INTRODUCTION
We should begin by such a parting light
To write the story of all ages past
And end the same before the coming night …
Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘The Ocean’s Love to Cynthia’ (c. 1590s)
The owl of Minerva begins to fly only at dusk.
G.W.F. Hegel, preface to Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1820)
Last night the storms passed over in the dark to leave this borrowed day of stillness and bright air. The barley is harvested now and the long slopes above the house are pale with stubble. It is cold by the end of the afternoon, colder still in the thin wind as I climb out above the shelter of the hawthorns, where the track bends right towards the farm, and the mountains on the western horizon come into view. This walk comes earlier every day, as the year hurries down towards the dark. I press on ahead up the stubble field until the whole broad valley lies below me, with the wider landscape spread beyond it. The black hill above Cullen, then the receding shadows of the greater hills that begin beyond Huntly, fading into distances and cloud.
To the south is the outriding mountain of Bennachie, with its row of rocky teeth that gave the ridge its Celtic name, ‘The Mountain of the Comb’. That name became the ‘Graupius’ of Mons Graupius, the place where the legions were defeated, the northernmost point that the Roman Empire reached on land. So I stand on shadowed slopes, on the bare shoulder of the hill, outside the old boundaries of Empire, on the far margin of Europe.
The lime-white castle of the Jacobite Hays closes the valley to the south, its woods curving about it, huge beeches washed with umber as autumn takes hold. There is a bonfire among the plantations, one straight column of rising smoke. The castle wavers and dissolves behind it. Across the tawny land, with the last rolls of straw in the fields, there is a scatter of stone farm-towns, each with its hedges and tree. Our house is invisible on its ancient site in the valley bottom, folded into the sheltering flank of the hill, lost in its grove. There is something secretive still about these remote landscapes of old rebellion – Lancashire, Aberdeenshire – the places that held out against all the revolutions, religious, industrial and glorious alike. The castle guards its own ‘dark corner of the land’, with the Jesuit badge still carved over the fireplace in its great hall, part of a furtive culture of codes, ciphers and allusions. To the north the slopes fold into dimness and away into cloud massing over the coast.
The sun is far into the west now: the mountains to the south have gone to flat grey and leaden blue. The farmland in the valley at my feet is sinking into the shadows. Only the western ranges hold the light. The sky above them is faint azure with a thin glaze of yellow laid over it, spreading up from the horizon. However hard I stare, shading my eyes against the sun balanced on the rim of the mountains, I can’t see where gold gives way to blue. John Ruskin laboured all his life in the attempt to describe the almost indefinable colours of a clear western sky, coming in the end to rest on the beautiful form of words that fixes the thing as nearly as it can be defined: ‘transparent blue passing into gold’.1
The sun sinks below the nearest peak. Deep in the distant hills, mountain slopes and high grasslands are flooded in gold. Looking westwards over the darkened fields towards this transient, bright kingdom, I am seized by an unreasoned longing to be there in that unreachable, temporary paradise at the frontier of the day. I know that it will fade when the sun goes below the mountains and the cold flows down with the evening wind. But, for this one moment, that last territory of the light seems to draw into itself every longing for travel that I have ever felt and every longing for home.
How little resistance we have to these longings that come with evening: the vague yearning for the place we haven’t come to yet, or the place that we have left without hope of return. Belated longing for journeys in time as much as place. The melancholy of Europe evoked at the opening of Angela Carter’s Black Venus: ‘Sad; so sad those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart … the time of impotent yearning, the inconsolable season.’2 Why do we respond to these words with such an emotion of recognition? Is it because we are predisposed to do so by our personal histories, our educations, the inherited cultures that we share? The great origin myth of the west is Virgil’s tale of the voyage of the Trojan refugee Aeneas towards a promised home in the lands below the sunset, and the disappointments and losses that haunt him even in Hesperia. Is it the condition of the European ‘evening-land’ to see life itself as exile – hoc exilium – felt anew with the fall of every dusk?
We turned from the rail with a sigh, aware that the light was sifting away into darkness, as casually as the plumes of smoke from the funnel of the ship that carried us. We had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time – those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.3
Thus Lawrence Durrell, travelling through places at the root of the European arts, on the voyage from Cyprus to Venice. Through the centuries, European culture has, to some degree, felt itself to be an after-culture, a broken culture of shadow and echo. All times after the lost, bright world of Greece and Rome are ‘twilight ages’. Those who lived in the overshadowed world after the fall of the Western Empire had to look back to the full sunlight of antiquity for wisdom in every field of human endeavour – medicine, poetry, law. The great humanist endeavour of the Renaissance was in essence the piecing together of the scattered fragments of the works of the ancients, even amid an awareness that much was lost beyond recovery. For a thousand years Europe has readily accepted the old idea of the constant decay and dimming of the world. This has affected almost everything. It is only the generals and dictators who proclaimed in action and architecture that they had re-made the glories of the Romans. The age of gold declines to our age of iron, and exile and shadow are the undersong of our histories. Our own age too can readily be seen as a spoiled and darkening one, littered with a tidewrack of failing monuments to the hopes of post-war Europe.
