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Storm-Cloud
A performance lecture in 39 fragments, responding to Ruskin’s 'The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century 'through contemporary practice. Part research, part provocation, part weather report.
Preface
THE following lectures, drawn up under the pressure of more imperative and quite otherwise directed work, contain many passages which...
1. I Mean Simply What I Have Said
LET me first assure my audience that I have no arrière pensée in the title chosen for this lecture. I might, indeed, have meant, and it...
2. The Existing Evidence
So far as the existing evidence, I say, of former literature can be interpreted, the storm-cloud—or more accurately plague-cloud, for it...
3. In Those Old Days
In those old days, when weather was fine, it was luxuriously fine; when it was bad—it was often abominably bad, but it had its fit of...
4. Divine Power
In the entire system of the Firmament, thus seen and understood, there appeared to be, to all the thinkers of those ages, the...
5. A Passage About Clouds
You will not think I waste your time in giving you two cardinal examples of the sort of evidence which the higher forms of literature...
6. A Sunrise from Byron
With this bit of noonday from Homer, I will read you a sunset and a sunrise from Byron. That will enough express to you the scope and...
7. The Account of Clouds that are
Thus much, then, of the skies that used to be, and clouds “more lovely than the unclouded sky,” and of the temper of their observers. I...
8. A Cloud is Where you See it
That is the first idea you have to get well into your minds concerning the abodes of this visible vapour; next, you have to consider the...
9. A Cloud is Vapour Visible
That, I say, is broadly and comfortably so on the whole,—and yet with this kind of qualification and farther condition in the matter. If...
10. The State of a Particle of Water
Then the next bit of the question, of course, is, What makes the vapour visible, when it is so? Why is the compressed steam transparent,...
11. Scientific People
And here I must parenthetically give you a little word of, I will venture to say, extremely useful, advice about scientific people in...
12. Mist
I go back to my point—the way in which clouds, as a matter of fact, become visible. I have defined the floating or sky cloud, and defined...
13. Thick Air
I put the question—and pass round to the other side. Such a clearness, though a certain forerunner of rain, is not always its forerunner....
14. Aqueous Vapour
I suppose the thick air, as well as the transparent, is in both cases saturated with aqueous vapour;—but also in both, observe, vapour...
15. Monastic Disciplines of Cloud
Hitherto I have spoken of all aqueous vapour as if it were either transparent or white—visible by becoming opaque like snow, but not by...
16. What Colour From Sunshine
Admitting degrees of darkness, we have next to ask what colour from sunshine can the white cloud receive, and what the black? You won’t...
17. When the Cloud is Transparent
But when the cloud is transparent as well as pure, and can be filled with light through all the body of it, you then can have by the...
18. The Lustre of the Cloudy Ones
No colours that can be fixed in earth can ever represent to you the lustre of these cloudy ones. But the actual tints may be shown you in...
19. Prismatic Cloud
But now note, there is another kind of cloud, pure white, and exquisitely delicate; which acts not by reflecting, nor by refracting, but,...
20. Ice Clouds
This second diagram is enlarged admirably by Mr. Arthur Severn from my sketch of the sky in the afternoon of the 6th of August, 1880, at...
21. Between the Spectator and the Sun
Enough, however, is here done to fix in your minds the distinction between those two species of cloud,—one, either stationary, or slow in...
22. Frightful Innacuracy of Scientiifc People
The main reason, however, why I can tell you nothing yet about these colours of diffraction or interference, is that, whenever I try to...
23. Sensations of the Animal Frame
Yet observe that in thus signalizing the inaccuracy of the terms in which they are taught, I neither accept, nor assail, the conclusions...
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