'The Drab Shoelace of H'

A friend with a much-cherished case of synesthesia tells me my surname is brown – “the color of The Band’s second album.” I envy him. Like Nabokov, he is gifted with grapheme-color synesthesia, in which letters and their combinations come in colors. As if the visual world weren’t already sumptuous enough, a veritable Matisse painting, Steve sees letters and words as daubs on a palette. “K” on its own, he says, is consistently brown. Some of the remaining letters shift colors depending on context. Rimbaud wrote about it in "Voyelles."

Almost eighteen years ago I wrote a freelance story about synesthesia in which I described it as “an artful and harmless merging of the senses.” After the story was published, I heard from several people who had the condition or wished they did. All were eager to talk about it. For other lucky people, music arrives with colors.

In chapter 2 of Speak, Memory, Nabokov devotes several pages to his synesthesia, including a color key for each letter:  

“The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) has for me the tint of weathered wood, but the French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites.”

He continues, reveling in his gift:

“In the green group, there are alder-leaf f, the unripe apple of p, and pistachio t. Dull green, combined somehow with violet, is the best I can do for w. The yellows comprise various e’s and i’s, creamy d, bright-golden y, and u, whose alphabetical value I can express only by ‘brassy with an olive sheen.’ In the brown group, there are the rich rubbery tone of soft g, paler j, and the drab shoelace of h.”