By Christian tradition, too, Europe has seen itself as defined by twilight: the twilight of the scattered, fallen world as opposed to the ordered, sunlit garden from which humanity is exiled. The light of our brightest day is but a shadow of the sun before the fall. The Anglo-Saxon Lives of Adam and Eve assert that the light of the world that we humans inhabit is but one-seventh of the light of the otherworld of Eden. Like twilight, the whole human condition is thus conceived as occupying a halfway point between a greater light and a greater darkness. Throughout the long Middle Ages twilight was also a time of unease, the antechamber to the night, the time to solicit supernatural protection. In Beowulf, it is at nightfall that the monster Grendel emerges from the outland of the black mere, to approach the human world:
Sceaduhelma gesceapu scríđn cwόman Wan under wolcnum.4
and stealthy night-shapes came stealing forth under the cloud-mirk …5
It is on the threshold of the night that the hymn for Vespers weaves its web of protection around the threatened house:
Procul recedant somnia
et noctium phantasmata …6
May evil dreams and the phantoms of the night be kept far away from us …
The word ‘exile’ resounds through the western liturgy, bearing the idea that the only lasting home that humanity can know is in the far garden, the celestial city.
The first lights appear far below in the windows of the scattered farmhouses. How yellow the lamplight shines in this fading world of slate-blue, smoke and umber, of the last light held in the margins of the clouds, as Ruskin remembered them, ‘their edges burnished by the sun like the edges of golden shields, and their advancing march is as deliberate and majestic as the fading of the twilight itself into a darkness full of stars’.7 Twilight can be thought of also as the time of tranquillity and return, when all things scattered by the day are drawn back to their right places. Sappho thought of the dusk, of the benign evening star as a guardian of the homeward way:
Bringing the flocks homeward,
Bringing the child home to its mother.8
Evening paradises can be located on earth in the southern European imagination: slanting sunlight on groves of orange trees. The evening heavens of the north have to be elsewheres, like the slopes that have now darkened among the mountains to the west: imagined in far hills or in the sunset clouds.
In the south of Europe, any clement evening draws forth whole populations to thread familiar routes through streets, squares and cafes; to stroll together, greeting colleagues and friends, tracing patterns of connection under those colonnades, those avenues of palms or bitter oranges that seem barely imaginable to me now, alone in the cold on this Scottish hillside, as the day dwindles to a yellow line on the western horizon.
Yet only a month ago, I was standing on another hill, in dusty warmth of late summer. Late August thunderstorms had broken the suffocating heat of the Veneto, although the chestnut trees along the slopes were brown from long drought. The afternoon was still hot during the walk up the slope to the Villa Valmarana, fallen figs in the dust underfoot, hazelnuts and chestnuts ripening along the road. But the heat had faded while we had been in the main villa, and I had paused for a moment in the box garden at the end of the detached guest wing to look across to the sanctuary of Monte Berico. The gravel and walls were still hot in the evening sun; the tunnels of hornbeams between villa and guest wing were turning shabby, withering for lack of rain. The fountain in front of Neptune in his great niche was dry.
The view out over the valley with its olives and vines below was still of the Italy of Ruskin, even of Goethe, for all the prosperous modern villas hidden discreetly amongst the trees. Slopes of hanging woodland, the ilexes amongst them still inky green. The dome and bell-tower of the sanctuary clear against the softening light. Smoke from a garden fire hanging against azure fading to white, blurring the sharp outlines of the cypresses along the ridges of the hills.
I was trying to make sense of the frescoes by the Tiepolo family in villa and guest house, when three strokes of the bell sounded three times across the valley. It is hard to account for the choices of subject for these wonderful painted rooms. The frescoes in the pallazina (the villa itself) are by the eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo. They are justly celebrated for their uncanny virtuosity, for the painted cloud hovering in front of the feigned columns in the entrance hall, defying sight and reason it its apparent reality. The four ground-floor rooms are painted with scenes from European epic – Iliad and Aeneid, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Tasso’s crusading epic Jerusalem Liberated – yet the cumulative effect of a thoughtful visit is a kind of disquieted melancholy. A puzzled sense lingers that something is wrong despite the accomplishment and beauty of the paintings themselves, their palette so fine that it is as though the figures and the architectures and landscapes through which they move were shaped out of late-afternoon sunlight, rather than simply being lit by it. It is very difficult to follow the choice of episodes to be depicted – the series is possibly linked by the theme of the greatest heroes conquered by love, conquered by desire. But the result seems to convey an insistence on the idea of decline, to show great heroes at their moments of greatest weakness.
The bell had started a train of thought of its own, moving below the conscious surface of the mind, surfacing only as the words ‘now and at the hour of our death’ formed on my lips. The Angelus bell sounds out of the deep time of Europe, the ancient divisions of the day. The ringing of the bell at six is not only a call to brief prayer and recollection of the Annunciation, it is also a pivot between afternoon and evening, the point where the mind turns to the liberty after the day’s work, to the cooler hours after the heat of afternoon. It is an echo turned outwards to secular society of the intense reckoning and marking of the hours of the day in the lives of the religious orders. Their daily pattern of observance – the prayer of the hours in matins, vespers, compline – is a time-capsule preserving the human day as it was perceived in the first millennium. Public time in the Middle Ages and Renaissance was communal, marked by church bells, and later by public sundials and clocks. Much of that ended when the pocket watch became widely affordable and, at least in the north of Europe, one of the consequences of modernity is that there is barely a sense of shared progress through the day. Rush hours are left as the only markers of common humanity. Time is now privatized and specific to the individual. In the south, the Angelus bell and the later passeggiata, that spontaneous and universal movement into the central streets of the town, keeping the visible fabric of society in repair by weaving through the crowds of friends and connections, look back in different ways to coherent and communal uses of evening.
