Description
Book SynopsisMirages have long astonished travellers and beguiled thirsty desert voyagers. Chinese and Japanese poetry and images depicted mirages as the exhalations of clam-monsters. Indian sources related them to the `thirst of gazelles', a metaphor for the futility of desire. From the late eighteenth century to the present, mirages became a symbol of `Oriental despotism', a malign, but also enchanted, emblem. But the mirage motif is rarely simply condemnatory. More commonly it conveys a sense of escape, of fascination, of a desire to be deceived. The Waterless Sea is the first book devoted to the theories and history of mirages. Christopher Pinney navigates a sinuous pathway through a mysterious and evanescent terrain, showing how mirages have impacted politics, culture, science, and religion, and how we can continue to learn from their sublimity.
Trade Review`This is both a study of the mirage as a subject of scholarship and a profound meditation on its paradoxical form as a true illusion . . . Itself written as if in the style of a mirage, this is a beautifully conceived work that philosophises the visible.'- Faisal Devji, University of Oxford; `An extraordinary tour of the union of refraction and the imagination.'- Jonathan Lamb, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee; "Pinney's erudite and highly readable account of the mirage is a scintillating journey through more than just an ephemeral intangibility. It is a substantial history of the sublime as it is refracted on the surface of what remains enchanted, mysterious and strange.'- Omar W. Nasim, University of Regensburg
