Pullman's Recursive Vision

Look at what Pullman is doing in that shimmer passage: "The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else." Every word about the method is visual – the language of seeing, gazing, looking. But what he's actually describing? That's auditory architecture: resonance, temporal duration, harmonics that exist in time and die when you try to freeze them. Sound hovers. Sound shimmers with overtones. Sound bursts when you grab at it. Vision doesn't do any of this – vision gives you frozen frames, spatial arrangements, things you can stare at. So as you read his passage, Pullman is giving you the resonance of describing an auditory way of being, in visual terms – like making a pun between sensorial architectures.