Six o’clock, so they will be closing the great gates of the villa in a moment. But it strikes me, at this end of afternoon in the box garden between the palazzina and the foresteria, that I am also standing within a historical perception of twilight. Between the failing heroes in the villa and the elegant transience of the contemporary scenes painted in the guest-wing by Tiepolo’s son Giandomenico is what we could call ‘Horatian’ time, the Roman poet Horace’s sombre perception of a world declining into evening as each generation goes down one further degree on its long slope. We are worse than our parents and the next generation will be worse still.
Did Count Giustino Valmarana, who commissioned both sequences of frescoes in the last year of his life, feel a public or civic decline from the brightness of the heroic world to the deepening twilight of his own day? Nos nequiores – certainly, the Venice of 1756 was not the Venice of 1571. Perhaps it was he who chose the subjects for the painted rooms: in the hall on the axis of the house Agamemnon hides his face, weak enough to sacrifice his daughter for a favourable wind. Achilles sits shadowed in the feigned architecture of the first room, sulking over the distribution of slaves, turning his back on his goddess mother rising from her native sea. Aeneas weeps and covers his eyes as Mercury orders him to set destiny before love. After too long, Tasso’s hero Rinaldo says farewell to the enchantress Armida, in a composition dominated by dust-rose and purple draperies against powdery grey cliffs, the very colours of the Mediterranean twilight. Overall, there is a post-baroque sense that it is late in the day, late in everybody’s day, and even the heroes of the dawn of the world and the paladins of the crusades had already within them the seeds of the decline. Everything is old, everything is complicated. However beautiful it all is, it is moving to evening and its end.
A different kind of disquiet attends the rooms in the guest house, the foresteria, a sense of the passing moment of the eighteenth century caught in paint, of the transience of fairground and carnival, even of the pathos of fashion considered as a marker of the passage of time, when there are no larger events to mark it. So many figures turn away from the spectator. A great evening cloud overshadows the landscape behind the rustic lovers. The last room has fairground scenes in feigned picture frames. Here, almost all the figures have their backs to us and those that turn towards us are masked. They are crowding round something that we cannot see – a peepshow in a box, in the speech of the time, a new world. We can only imagine what they see in this Mondo nuovo – the title itself is at once sad and faintly menacing in this context of a crowd in disguise under a chalky evening sky, whose minimal washes also suggest sands at low tide and an empty sea. Is the new world in the box geographical or temporal? Does it offer a hint of the world that comes after the old world has run to its end?
As the great gates close behind us, and we walk past the statue-crowned gateposts opposite the villa with a tangled, deep-shadowed grove behind them, I think that everything that we have just seen belongs to the last years before the wars of Empire and the neoclassical revival resulted in a conformist seriousness about antiquity and enforced, for a time at least, the outward expression of belief in a new dawn.
Detail from Giandomenico Tiepolo, The New World, 1791, fresco formerly in the Villa Zianigo in the Veneto.
Hazels and chestnut trees, limewashed walls giving out heat as the air cools. Maize fields and drainage ditches, olives and vines. Sky dust-white, then purple for ten minutes, then dark.
HOW DIFFERENT FROM the abrupt, purple dusk of Italy the slow death of the northern daylight is, with its whitish-yellow light now faded behind the western mountains. No wonder that the long twilight is the particular obsession of the north of Europe. One of the surest ways of defining the mind of the north is to define it in terms of light: prodigality of light in the white nights of summer, paucity of light in the dark of the year. And the slow blues of the twilights between them with the lamps coming on one by one.
The 60th parallel takes on an importance here as the meridian of those latitudes that experience a distinctly northern pattern of light. Territories lying ten degrees to either side of the 60th parallel, to a greater or lesser degree, know those extremes of light and dark and, crucially, those twilights that shape and define the north of Europe. Long evenings and protracted sunsets stretch from about 50 degrees to 70 degrees. Northern winter days that end in damp and frozen air: ash and rose and crimson over the cities, grey and gold over the remote provinces.
Beyond 70 degrees the north is the frontline in the battle of the light and the dark. Thinking about the arts of the north, the 60th parallel is nearly a centre-line: from 50 to 74 degrees might be said to encompass the inhabited north, all places where awareness of light is not only essential and formative, but the foundation of modes of feeling that find expression in all the arts, but most especially the visual arts.
These latitudes are the realms of the twilight: all these territories have some degree of twilight rather than darkness all through the night at midsummer. The white nights – a wonderfully precise phrase, evoking the lighted but colourless sky of the evenings when the summer sun is setting almost due north, before the cobalt midnight and the dawn out of the north. To the north of all this (north across the skerries and the islands, far beyond the reflected simmer dim of the Shetlands and the Faeroes) are the lucid midnights of Tromsø and their dark opposite, snow falling through lightless air through the murk-tide of winter. Arctic north, absolute north, is simply defined in the absolute of light and dark.
