"
“Green is power, nature’s fuse, the colour of more force and guises than are countable…”
“Orange is a bold, forritsome color. It sells, it smiles,it sings, it simpers…”
December 4, 2008
Purple, Orange, Green. Who would have thought? Theroux' essays are symphonic.
October 9, 2010
I don't think this was as successful as The Primary Colors for two reasons that might be entirely personal. I think the historical associations for the primary colors are more compelling, perhaps by their very nature. I also find that any second attempt of a charmingly unique format loses a little of its charm.
December 24, 2010
Such a lot of information about colors. How we see them, how they get named, what they have meant to different societies. Enjoyable and fascinating reading.
October 12, 2022
Habe nur den Essay "Orange" gelesen, nachdem es in einem Hausflur zu mir fand: Nette Idee, er hat hunderte interessante Referenzen zu der Farbe gesammelt. Aber grauenhaft zu lesen, vor allem wenn man kaum eine der Referenzen kennt. Ansonsten wird man mit einem Haufen Adjektive zugeballert. Widerspricht sich auch teilweise in seiner Charakterisierung. Vielleicht gut für Künstler, die sich der Farbe als Projekt widmen wollen und ein paar Anhaltspunkte für weitere Inspiration suchen.
April 15, 2022
brilliant prose on the subjects of purple, orange and green….fall in love again and again with each, the world suddenly all purples, oranges, greens and filled with wonder
December 19, 2009
Loved it.
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December 16, 2025a great way to end 2023. this is a great collection of essays on color by theroux. his vocabulary is just astounding. this is the only theroux i own and probably the only i'll ever have.
July 20, 2015
This man knows too much. He must be assassinated.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews