Brook-feather green, robin-egg blue, penstemon lavender, I dream of you

[sovay]

My ironic virtual con crud has progressed to the point of keeping me up at night coughing and sneezing when I get up in the afternoon. I have some fairly solid reasons for believing it not to be COVID-19, but have nonetheless put in a call to my PCP in order to warn them that my history with normal respiratory crud is quite bad and if I am not lucky I will be calling them later in the week about it. In the meantime, I am trying to procure more orange juice.

I want to write about so many things and I need to do my job and the state of my body is not helping. Nothing is interacting—physically—well in here. It's not new and I still hate it.

Have a nice thread about Jewish atheism and some smoking twelfth-century sunglasses.

Comments

[sovay]

I would guess that a hasty reading attached these particular glasses to that date.

See reply to ethelmay: I found an earlier article crediting the glasses with a twelfth-century origin (rather than just illustrating the style of smoky quartz lenses worn at the time, which does seem to have been a thing); I also found some of the nineteenth-century pairs when trying to source the image. They are constructed differently enough—much more lightly—that I'm willing to believe the contested pair is older, but I would also like an attestation from a museum or private collection and have not so far been able to find one.

[nineweaving]

The hinged temple-pieces would suggest a later date. Those appear to have developed in the 18th century, at least in the West.

If only the library were open!

Nine

[sovay]

The hinged temple-pieces would suggest a later date. Those appear to have developed in the 18th century, at least in the West.

The internet tells me that museums of eyeglasses exist, but good luck visiting one right now.

and cites Science & Civilisation in China, for which I cannot find an online text.

I linked it in my comment:

"The Sung people, however, did have two techniques which may be considered introductory to spectacle lenses; one was the magnifying glass, and the other dark glasses as eye-protection. Regarding the former, Li Chhi wrote, in his Hsia Jih Chi (Records of Leisure Hours) some time before his death in +1117, that his contemporary, Shih Khang, and other judges, used to use various magnifying lenses of rock crystal (shui ching) for deciphering illegible documents in criminal cases. The judges also used to use dark glasses made of smoky quartz (e.g. chha ching), not, as we do, for driving against the sun, but so as to disguise from litigants their reactions to the evidence." This last sentence is footnoted: "This piece of information, which I fully believe to be true, comes from a paper on fire-pearls and spectacles by Pi (1), which, though interesting, is full of serious and misleading mistakes. The same applies to the paper by Rakusen (1)." No further information is given on the two interesting but misleading papers.

[edit] I went to all the trouble of typing that text out, so I'm leaving it!

[nineweaving]

I linked it in my comment.

You did. We were delving at the same time, and you emerged first. I saw, and deleted that part of my comment, too late.

I am very curious about those judges' dark glasses and what form they took. The "proper" design seems obvious to us, but were they two framed circles? Or something like a visor? Did they balance on the bridge of the nose? Were they tied on like a mask?

Nine

[nineweaving]

I went to all the trouble of typing that text out, so I'm leaving it!

Many thanks! I was typing it out myself when I refreshed.

Nine

[sovay]

I am very curious about those judges' dark glasses and what form they took.

I was trying to look into that myself and all the citations I could find kept circling back to Needham's Science and Civilisation in China. This page does the same, but adds that Chinese spectacles "were quite different than early spectacles from the West as they were made from rock crystal and were monoculars that could be attached together," which if true means the pair under debate cannot be an early model. It's not well-footnoted, though: it claims that the "tea lens" variant (what Needham transliterates as chha ching) were used as sunglasses proper and I can't tell if he has another source for that information or if he just disagrees completely with the paper on fire-pearls and spectacles that Needham is willing to believe partly. In short, I want more than the one book on the subject.

[nineweaving]

In short, I want more than the one book on the subject.

Truly.

Curse these circumstances.

Nine