South of the 50th parallel are the territories of true darkness at midsummer, the year-round equipoise of night and day, short twilights, the noonday demon of the August sun. Heat and light are the enemy here in the malign brilliance of high summer, and the cooler hours of darkness – la madrugada – are the time of release and pleasure. So the history of twilight has also a geography focused on those places where twilight is inevitably a mode of feeling as well as a natural phenomenon. ‘No twilight’, said Coleridge, ‘within the courts of the sun’.
The words for twilight – dusk, half-light and crepuscule – should concern us too:
Dusk. In Greek, the dusk is metaphorically lykόphŏs, ‘wolf-light’, which I have also heard in Austria (Wolflicht). In French it is entre chien et loup (between dog and wolf) – the dogs have knocked off barking for the day: the wolves are about to start howling. There was an English saying ‘dark as a wolf’s mouth’, where ‘mouth’ may originally have been the wolf’s month, the perpetual dusk of January.
In French, dusk is also l’heure du berger, the shepherd’s hour, when l’Étoile du berger, the shepherd’s, or evening star, Venus, steals into the sky. It sounds ‘romantic’ (and the ‘shepherd’s hour’ is held to be auspicious for lovers), but of course dusk, when the wolves were about, was exactly when the shepherd (with his dog) had to be at his most watchful, and when all things were ‘between dog and wolf’ in another sense.9 In the northern latitudes of twilight, where midwinter can feel like something near to victory for the dark, the fall of the long night is a time of anxiety:
It is, all in all, an edgy time of day. In Latin it is crepusculum, and in English once was ‘crepuscle’. It and other derivatives – like the adjective ‘crepuscular’ – have now fallen largely out of use, as has ‘the gloaming’, a word of Scandinavian origin corresponding in literal meaning, though not in richness of association, to the French-Canadian la brunante, which sounds like something from cookery. ‘Crepuscle’, to English ears, is a bit creepy, and ‘the gloaming’ has echoes of doom and glumness.
Crepusculum also carries a sense of doubt. Creperae, in Latin, were ‘doubtful matters’, ‘because dusk’, Varro tells us in one of his strongest etymologies, ‘is a time when to many it is doubtful whether it is even yet day or is already night’.10
And always shade and shadow are ambiguous, however much they may be words of refuge and consolation in the heat of the south. And overshadowed is always attended by undertones of menace and defeat, from an individual under suspicion to a whole community living as internal exiles, or mistrusted second-class citizens.11
The last brightness has moved far west beyond the Cairngorms. As I make my way down the hill, glad to move out of the wind into the shelter of the hawthorns, a purpose grows clear in my mind: to follow the longings of the ‘evening lands’ through history and trace their twilight arts. If I do this – if it can be done – I will also gather together, out of those shadows, the scattered recollections of my own paradoxical education as a European in both the Scottish north and the Mediterranean south.
The noise of water is on my left in the gloom under the thorn hedge – the little burn running off the hill. In upland northern places you are seldom out of earshot of moving water, a sure guide down a slope in fading light. From halfway down the track, I can see into the farmyard along the valley. A tractor must have switched on its headlights to move a few bales into the big shed, the last job of the day. It is so far into the evening now that artificial light shines with an intense gold, yellowed by contrast, against the colourless fields and the greys and blues that linger in the sky.
As the tractor shifts about, different parts of the farmyard are lit up by the warm light, as clear as a stage seen from high up in the gallery. Light catches eighteenth-century rough stone from when there was a linen mill on the site and the big pond at the bottom of our garden held the head of water to power it. The headlights move across nineteenth-century dressed ashlar from the days of model farming as the recreation of the man who planted these beeches and ash trees to shelter and hide his new-built house. Light rests on worn textures – the scoured paint of the big corrugated iron sheds that were added in the twentieth century, when the whole valley went back to small-scale farming. Colours of the post-war years: rust-flaked Indian red, unkempt Brunswick green. Glimpses into the workshop shed with its wooden bench and oil drums against limewashed stone. There are still leaves on the trees, more brown than green, with the light striking up to their undersides. The ragged farmyard takes on a real beauty in golden light, with its dim fields folded around it. It is a dimmed, transfigured moment of the everyday, of the kind that the English painter John Sell Cotman loved and captured in watercolour in the early nineteenth century. The engine cuts out: the light goes off and the eye is thrown upwards again into the vastness of the shifting clouds above, to glimmers in the depths of the sky.
How strange and how comparatively recent are these artificial lights by which people can work and travel as easily as by daylight. The candle and the simple lamp wick are the only defences against the dark until the late eighteenth century when brighter and more effective oil lamps come into use,12 and even then for the majority of people, daily experience would have included the slow fall of the light, an awareness of the slow process of twilight, which, paradoxically, has been banished by the brilliance of our effective artificial light. For the majority of people, with the exception of a few evening walkers and workers, the gradations of the dusk are rarely experienced, and lives are lived in a stark contrast of dark and bright. There are now comparatively few who experience Nabokov’s
George Reid, Evening, 1873, oil on canvas.
As night unites the viewer with the view.13
By the time I come down amongst the trees around the house, the last reflected daylight in the west has faded to uniform grey beyond their branches, and the stream that feeds the big pond is loud over the stones. Still air, dimming and thickening. The light has gone completely where the boughs of the trees hang down to the grass by the water, where the pine branches brush the surface of the pond. This depth of twilight, when the one unseasonable white flower hanging on an elder bush jumps forward a hundred yards to meet the eye, is the solitary domain of those whose eyes have practice in navigating it.
