Thoughts on light

 Why are there so many words in the English language to describe light?

Glimmer, glitter, glister, glisten, gleam, glow, glare, shimmer, sparkle, shine, 

these terms are not utilitarian; they reflect a necessary nature for aesthetic attention that light deserves and allow us to make the satisfactory distinctions between the warmth of candlelight, sunlight at the zenith, the glow of a shop window as you blur past it on the bus ride. How were these words coined and retained throughout history, how were they passed through generations so that we could use the exact precision of preserving these terms? 

The infamous poet Rainier Marie Rilke describes colors through their intercourse within a painting, a single color’s evolution through history: their interaction and interplay within a poem. Rilke reaches out to language for words that would express the nuances of color and the biography of blue spills out into his realm of language: a barely-blue, a blue dove-gray, a densely quilted blue, an ancient Egyptian shadow-blue, a waxy blue, a self-contained blue, a wet dark blue, a listening blue, a thunderstorm blue, a bourgeois cotton blue, a light cloudy bluishness, a juicy blue.

One of the pleasures I take from reading is thinking about a specific word and appreciating how perfectly its definition, elocution, and utterance fit itself and its representative ability. I like to think of language as a communal thing, one that binds us in an inexplicable shared force of understanding. 

Language enables us thought and is wealthy in a degree uncalulable by standards of monetary systems.