“Mantis shrimp have sixteen cones in their eyes,” I explained to a friend. He had just pointed out a rainbow that had formed in the water droplets from the Washington Square fountain.
“To put that in perspective,” I went on, professorially, “Dogs have two. And humans three. Just three cones give us our entire color spectrum. Can you imagine how different even this rainbow would look if you had sixteen?”
We paused for a moment, trying to fathom a more colorful rainbow.
“And then think of everything else around us—”
We looked around at the reading, chattering, yelling, begging, singing, tap dancing, back flipping, skate boarding, dog walking, piano playing, check-mating, chalk painting, cause explaining, sausage selling, ice-cream eating crowd around us and tried to imagine it all infused with hotter pinks and brighter blues and deeper greens and redder reds . . .
“—or would it be too much?”
My friend, a native New Yorker, laughed once, condescendingly. “Not for the Village,” he said, professorially.
1 Comment
I really like your picture and post, Emily. It’s thrilling to be a part of so much activity in city squares like this. As to being able to absorb more color, my three cones are enough to make me feel almost drunk with color sometimes, especially in the fall. Why should mantis shrimp be constantly blessed with such enormous “highs”?