The remains of the day

Described by John Clare as 'Eden in such an hour' and 'the weakening eye of day' by Thomas Hardy, the twilight hour is a bewitching time for John Lewis-Stempel

- John Lewis-Stempel

The sun was sunk, and after him the star Of Hesperus, whose office is to bring Twilight upon the earth, short arbiter ’twixt day and night, and now from end to end Night’s hemisphere had veil’d the horizon round Milton, ‘Paradise Lost’, Book IX

IT is getting dimpsy. The sun is disappearing down below the horizon, the visible world shrinking, quietening, settling. Through the bare trees of the wood seeps a slow tide of silt. The valley fills softly with grey sand, an egg-timer inverted. A world slowly, beautifully drowning into darkness.

Twilight: the hour of monotone between day and night, between the known and the unknown. Twilight: when everything solid melts into insubstantiality, when the walk along the lane is to tread on air in a vaporous, floating world. Twilight, half-light. Simultaneously exit and entrance. A Venn diagram overlap of the diurnal and the nocturnal. The dreamy time when one existence begins roosting and another arises for the night shift of Nature.

Distinct in the demi-dark is the chinkchink of a blackbird from a laburnum, and the kerwick of a tawny leaving her ascetic cell in the oak. The one is absent-mindedly sleepy, the other cruelly alert, both of them ordered by the tick-tick-ing of a strutty little wren. Twilight in each of the four seasons possesses magic, although the twilight of early winter has a particular profundity, because it is the dying of the day in the dying of the year, the remains of the day in the ashes of the year. Twilight in the twilight of the year.