The not very wonderful Wizard of Oz, said of the people of Oz that the 'people have been wearing green glasses on their eyes for so long that most of them think this really is an Emerald City.' That means to say that the actual colour of the Emerald City is not really green (and in fact Dorothy points that out) but that the perception that it is, is stronger than reality.
As this is an road trip through a world that I have constructed (poorly) in my mind, then your perception can only be determined by what I tell you. How real this world is, depends on my ability to communicate it to you. The underlying problem is that I think that I have the ability to communicate things that I can not physically perceive, or perhaps maybe used to be able to but now can not.
The Citta d'Scarletti is a city built almost entirely out of red brick; with red terracotta roof tiles and where the streets are paved not with cobble stones but large blonde bricks.
The streets are so narrow that vehicular traffic only flows in one way and while this might be annoying, this is more than compensated for by there being manicured grass courtyards at the middle of every single building. Rather than buildings where the apartments are built around the lift wells and corridors so that the citzens look outwards and away from each other, people's balconies look towards the centre of the courtyards and towards each other.
Now you might think that I have conveyed the impression that I can imagine a quaint little Italian style city which is various shades of crimson but the truth is that I do not know if I can imagine crimson or even if I ever could.
I am old enough to remember having a black and white television in our house. If you are watching through an achromatic screen, then there are no such things as colours. It makes watching an Australian Rules football match between Hawthorn and Collingwood very difficult as they both play in dark and light stripes. It also makes watching Liverpool versus Everton difficult but at least there, Liverpool's all red kit is in partial contrast to Everton's blue kit with white shorts. Both of them look grey on a black and white television.
There is a further complication in that I am red-green colorblind and as best as I can describe it, I think that the world looks to me as it would to you watching a PAL broadcast on an NTSC 4.33 television. Reds are brown? I literally have no idea what you can see. The irony here is that I am a Liverpool fan; so I can not see the same red as you.
I didn't know that I was colourblind at all until my mid 20s and by chance one of our clients who was a medical officer at a naval base, just happened to be carrying one of those books with the coloured dot pictures in it. Naturally as someone who is colourblind, I could see a 9 instead of a 47, or a picture of a house instead of a horse, and so I found out then that I was in fact colourblind.
All of this leads me to an interesting question. Am I better or worse off for knowing that I am colourblind, considering that if I didn't know then I also wouldn't have known to know that there is a difference? Alternatively, how does one describe any colour to someone who is completely blind and therefore has no perception of any of them?
It is a bit like waking up on a Tuesday and saying that 'it feels like a Wednesday'. What then does Wednesday feel like? How do you ascribe a feeling to an entirely arbitrary concept like Wednesday?
We are walking around the Citta d'Scarletti, not because it is necessarily anything special (though it does reveal that I like the idea of really small and cramped cities) but rather because it is a red city, I don't know if I can actually imagine what colour it is, even though I can kind of play the trick if describing roofs that are the colour of strawberries, fire engines, cinnamon bread, and the Pink Panther.
I think that I would be like the people of the Emerald City in the merry old land of Oz and I wouldn't even need to be wearing green tinted glasses all of the time.
We shall be staying at the Piazza d'Aqua Minerale and the Alessandro Nannini Hotel.
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