Summary

The book opens with an epigraph from Pascal’s Pensées: “And were it true, we do not think all philosophy is worth one hour of pain.”

1-4: The speaker asks the reader to “suppose” she is confessing to falling in love with the color blue. This love may seem voluntary, but to the speaker every speck of blue, even garbage caught in a bush, points to the divine. She will try to explain how her loneliness has led to this feeling.

5: The speaker gives the example of the French poet Mallarmé. During a period of isolation, he exhausted himself with thinking until he felt he had defeated God. He began calling the sky “l’Azur” in his poems to remove reference to the Christian heaven.

6-7: The purest site of the speaker’s love for blue is to be surrounded by ocean...