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· · to read

I was looking at some newly released books when one caught my eye: True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color by Kory Stamper.

I started reading an excerpt from the book and came across a colour I'd never encountered before: sea pink. 😲 And, yes, it turns out that Sea Pink is a colour in the Pantone catalogue.

Pantone swatch for Sea Pink
Pantone swatch for Sea Pink

Naturally, I wanted to know where the name came from.

Somewhere along the way I came across a reference to ancient ocean pigments being pink. That caught my attention because it immediately brought Homer's wine-dark seas to mind.

For a moment, I wondered if I'd stumbled upon an explanation for Homer's strange description of the sea.

From there my mind jumped to Emily Wilson's Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea, which is currently sitting on my TBR list. And then, because apparently my brain wasn't done making connections, I noticed from the dedication that Emily's sister is Bee Wilson, another wonderful writer whose work about food I enjoyed a lot.

Then some fact-checking interrupted my excitement.

The ancient pigments, it turns out, weren't actually pink when they were part of living organisms. Chlorophyll contains magnesium, which gives it its green colour. But in the billion-year-old sediments that scientists studied, nickel had replaced the magnesium in the chlorophyll-derived molecules, turning them pink.

There was a word for this process that I'd never encountered before: diagenesis.

Diagenesis describes the physical and chemical changes that sediments undergo after they are deposited and buried. In this case, it helped explain how chlorophyll-derived molecules in billion-year-old sediments ended up pink.

I liked the word almost as much as the colour.

But I still hadn't answered my original question.

Where did sea pink come from?

A little botany.

Sea pink is the common name for a plant, Armeria maritima, that grows near the sea and has pink flowers. At some point, the name of the flower became the name of the colour.

Link to Wikipedia page for Armeria maritima
Armeria maritima

And there I was, having started with a book about colour and somehow travelled through Homer, Emily Wilson, Bee Wilson, chlorophyll, billion-year-old sediments, diagenesis and a flower growing by the sea.

I suppose that's what happens when you follow a colour.

 

 

 

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· · to read

[I'm reading *Moby-Dick* at the moment](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/xavierroy_srividya-suryanarayanan-asked-if-we-can-do-share-7490785589437349888-Pdwq/), and I've been thinking about first lines. That's probably inevitable when you're reading a book that begins with ***Call me Ishmael***.

It is such a strange thing to do with the beginning of a novel. Melville doesn't explain where we are or why Ishmael is speaking to us. He doesn't even tell us much about Ishmael. He simply gives us a name and a voice, and somehow that is enough to make us keep reading.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to write a story of my own and have been stuck on its first line for a while. I wrote:

> I was on my regular maintenance walk along the northern wall when I first noticed the crack. I thought to myself, *Well, it wasn't there yesterday*.

I've been staring at that sentence long enough to feel a discomfort knowing that something about it wasn't quite right without being able to say exactly what. Then I went back to my notes from Stanley Fish's [*How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One*](https://link.amazon/B0dLqhUXV), and I started to see the problem in my sentence.

For one thing, I'd buried the important bit. The main clause is *I was on my regular maintenance walk*. Grammatically, that tells the reader that the walk is the important thing; it wasn't. The *crack*, which is actually the reason I'm telling the story, gets pushed into a subordinate clause.

Fish has an interesting way of making you look at sentences structurally. The grammar isn't just a set of rules for putting words together. The structure itself tells us what to pay attention to. The main clause gets the prime position; everything else has to negotiate for attention. I'd given that position to the walk. I had got the hierarchy backwards in my sentence.

Then there was the narrator getting in the way. *I first noticed the crack. I thought to myself.* Both phrases are telling the reader that something is happening inside my head rather than simply letting the thing happen. Fish calls these constructs as "pointing words": *I noticed, I saw, I felt.* They're not necessarily bad, but they can be unnecessary. If the crack is interesting, perhaps I don't need to announce that I noticed it.

So I tried taking the narrative scaffolding out of the sentence altogether and ended up with:
> *The crack wasn't there yesterday.*

Now this felt much better, not the level of 'Call me Ishmael'.