Turning off the farm track onto the grass walk by the pond, I pause a moment as the lighted windows of our house come into view. But I turn, moving away from them, a manoeuvre that takes little thought once the eye has learned to work in the lowest light. Darkness is rarely absolute, particularly out of doors, and the merest outline or reflection is enough to show the way. One light bulb behind a half-open door will spill usable light from one end of a house to the other. What takes a lifetime’s practice is the move away from company into solitude.
My education has been, in part, the study of this manoeuvre: as a child moving into the scented dark of the formal garden, past the fountain, away from the barbed formalities of adult conversation on the terrace. Moving away from lighted Gothic windows as a student, down lanes leading to the river, moving away across water meadows navigable by diffused light sparking on frozen grasses. Or in the blue-grey evenings of European cities, as the crowd ebb and flow in the streets as the lamps come on in the windows before their curtains are drawn. Or, ever since, on the Scottish hills, watching the sunset, perhaps, from the ridge beyond Glenlivet and the first lights coming on below in Tomintoul (startlingly clear, startlingly far) and turning belatedly eastwards, skirting the pinewoods with the light at my back, and picking a way down the stony, heathery path in the dark.
Or the same feeling of belatedness can come from the lighted world itself moving away. Like the Shetland boat, the Hamnavoe, putting out from Aberdeen at seven of a spring evening, moving with its portholes bright in the twilight, past the pier where I stand, past the lighthouse, past the headland and heading north out into the open sea. Such a moment becomes an epitome of all partings, all embarkations, all lighted ships or trains pulling away into the dusk.
As I stand by the pond dam, the two lighted windows of our house are reflected in dark water, and the lamplight is lying in long stripes over the grass. Nocturnes and nostalgias of Victorian England: lighted windows in late dusk. I have a recurrent dream-image not unlike the scene before me – a synthesis of scenes from nineteenth-century journals, verses, fictions. A nineteenth-century rectory, a veranda hung with creeper turned orange with autumn, last light, a lawn sloping to a river. And as I turn away from our house, its yellow lights seem stronger as the sky fades to deepest grey. Autumn and winter England open in memory: Victorian loneliness, seashores at low tide. Eliot’s ‘draughty church at smokefall’.14 Northern England, Lowland Scotland: the streets of stone villas in their own grounds, the scatter of lit windows, the spectrum of industrial sunsets at the end of the hillside streets.
That feeling of sadness at dusk that is characteristic of Victorian England was already observed in early sixteenth-century Japan, with its aesthetic of wabi, tranquil beauty found in loneliness, simplicity, even in poverty:
Takeno Jōō (1502–55) cited with satisfaction a poem by
Fujiwara no Teika … as containing the essence of wabi:
As I look afar I see neither cherry blossoms
nor tinted leaves;
Only a modest hut on the coast in the
Dusk of autumn nightfall.
The poet, surveying the scene, chooses not the pink and festive cherry nor the bright red maple, two favorite if hade [bright/loud] seasonal sights. Rather, he chooses deep autumn, conventionally the darkest of the seasons, and dusk, that time of day when all that is brilliant disappears into the monochrome of twilight.15
As I walk on into the ‘viridian darkness’ under the trees, guided by a glimmer on the water, hanging willow branches catching borrowed light, I think of my correspondence with a friend who is, among many things, a climber and a naturalist. I think of our shared concern that people don’t have time any more to allow their eyes to learn the skills of half-light and the near-night. What they miss by confinement to the hours of daylight, lighted places. The water sounding in this still autumn air, the shuffle of a deer feeding in the plantations of rowans further upstream, the smell of dry pine needles. I know the rough steps up the bank into the wood by heart, as I know the grass walk through the trees. I feel absolutely content to be out here in the last of the light, to be able to offer this hour to the ending day. All walks that begin by going out in the daylight and end with return in the dark have an extra emotional dimension. An important part of the progress of any individual can only take place when moving through the landscape or townscape alone.
I have come up the steps at the end of the garden. One of the upstairs rooms is lit and I can see bookshelves in the lamplight across the dark grass. As well to start at once on the task of sketching the history of twilight, tracing Europe’s arts of evening. And as well to start by trying to focus on the central problem – how to define twilight. It is easily defined in personal terms as a response, mood or memory. It is easy enough to think of the most celebrated works in different media that have responded to it – Gray’s Elegy, the piano Nocturnes of Chopin and John Field, the paintings of failing light that suddenly became universal in northern Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century – but what is the twilight itself?
Some of the definitions, indeed the word itself could, of course, also apply to the slow rising and gathering of the light towards dawn – the daily reverse of the falling light of evening – but already I know that that is an entirely different investigation. The whole morning world implied by the Victorian critic John Ruskin having himself called before dawn, when travelling in the Alps, so that he might walk up the ridge above the glacier to see the dawn breaking over the peaks, is the antithesis of the evening world of melancholy, peace and regret that is the territory of this book. Some lives are defined by mornings, some by evenings – mine unequivocally the latter. Reading and writing that is the product of working late by lamplight, working when the light has gone over the garden outside the window. A habitual sense of belatedness: missed chances in the short morning; afternoon work unfinished; the compulsion to be out, wandering and observing, as soon as the light begins to fall. Then trying to catch up by wringing the last hours out of the evening and night. Also, perhaps, although this is more elusive and will need more thought, a sense of belatedness in time underlies my fascination with evenings, a sense that I am personally content with remoteness and slowness, moving away from a dominant culture of immediacy and speed. And that there are many others in Europe who have felt this same lateness as a condition of life and that it has shaped the ways in which generations have thought and painted and written.
