Silhouettes

I drive past this tree every day, and it catches my eye almost every time. Curling, intricate, lacy, the branches etch a beautiful and complex pattern against the sky.

Cave drawings may have been the earliest silhouettes created by people, but the word itself wasn't coined until the 18th century. There is general agreement that Étienne de Silhouette gave his name to the stark outline art form, originally thought of as a cut-out representation of people's heads and now given the broader sense of a black shape against a light background. Silhouette was a French finance minister who, to cope with a budget imbalance, implemented austerity measures that history records as "unpopular" (which means that the people who wrote history didn't like these measures): he taxed the rich to pay for the government's debt. It is unclear if the silhouette was named after Étienne because it was an austere or inexpensive portrait, or if he was in fact a practitioner of the art form.

There is something eye-catching about silhouettes. I took the picture above of Amy and Rebecca through a tent at the Guilford Fair a couple years ago.

Words, too, are a kind of silhouette. The letters are dark marks on a light surface, and they quite literally "speak to us." And the words they form provide us an outline of the writer's thoughts, leaving it up to us, the readers, to fill in the meaning.