the winter anthology
Vol. 13
Maggie Nelson
from Bluets: 168
Cézanne, too, had had enough of psychology. He attended, instead, to color. “If I paint all the little blues and all the little browns, I capture and convey his glance,” he said of painting a man’s face. This may be but a colorized restatement of Wittgenstein’s remark, “if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be—unutterably—contained in what has been uttered!” Perhaps this is why I take the blues of Cézanne so seriously.