There is a science that defines the twilight of evening in three stages: when the sun has just dipped below the horizon, up to six degrees below, and when the first stars are just visible, it is ‘civil twilight’. This is the ‘blue hour’ beloved of nineteenth-century French writers and painters. This is the time when the white flowers in a summer garden jump forward to the eye, when a whitewashed house on a distant winter hill shines out of the dimness. (Although the term is not free from ambiguity, this is also sometimes defined as the ‘magic hour’ of the film-maker, the ‘golden hour’ for the photographer.)
When the sun is six to twelve degrees below the horizon, it is ‘nautical twilight’, deepening cobalt on a clear night, at the end of which time the horizon line is no longer defined by visible brightness. On a summer night a remarkable amount of colour will linger surprisingly late in such a twilight sky. On a misty evening or if the light has been low throughout the day, this will seem as good as dark to an eye that has just come out of a lighted building. The end of nautical twilight has its place in military strategies of surprise, the level of darkness where movement will not be immediately apparent even to a watchful sentry. What the eye sees moves from the perception of colour by the cones in the retina to the perception of monochrome and some movement by the rods in the eye. These visual receptors report, as it were, to very different areas of the brain – so the perception of full daylight is physically an activity that is wholly distinct from the perception of the dimmest lights. And in any case what the human eye sees as the day dies, far from what the camera sees, is often a filtered and adapted version of what is there: this is explored scientifically by Aden and Marjorie Meinel in their remarkable book Sunsets, Twilights and Evening Skies16 in which they remind us that the extraordinary capacity that the human eye has to impose memory and expectation on light conditions can often cancel the actual hue of an evening sky and substitute one closer to expectations, often filtering and reducing perception of red colouration in the west. Similarly, the absolute adjustment of the eye to all phenomena of light can compensate and adjust what is perceived to a remarkable extent – an idea that sets up a tension between the claims of paintings and photographs of twilight to represent justly what is seen as opposed to what may objectively be present:
Astronomers, navigators and civilians all have their own way of looking at twilight … For the photographer there is the added complication that photographic film distorts any image produced in that almost dark period … While our eyes and brain are able to make quick adjustments, photographic film is not … at twilight the light levels are changing constantly, so getting the film just right (or compensating with filters) is almost impossible.17
There are other mirages and delusions of the evening sky: refraction in air thickened by water droplets or dust enable an observer to glimpse ‘sunlight’ while the sun is in fact far below the horizon. Rich scientific paradoxes to add to the old perception of the twilight of the time of visual uncertainty: dog and wolf, bush and bear.
From twelve to eighteen degrees below the horizon, it is ‘astronomical twilight’, apparently dark to the casual observer, to whom the constellations are as bright as they would be in full darkness.
This defines the twilight of evening considered simply as a time of an average day, but geography is the factor that shapes and alters the twilight and all perceptions of it. Those defining twilights of the north manifest themselves not only as long evenings, the absence of complete darkness at night, but also as states of lowered light that can last for days or even weeks. Because twilight lasts longer the further north (or, of course, south) you are, Polar twilight can go on for a whole fortnight, at the beginning and end of the murk-tide, the blackout at midwinter. In the territories ten degrees either side of the 60th parallel, south of the absolute extremes of light and dark, the twilights of midsummer and midwinter are at their longest.
Civil twilight lasts all night at midsummer at 60 degrees – that glimmer of redness in the northern sky seen from the north of Scotland is the faint reflection of the ‘simmer dim’ over the Northern Isles. Nautical twilight lasts throughout the midsummer night at 54 degrees north, astronomical twilight at 48 degrees north. Civil twilight over Shetland; nautical twilight over Newcastle and the Scottish Borders; when the sky grows dark on midsummer night over London, it is actually astronomical twilight.
The degree to which inhabitants of these regions of the twilight are conditioned by the long waning of the light is hard to overestimate. It strikes me suddenly that I have an example on the desk beside me: a mineral specimen, a slice of ‘figured stone’ taken out of the cabinet earlier in the day. Only in the latitudes of the twilight would its figurations be read as representative, would this stone be thought of as ‘landscape marble’ at all.
It is in fact a limestone (there is no true marble in England) found in Rhaetic beds in the West Country, particularly at Cotham in Bristol, hence its name ‘Cotham marble’. The strata of mud are broken by darker bubbles pushing upwards, which are petrified into the forms of trees, bushes and clouds, while the dun-coloured horizontal strata of mud suggest the lines of ploughed fields, or sometimes (in the larger pieces) a river valley with cliffs and rocks. Always seen against a grey, fading sky.
