An Orchestra of Shapes and Colors

I wonder if anyone imagined anything like this when Vivaldi wrote "The Four Seasons" (if you're wondering, no, I didn't recognize it exactly, but I suspected Vivaldi...). I remember standing in the yard as a child conducting an imaginary orchestra of moving shapes and colors, but never anything so elaborate.



Then I thought back to Advanced Shakespeare class and our study of Falstaff. He is thought of as one of Shakespeare's funniest characters, yet when a class of 21st century college students read his words, none of us found them particularly funny. Our professor went on to explain that we don't find Falstaff all that funny because he is making fun of a life which moves quickly from one thing to another. We modern Americans didn't understand the humor because our lives move so quickly that we hardly notice the speed. They had never seen, for example, a television show that jumped instantly from scene to scene, face to face. The point is, they couldn't imagine a reality where things move quickly from one thing to another, and we now live in that very reality.

So, with that in mind, I got to wondering whether children a hundred or two hundred years ago would have imagined my orchestra of shapes and colors. I live in a world where such things are possible, at least in digital format, and the idea of objects (other than birds) flying and floating through the air has been normal for nearly a century. Perhaps my mind took what it had observed and changed it into something a little more fanciful. Could a mind that never saw an airplane, or a shuttle launch, or fireworks, or pictures of satellites drifting through space imagine that same thing? Or would it be limited by what it had observed?