Chatham, Twilight in the Badlands, 1999
We are not great connoisseurs of the two twilights. We miss
the dawning, exclusably enough, by sleeping through it, and are as much
strangers to the shadowless welling-up of day as to the hesitant return of
consciousness in our slowly waking selves. But our obliviousness to evening
twilight is less understandable. Why do we almost daily ignore a spectacle (and
I do not mean sunset but rather the hour, more or less, afterward) that has a
thousand tonalities, that alters and extends reality, that offers, more
beautifully than anything man-made, a visual metaphor or peace? To say that it
catches us at busy or tired moments won't do; for in temperate latitudes it
varies by hours from solstice to solstice. Instead I suspect that we shun
twilight because if offers two things which, as insecurely rational beings, we
would rather not appreciate: the vision of irrevocable cosmic change (indeed,
change into darkness), and a sense of deep ambiguity—of objects seeming to be
more, less, other than we think them to be. We are noontime and midnight
people, and such devoted camp-followers of certainly that we cannot endure
seeing it mocked and undermined by nature.
There is a brief period of twilight of which I am especially fond, little more than a moment, when I see what seems to be color without light, followed by another brief period of light without color. The earlier period, like a dawn of night, calls up such sights as at all other times are hidden, wistful half-formless presences neither of day nor night, that draw up with them similar presences in the mind.
Robert Grudin
No comments:
Post a Comment