Despite being in Mrs A’s reading list from college and his turning up (often tucked away into uncanny corners) in commercial bookshelves everywhere, I’d delayed picking an Oliver Sacks book up, thinking I’ll find one in a library someday or technically ‘borrow’ one. Vintage Sacks is from SPLRC (of the DiceyDewey’s fame). Sacks makes chemistry (of the trivalent-bond-and-isotopes kind) feel deeply personal. (The chapter is titled Stinks and Bangs.) I wish chemistry textbooks from my literature-starved hostel years were written with such love and sense of adventure. In twenty-twenty-perfect-hindsight, I think the textbooks (the NCERT ones in two-colour offset [1]) took things too seriously and forgot test-tubes over bunsen burners were also supposed to be fun in mysterious ways. (This is a well […ish] description of Sacks’s description of test-tubes-over-bunsen-burners.)

I’m about to head to Vijayawada for a re-run (hardly; same river, not twice, all that) of the typography course and think this divine-ish intervention calls for a much more end-products-unknown approach for it to balance out the dashes-dots-spaces-pedantry.

In an excerpt from Uncle Tungsten, Sacks footnotes Euler’s thoughts on lights, colours and (inevitably) music.

The nature of the radiation by which we see an opaque object does not depend on the source of light but on the vibratory motion of the very small particles [atoms] of the object’s surface. These little particles are like stretched strings, tuned to a certain frequency, which vibrate in response to a similar vibration of the air even if no one plucks them. Just as the stretched string is excited by the same sound that it emits, the particles of the surface begin to vibrate in tune with the incident radiation and to emit their own waves in every direction.

I’m so going to find a way to shoehorn that into a lesson on the black-on-white-and-readallover typography landscape.

1: Their managing science textbook diagrams with just two colours (often a sedate palette at that) wasn’t particularly amusing then. Wish I could say I was entranced, etc., but in reality, I was stuck SunTzu-ing my way to entrance exams like almost everyone else.