The phenomenon of the recognition of the landscape within the stone is complex and hard to date precisely: certainly the baroque cabinets of curiosities throughout Europe are full of examples of figured marble interpreted as landscape, often with details added in oil paint to enhance the illusion. To my eye, the landscapes in Cotham marble associate powerfully with the years around 1800: to the time when the Napoleonic wars turned cultivated interest inwards onto the landscapes and phenomena of the British Islands. The grey and brown landscapes of the marble are not unlike the monochrome vignettes on late eighteenth-century porcelain, not unlike the thumbprint whorls of the trees in Thomas Bewick’s engraved tailpieces, and very like the crude but haunting landscape murals in blue monochrome (an improvised, imaginary world of evening) at Llanfyllin, near Welshpool, painted there by a French prisoner of war.18
The recognition of the landscape in the split stone is conditioned by eighteenth-century focus on landscape parks and landscape painting. But the essential factor is the romantic celebration of fading light: evening walks and painted night-pieces are both phenomena of the turn of the nineteenth century, and it is a dimmed landscape of mist or twilight that emerges from the stones. It is only as a landscape of evening (or of autumnal mist) that it can be recognized as landscape at all.
There are two examples of landscape marble in the room in which I write: one of mist, one of twilight. The first is an uncommonly long piece, perhaps half a metre, with a continuous row of faint trees in the foreground and, in the middle-ground, streaks of dark in light grey seem to form themselves into a continuous river-landscape with cliffs seen in fog or half-light.
The smaller piece that lies on the desk beside me is more startlingly pictorial, in a style that seems more Victorian than Regency. The configuration of field, hedgerow and trees is unmistakably English. The coloration is that of autumn, late in the day: ploughed fields of yellowish clay rise towards a shadowy hedgerow whose trees are still in leaf, some darkened, some still brown. Pale light is fading at the horizon, although the wide sky is filled with darkening, wind-blown clouds. The landscape is insistently sad with the sadness of the nineteenth century. It is late in autumn, the wind that blows the trees and clouds will soon scatter the leaves and it will be winter. Tennyson or Matthew Arnold: In memoriam or ‘Rugby Chapel’. Both poems where the speaker is out in the darkening air and the lit houses are closed to him. What makes this random piece of stone the counterpart of mid-Victorian poetry of lonely twilights is that a figure is perceptible at the right of the hedgerow, cloak or ulster held across the body, leaning against the wind that threshes in the trees. Like the solitary twilight speakers of Tennyson’s and Arnold’s poems, here is a figure walking in a landscape otherwise unpeopled.
The other association that comes to mind at once is with the ghost stories that were a particular minor art form in England in the late nineteenth century and earlier twentieth century. This would make the figure in the stone less of a solitary walker and more of a revenant, one of the number of the injured dead who lurk and approach slowly in these fictions, until they take their vengeance on the living at their climaxes. In this mode, it might be that the figure might move within the marble, stalking the living, moving from right to left, appearing in a different gap between the trees every time that the stone is taken from its place in the cabinet to be inspected.
Yet it is not the supernatural that dominates the landscape in the stone, rather an implied mood of the fathomless sorrow of Victorian England: twilight, loneliness, mists rising from ploughland. The earliest discoveries of figures in split stones were held to be talis-manic, rather than aesthetic: in a very different way this arrangement of mud strata petrified into limestone is a post-Romantic talisman in that it can invoke at a glance a season, a world, a century. Most of all it evokes a time of day, the fading of light. It calls to mind the spontaneous, sad poetry of English fishermen’s words for the watches of the night at sea: light moon flood, light moon ebb, dark moon flood, dark moon ebb.19
The landscape outside my window is like the landscape in the marble now. Dun and shade and all detail gone. There is barely a scratch of grey on the western horizon, and I have to turn the desk lamp off to see it. There is almost no light in the rooms, as I move through the silent house, save a faint spill of light from the one lit doorway downstairs. Away from this there are only the faintest reflections – on a picture frame, on the moulding of a skirting board. All that remains is this last monochrome: afterlight at the windows seen from the darkness inside.
There is a curious poem by Browning (‘Love in a Life’), surely based in part on an experience in a dream, about the unknowability of a lover, even of a spouse. This is expressed allegorically as a search through a strangely animate, seemingly infinite house for a woman who is always one room ahead of him:
As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew.
Yon looking-glass gleamed at the touch of her feather.
But the house is infinite and the daylight begins to fail, and what has been dreamlike becomes inexplicable and sad, a panic, a race against the fading light.
… she goes out as I enter.
…
But ’tis twilight, you see, – with such suites to explore,
Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!
In the visual arts, the great virtuoso of the last of the light was the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi, who is most celebrated for his depictions of the interiors of the Copenhagen flats in which he and his family lived. Occasionally he shows a bright morning throwing sunlight across Biedermeier furniture and grey-painted panelling. But the vast majority of his works are evening pictures, haunting depictions of the northern light and its fall. They are often extraordinary experiments with the very last of the light, the final ebbing of definition from grey things, the catching of a sliver of belated reflection on the moulding of a panel or a window mirrored in a polished floorboard.
He also painted subtle and persuasive images of the monochrome of winter London in the early years of the twentieth century: in these, the absolute restraint of his palette renders the absence of light present, expresses that northern light which is itself a gap or a lack. He captures alike the wonderful sculptural quality of the great black iron railings and the cold in the damp air – tending to mist, tending to dusk. And the poignancy of the gaslight in the shops, lit so early in the afternoon.