It also made me notice something I hadn't thought about before. I'd originally written *yesterday*, which seemed perfectly natural. But *yesterday* is entirely dependent on the narrator. We know what yesterday means because the person telling us the story knows when they are speaking. So one more change:

> *The crack wasn't there on Thursday.*

Replacing it with *Thursday* suggests that there is a routine behind the sentence. Someone walks along this wall often enough to remember what was there on a particular day. There is a schedule, a history, a world that existed before the crack appeared.

One word suddenly seemed to be doing the work of an entire paragraph. Fish wrote about the "sentence as world." A good sentence doesn't merely describe a world. For a moment, it creates one. Sometimes a sentence can give you enough of a world that you don't need the narrator to explain it.

Perhaps that's part of what makes *Call me Ishmael* so effective too. It doesn't tell us much, but it gives us someone to listen to. Three words and there is already a relationship between the person speaking and the person reading. The rest of the world arrives later in the story.

I've spent rather too much time worrying about whether the first line is doing everything it possibly can. Now I need to stop fussing over it and write the second line and the third, and someday the final line.

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· · to read

I closed my laptop, walked a dozen steps, and plopped myself on the bed, when the words _“I'm a big, big girl in a small, small world”_ appeared in my head, complete with a piano soundtrack. I didn’t know the artist, but a quick search led me to the song (earworm::[Big Big World by Emilia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Big_World_(song)?useskin=vector)) on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpkS2DU_qMs). What amazes me is that I remembered the exact tune, the lyrics—everything was perfect in my memory.

A twinge of curiosity tugged at the edges of my thoughts. _When had I last heard this song?_ I was confident I hadn’t heard it in the last decade—yet Last.fm told me otherwise: [July 3, 2023](https://www.last.fm/user/xavierroy/library/music/Emilia/_/Big+Big+World). _Hmm…_ Months had passed. *What caused this song to resurface now, of all the countless tracks I’ve heard since then?* *And why now?* I tried retracing my path through my thoughts. The thread vanished somewhere in the labyrinth of memory, a Theseus without Ariadne to guide me.

An hour later, I still didn’t know why the song sprang to life. I smiled, letting it be what it was: a fleeting, playful proof that thought and memory are never entirely ours to command. *Maybe an errant misfiring synapse*. Yet a reminder too, of some strange delights hidden in the quiet flicker of memory.

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Last Saturday night, Max and I were watching a movie. It was already a bit past 10:45 when we started the movie. We were shifting between watching on TV or the laptop. We snuggled up on his bed with pillows piled up, snugly ensconced in blankets and began watching.

As the movie played on, we talked about scenes, characters, and dialogues. I pointed out the lore and he asked questions or asked to rewind to watch a missed scene or two.

About midway through the movie, I noticed his breathing pattern had changed — deepened. He had fallen asleep. I called out his name to verify that he was fast asleep. I slowly extricated myself from the intertwined blankets and proceeded to arrange the bedding around him when he woke up.

He wanted to continue the movie which I refused as he was sleepy and groggy. I told him we could watch the rest of the movie later. As I was tucking him in, he said, "Sorry pa" and "Good night," and fell asleep.

As I returned to my bed, his words were still on my mind, 'Sorry pa'. And it took a long time for me to fall asleep as I kept on thinking about it.

*Was he sad because he fell asleep or was he sorry that we couldn't have the father-son bonding time?*

Countless other thoughts kept circulating in my mind. I ran through all of our interactions throughout the day — words of praise (He had yet again got 97% in his music theory), words of frustration (at each other), words of advice, words about word origins (we had a discussion on why science usually uses precise terminologies to mean something) — and words unsaid.

The next day at church, we're sitting together and I asked him why he said sorry the previous night. He was embarrassed and said it was something he doesn't remember saying. As he turned away after complaining about his too-tight shirt, I remembered a poem by Wordsworth about [fathers and sons](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lyrical_Ballads_(1798)/Anecdote_for_Fathers): "O dearest, dearest boy! my heart / For better lore would seldom yearn, / Could I but teach the hundredth part / Of what from thee I learn."

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Yesterday, I was looking for a topic I knew I’d written about before. But I wasn’t sure if I’d ever published it. So I went searching — through my vault of old drafts, partial posts, abandoned ideas, and half-finished pieces. *Organizing that vault has been on my "someday” list for a while now. I keep putting it off.*

And then I started reading some of the old drafts. It felt like walking back into a room I used to live in, one I hadn't entered in years. A room that I could navigate with the lights off.

