Is twilight a spectacle? Twilight is scenography. Grazing the river, it is a tender, reddish sword; in the darkening fields, it is the shadow of a red eagle; in the turrets of an ancient city, it is a gargoyle tinged with purple; in the sea, it is another sea, volcanically fused; vanishing in the distance of the broad avenues of capitals, it is a tournament of specters glowing bright on a stellar television. Do we feel alone? More, we feel ourselves. Twilight is a spectacle in the mode of a classical tragedy; a spectacle that casts us into the deepest well of the spirit.
Some time ago, in the drawing room, they finished taking their tea. The conversation was light, voluble, sensible, and trivial; a soft touch of light on the skin of smooth water that quivers and shines. Punctually – the window panes have just begun to redden – the girl comes in announcing: ‘Sir, the twilight’. Mr John Ruskin, writer, stands up and goes out to the garden, to witness the slow spectacle of transfiguration.
This other gentleman – perhaps not so different in age – had a rather more active vision of twilight. There is a special, extremely fleeting moment during sundown; on a river, the light blesses the poplars. The poplars are slender, and hold aloft a grille of soft bark and branches and mobile bare leaves. The leaves are green; the sky is deep blue; the twilight is red and ochre. But the eye, at the center of the twilight, communes with a confused and total and transitory apotheosis of splendors.
Fifteen minutes. We have only fifteen minutes of this brilliance that binds the poplars and the twilight. Fifteen minutes at this time of year, then everything goes blurry and black. This gentleman comes every day to see the poplars at the same fleeting and sublime hour. He comes in a fisherman’s boat; but it is not a boat like others. It has, scattered inside it, strange contraptions, easel, paintbrushes, colours, an artist’s utensils. In 1891, Claude Monet, painter, looked, from one day to the next, at this strange fluvial artifact, the fugitive splendor of the poplars during the final fifteen minutes of twilight.
Painting is an art of the instant; the poem is an art of the instant. Monet’s poplars are now in New York. In this inaugural moment of summer, after looking at them for a moment, a poet – Octavio Paz – has fixed in verse the moment Monet fixed on canvas. Words, colours: mirages that glide and flee. No: still light of what lives in consciousness, like the memory of the clarity of twilight after the full arrival of night.
19 August 1980