Sometimes, in his Copenhagen interior paintings, it has grown so late that the only light in the room comes from the streetlight outside, caught on the glazing bars of the window, faintly reflected on the bevel of a mirror. And, almost always, if the painting is inhabited at all, the figure of his wife has her back to us, eluding us like the woman in Browning’s poem, turned away from us like the figures in Giandomenico Tiepolo’s sad carnivals. Enfilades of doors standing open, each room dimmer as it recedes. Calm, silence, and the lingering arrival of evening. The light gone over the quay below the windows and the inlets of the Baltic.
My cartography of dusk can, I know, only be a European one: otherwise, the scope grows impossible, the latitudes and lights too diffuse. If this excludes the popular encounters on film of the teenage citizens of day and night, it also removes the authentic, Hoffmannesque strangeness of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, beguiling, almost allegorical television films from 1959 to 1964 in America. It removes the archaic north American metaphorical uses of ‘twilight’ and ‘shadow’ to refer to the gay community,20 ‘twilight zone’ as a specific description of an area of urban transition. With regret, it sets at a distance the visual refinement of Terrence Malick’s pastoral tragedy Days of Heaven (1978), shot under the dust-filtered strata of the dusks of north America: smoke-orange, purple-yellow, cloud blue and lilac. It also removes the otherworldly brilliance of the meticulously staged photographs of Gregory Crewdson (b. 1962). His works are all images of twilight in familiar, usually American suburban, settings, but so carefully posed, lit and processed as to render the familiar unfamiliar and uncertain. Homecomings to lit bungalows become episodes of revenance; hinted narratives of the magical and inexplicable. The transformative quality of twilight is developed in single images to imply some of the narrative power of a full-length film, and the sum of the work is to hint at a vast hidden narrative of nightfall in which the prosaic and quotidian is transformed into something both poetic and disquieting.21 For the American Auden, twilight recurs as a time when the shores of the Europe he had left behind grow most real in memory:
Quiet falls the dusk at this queasy juncture
Of water and earth,
And lamps are lit on the long esplanade …22
Indeed he associates twilight with the guiltless and cultivated citizens of Europe, hopelessly vulnerable to each new wave of barbarians:
… By lakes at twilight
They sang of swans and separations,
Mild, unmilitant, as the moon rose …23
The focus on Europe distances us also from a notable school of artists of twilight in the twentieth century, the Japanese painters and woodblock-print designers of the early century of whom the most celebrated is Hasui Kawase (1883–1957). These woodblock designers assimilated European conventions for the depiction of conditions of darkness and failing light in the late nineteenth century,24 initially as part of the expressive anxiety in their work during the period of the Pacific War. Later they made consistent use of azuri-e, of the Prussian blue pigment introduced to Japan in the 1800s, in the expansion of the repertory of prints of landscape to include scenes of night and twilight. These go beyond earlier depictions of places celebrated for their beauty to include scenes of drifting evening crowds in modest urban streets, or to show haunting images of forgotten corners, small quotidian scenes from provincial life at nightfall. As the century progresses these become increasingly nostalgic, in a parallel to the serial nostalgias of the contemporary west.
A typical example of many twilight woodblock prints by Hasui is his ‘Omori Beach at Night’ from the Twelve Scenes of Tokyo (1919–21): four colours, dominated by a rich, late-twilight blue, achieve a depiction both realistic and nostalgic of a row of wooden houses by a creek, with the bright spots of lighted windows sending trails of light across the water.
My own reflection appears in the glass of the window as I switch the lamp on again, conceding victory to the dark at last. A reminder that the exploration of the history of twilight can also be an exploration of memory. And that there will be twilights to be found that will be metaphorical or allusive – I have one already in the mainstream dismissal of the kind of counter-cultural backwater in which I live as a ‘dark corner’.
And many historical epochs are identified, even by contemporaries, sometimes inexplicably (or at least in an enigma that requires investigation) as ‘twilights’. There is a ceaseless process from the meridian of the eighteenth century, which sees each epoch, each passing decade, each war or revolution as a twilight, as an ending, as a further step in the diminution of Europe. Victor Hugo’s Chants du crépuscule, published in the 1830s, express a typically haunted conviction that it is already hopelessly late in the day:
Everything today, in ideas as much as in things, in society as with the individual, is in the condition of twilight. What is the nature of this twilight? What will come after it?
… this strange twilight state of the soul and of society in the century where we live: it is this fog outside, this uncertainty within; it is I know not what that is born of the half-light that surrounds us … this tranquillity shot through with sorrow.25
And yet in the years during and after the First World War, how much more were civilizations and institutions seen as entering the twilight, before the nights of destruction that ended the Second, the Baedeker raids and the obliteration of European cities. And even now, the atmosphere is of belatedness, of inexplicable, unaccountable shiftings of power in the half-light, the end and abandonment of the projects of reconstruction.
Now, if ever, is the time to map the territories of the dusk: the territory defined as stretching from the moment when the sun drops completely below the horizon until the night comes – Blanche, Vénus émerge, et c’est la Nuit26 – the pale evening star comes forth, and it is night. That is my subject and the region in which I will move is evening with its ivory and rose, smoke grey and washed yellow, cobalt and diamond, until the lights come on in the windows. These are the territories of melancholy and revenants, longings and regrets, ‘tranquillity shot through with sorrow’, homecomings and serenities.
Now is the time to begin, as Hesperus brightens in the southern sky. In the hour that opens the gates of memory, under dark towers of cloud which are the gates of Europe.