And there it was—the piece I'd been looking for, sitting among all the others I'd abandoned. Which made me wonder: *why had I left so many of these unfinished, unpublished?*

I’d tell myself I was too busy. That the ideas had gone stale. That I’d moved on. But really, it was a quieter resistance. The kind that doesn’t announce itself but just lingers.

Writing, when it happens in the moment, feels fluid. Like catching a thought before it takes a more concrete shape. Rewriting, though — *that’s different*. It’s not just editing words. It’s stepping back into the mindset that made them.

That’s when I understood: rewriting isn’t polishing. ***It’s time travel with consequences***.

Reading old writing isn’t just revisiting the words. It’s meeting the person who wrote them. The turns of phrase I thought were clever. The tone I thought struck the right balance. The ideas I believed were solid, maybe even worth sharing.

Sometimes I nod along; sometimes I wince. I catch myself wondering, not “*What was I thinking?*” — but “*Who was I trying to be?*”

Rewriting asks for more than a better sentence. It asks what’s changed, not just in how I write, but in what I believe.

Some pieces I revisit and think, “*Yeah, I still mean this*.” Others… I hesitate. The words are fine, but the person behind them feels distant. And that’s the hard part.

Editing, when it’s honest, isn’t just improving. It’s letting go.

I still don’t love going back. Some drafts feel like fossils. Others feel too close, like they’re still breathing. But I’m learning to treat them with care.

Revisiting those moments isn't just about cleaning them up. It's about listening to who I was, so I can respond with who I am now.

**Each one holds a version of me** — what I noticed, what I believed, what I thought was worth capturing.

So yes, *rewriting is time travel with consequences*. And one of them is meeting yourself again...

Banner image is [Saint Jerome in His Study by Albrecht Dürer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Jerome_in_His_Study_(D%C3%BCrer)?useskin=vector).

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· · to read

Today, Max asked me to look at his descriptive writing assignment from school. He didn’t really want help. Not really. He just wanted a quick fix. A skim-and-sign-off.

*But he chose the wrong parent.*

He flopped beside me on the bed, reluctant. I scanned his draft and saw the usual: a decent attempt, a few bright spots, but mostly scaffolding, words and phrases repeating. It read like someone trying to finish a thing, not someone trying to say something. To show something.

I quipped, “Writing’s easy. Rewriting is the hard part. And it always takes more time than we want it to.”

That didn’t go down well.

Luckily, his book had a passage from Jane Eyre. I asked him to read each sentence out loud and then tell me what that sentence was about and how things were described.
His reading was flat, each sentence dropped like a stone. I could tell he wasn’t listening to himself.

“What does that sentence say?” I asked.
A shrug. “Something about... the unoccupied bedroom?”

![IMG_20250728_202710](/wp-content/uploads/IMG_20250728_202710.jpg){.aligncenter}

Later that evening, I kept thinking about it — not just the parenting part, but the writing part. That kind of descriptive writing — the kind that wraps an image around you, the kind that slows you down — feels rarer these days.

Outside of fiction and the occasional well-written essay or newsletter, you don’t find sentences like that often. Even in long-form spaces like newsletters and blogs — places without social media character limits or Instagram's visual priorities — writers seem to default to shorter, punchier sentences. Shorter paragraphs. Shorter sentences. Quick hits. Fast reads. Sometimes that’s good writing. Often, it’s necessary. But something gets lost in the speed and efficiency of it all — the layering, the rhythm, the careful unfolding of an idea or a scene.

Maybe our attention spans are to blame. Or maybe we’ve been trained by character limits, previews, and scroll-friendly design to read in blinks and fragments.

I found myself wondering if I was witnessing the end of something almost medieval — the notion that a sentence could be a dwelling place rather than a thoroughfare, somewhere you might pause and unpack your thoughts like settling into a favorite armchair, letting clauses accumulate and ideas unfold in their own unhurried time, the way this very sentence insists on taking the scenic route while Max's generation has already moved on to the next notification, the next swipe, the next dopamine hit.

Quick, clean, done.