Why Are We So Obsessed With Blue?

“SUPPOSE I WERE to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color,” reads the first line of Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets,” her 2009 book-length lyric essay about the color blue. “Bluets” — the title refers to the delicate, diminutive wildflower but also to the abstract artist Joan Mitchell’s magnificent 1973 painting “Les Bluets” — is an elliptical exploration of heartache, the bluest of blue experiences, in the guise of a scholarly, metaphysical and emotional enchantment with one particular hue. “Each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent,” Nelson writes of her affinity for the color, which she began to see everywhere.