In certain conditions, the white walls at home take on the character of a light box. In traditional Japanese architecture the intensity of atmosphere has a lot to do with the way natural light is filtered through the shoji paper panels, suffusing the interior spaces with subdued light, calming the spirit and sharpening the senses.
In optics, a caustic is the envelope of light rays reflected or refracted by a curved surface or object, or the projection of that envelope of rays on another surface. The caustic is a curve or surface to which each of the light rays is tangent, defining a boundary of an envelope of rays as a curve of concentrated light.
A piece of milled plexiglass acting as a projecting lens; via the Computer Graphics and Geometry Lab at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
New milling techniques applied to glass and plexiglass panels could be used to “create windows that are also cryptic projectors, summoning ghostly images from sunlight.”
[Pauly and Bompas] hope that the technique will be used in architectural design, to create windows that mould sunlight and throw images or patterns onto walls or floors,” which, if timed, milled, and manipulated just right, could produce a slowly animated sequence of images being projected by an otherwise empty window during different times of day.
To control the shape of a caustic pattern generated by a specular or refractive surface, we need to solve the inverse problem: how can we change the surface geometry, such that incident light is redirected to produce a desired caustic image?
Here, in short, is what I want to tell you.
Know what each sentence says,
What it doesn't say,
And what it implies.
Of these, the hardest is knowing what each sentence actually says.
Leave space between them for the things that words can't really say.
To suggest more than the words seem to allow.
Perhaps it renames the world.
The Anxiety of Sequence.
It was all change until the very last second.
The debris of someone else's thinking.
You'll never run out of noticings.
Names that announce the whatness of the world.
What were you trying to protect?
You were protecting the memory.
The tyranny of what exists.
Do any of them sound first?
It sets an echo in motion.
Try writing for the reader in yourself.
So call it "perfection enough".
Toward the name of the world—yours to discover.
In your head, you'll probably find two models for writing.
One is the familiar model taught in high school and college—a matter of outlines and drafts and transitions and topic sentences and argument.
The other model is its antithesis—the way poets and novelists are often thought to write.
Words used to describe this second model include "genius", "inspiration", "flow", and "natural", sometimes even "organic".
Both models are useless.
I should qualify that sentence.
Both models are completely useless.
You've been taught to overlook the character of the prose in front of you in order to get at its meaning.
You overlook the shape of the sentence itself for the meaning it contains,
Which means that while you were reading,
All those millions of words passed by
Without teaching you how to make sentences.
Much of what's taught under the name of expository writing could be called "The Anxiety of Sequence."
Its premise is this:
To get where you're going, you have to begin in just the right place
And take the proper path,
Which depends on knowing where you plan to conclude.
Writing isn't a conveyor belt bearing the reader to "the point" at the end of the piece, where the meaning will be revealed.
Good writing is significant everywhere,
Delightful everywhere.
Every work of literature is the result of thousands and thousands of decisions.
Intricate, minute decisions—this word or that, here or where, now or later, again and again.
It's the living tissue of a writer's choices,
Not the fossil record of an ancient, inspired race.
A true metaphor is a swift and violent twisting of language,
A renaming of the already named.
It's meant to expire in a sudden flash of light
And to reveal—in that burst of illumination—
A correspondence that must be literally accurate.
Pay attention now:
No matter how much you know or learn about syntax, grammar, or rhetoric,
This small internal quaver, this inner disturbance,
Is the most useful evidence you'll ever get.
Someday, you'll be able to articulate what causes it.
But for now, what's important is to notice it.
Noticing is always the goal.
...the faint vertigo caused by an ambiguity you can't quite detect.
What matter is what it points to.
Find out what's causing it and fix it
Even if you're not sure how.
It may seem strange that the manual dexterity needed to hold a pencil—or use a keyboard—comes later than the lingual and mental dexterity needed to speak.
But it does.
As the piece evolves, you try to protect those original, effusive sentences.
Only to realize, at last, that what you're writing won't come together until they've been removed or revised.
What were you trying to protect?
The memory of the excitement you felt when those words "came to you."
(Where did they "come" from?)
You were protecting the memory
of the excitement of really concentrating,
of paying close attention to your thoughts and, perhaps, your sentences,
the excitement of feeling the galvanic link between language and thought.
Style is an expression of the interest you take in the making of every sentence.
It emerges, almost without intent, from your engagement with each sentence.
It's the discoveries you make in the making of the prose itself.
Where ambiguity rules, there is no "style"—or anything else worth having.
Pursue clarity instead.
In the pursuit of clarity, style reveals itself.
It can be overwhelming—the inertia of the paragraphs and pages you've already composed, the sentences you've already written,
No matter how rough they are.
Whether you love what you've written or not,
Those sentences have the virtue of already existing,
Which makes them better than sentences that don't exist.
Or so it seems.
Imagine a cellist playing one of Bach's solo suites.
Does he consider his audience?
(Did Bach, for that matter?)
Does he play the suit differently to audiences
Of different incomes and educations and social backgrounds?
No. The work selects its audience.