From Orion:
In “Kodachrome,” Paul Simon sings, “Everything looks worse in black and white.” While I don’t entirely agree—penguins, polar bears, early Hitchcock films, and a December day in Gray’s River would all suffer from colorization—I happily echo his sentiments when he sings, “Give us those nice, bright colors.” Or, as Cézanne put it, “Long live those who have the love of color—true representatives of light and air!” I find no conflict between this view and my penchant for hoary hues.
Some people, when they discover that color vision is not general in mammals, feel bad for their pooches and pussycats. Yet our pets know nothing beyond their limited chromaticism, and even if they did, I’m not sure they would swap the exquisite sensitivity of their smell and hearing for what they might regard as the cheap trick of a parti-colored existence. Of the subtle range of perception they achieve through their noses and ears, we know nothing more than they know of our near-deaf progress through a colorful world. We haven’t even a word for nose-blindness! Yet anyone who reads Henry Williamson’s classic Tarka the Otter or Daniel Mannix’s The Fox and the Hound will apprehend something of our mammoth ignorance of these alternative sensory systems.
And what about the colorblind of our own species? Should we feel sorry for them?
More here.