On September 27, 1901, the New-York Tribune’s front page headlines opened themselves to readers chastely, in a font that seemed to connote a paired purity of sight and thought. If this above-the-fold item, for instance, had been mediated for reading by a didactic font like Comic Sans, it might feel unfinished in the absence of a terminating exclamation mark. The readers on whom Comic Sans has its designs are the kind of readers who need to be guided toward what they ought to feel.But as of 1901 the Tribune’s headlines were in a neoclassicizing font designed in 1798 by Giambattista Bodoni, and when the muse of journalism displayed herself garbed in Bodoni’s upright verticals and delicate serifs, she became a Canova nymph, all whiteness and purity around armatures of the cleanest black.

On this particular page, another pure Bodoni headline is accompanied by an equally pure photograph of the two yachts then racing for the America’s Cup. The photograph, however, derives its form from a different geometry. There, set off by Bodoni’s contrasting orthogonals, the British Shamrock and the American Columbia curve along diagonals laid out for them not by the logics of grammar or the copybooks of typography but by a wordless wind.

In the event which Bodoni proceeded to enter in the historical record on September 27, the wind died and the race ended without a winner. But after the wind revived, one more photograph signifying velocity by means of curvature was published in a different, Bodoni-free medium. It looked like this.

On behalf of the record book, the caption in the photograph’s lower margin carries out language’s task of exposition and explanation. It is printed a little crooked, but here that doesn’t matter. Even if it were straight, sight and understanding wouldn’t want to remain within its bounds for an instant longer than the necessary minimum. Along the margin, sight and understanding and all the rest of our powers come together, wanting in unison to stop reading, look back upward, and resume their flight toward seeing. There, waiting in the upward to be seen, is what we think we are beginning to love: this curved body in intimate contact with the water and the sky of our world, our own answering body.

The body’s image is black and white, but it evokes a content we understand to be in color. Forty-six years before the photograph was taken, Walt Whitman explained to us why that is. Look how motion travels through time and then comes to rest as color, said Whitman.

The schooner near by sleepily dropping down the tide, the little boat slack-tow’d astern,
The hurrying tumbling waves, quick-broken crests, slapping,
The strata of color’d clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint away solitary by itself, the spread of purity it lies motionless in.

In a new, permanent, Bodoni black and white, the maroon bar in its spread of purity has returned. It stands as an exception to the rule of body’s death. In the archive of words printed in black on white, its tint lives ever after.

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Columbia was the property of J. P. Morgan, a pragmatically imaginative man who is alleged to have said about the cost of owning a yacht, “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.” Walt Whitman, who was poor all his life, couldn’t afford it. But in 1855 he did give this form from 1901 one of the names through which we can come to understand it: the name purity. There in the photograph are Whitman’s cloud and pure light. There too, in the bronze hull conceived and formed by the naval architect Nathanael Herreshoff, one curve at the bow poses the idea of forward in the infinitesimal just before motion begins, while at the stern another curve mimes a girl throwing her legs backward behind her as she runs.

Of course this large-crewed sailing craft and its governing geometries of wave and sky and running are obsolete now, and of course time has updated them. In 2015, for example, another New York headline gave warning of changing weather over the yacht harbor. “Volatility Is Prompting Hedge Funds To Close,” said the bulletin. The body of the story then went into barometric detail about a special and beautiful sense of the verb close. Within the curved hull of the hedgy episteme, as it turns out, close no longer has to mean end or die. Closed, the hedge funds will merely ascend in their function from serving investors to serving the money that the now vanished investors have left behind. What gives the closed funds their newly perennial life is a preparation of the if-you-have-to-ask that has been reacted all the way to fully theoretical completion. J. P. Morgan, in his youth an excellent mathematician who could extract cube roots in his head, would entirely have approved the change from the impurity of life in the world of men to the purity of death in the idea of money.

In sunset-colored Bodoni, then, let us pay homage to those in the yacht harbor who have been changed. Speaking through the mouth of one of its hedgy oracles, change now teaches us this about its purpose in the universe.

Purity, say transformation’s pink words to themselves. Whitman’s cloud and Nathanael Herreshoff’s hull geometry weren’t pure enough. They were accessible only by means of the senses, of the changing, dying body. By contrast, the hedge fund’s one-man contemplative order subserves nothing that is not unchanging. In that sense of the term classical, it is as classical as Bodoni’s font, or as the Grecian urn which once explained to Keats, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.” If we’re to admit the imperfect to our own contemplation, we’ll have to notice at first that the pink hedgewords floating above these black words of my own do seem to look ugly. But looks are precisely what purity is not about. The purity of speculative contemplation is a purity which has transcended the bodily function of seeing. It is a pink idea that has gone fully and perfectly invisible. It will never again have to tint the vapor of a mere physical cloud at sunset.

Sources:

The page from the New-York Tribune is online in the Library of Congress’s archive of historic American newspapers, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/. Whitman’s poem is “There Was a Child Went Forth.” The photograph of Columbia has been photoshopped from the image in the Library of Congress at www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det1994001160/PP/.

The newspaper article from 2015 is Alexandra Stevenson, “Volatility Is Prompting Hedge Funds to Close,” New York Times 18 May 2015: B1-2 (print). The name of the hedge-fund contemplative is Gideon King.