a certain slant of light
We think of twilight as the mingling of the day and the night, a breathing space, sometimes calm, sometimes menacing, in which neither light nor dark prevails. But the name suggests something odder and more specific than this: not the meeting of light and dark, but rather the copresence of two different lights. As the sun sinks, its light is not steadily withdrawn, but subject to a scattering by the air and dust of the atmosphere. For a short period, this creates a strange, faint flaring of the air, an oblique blaze in things. During the hours of daylight, we have the sun always in mind, even when it is behind a cloud or at our backs. Another word for twilight is ‘gloaming’, which perfectly alloys gloom with glow. The glow of the gloaming, after the sun has gone but something of its light still lingers, seems dispersed or sourceless, as though aching evenly from every surface, as though brightness were falling from the air itself. Evocations of twilight often reach for the ambivalent colours of precious stones, pearl, opal, sapphire, amethyst, which suggest an eerie kind of earthlight, as though objects themselves were giving out their own illumination, stored during the day and given off as day retreats. As the contours of the visible world melt, other, more diffusive senses, start to leak into the eye: touch, hearing, smell.
[…]
The slight tipsiness of the earth’s solar orbit makes twilight a Northerly phenomenon. Twilight is not the time of inversion, the world turned upside down; it is time on a tilt. Perhaps it produces sensibilities that weary soon of straight-up-and-down things, of once-and-for-all, four-square perpendicularities, are inclined to see things anamorphically aslant, and have a taste for the late, the not-quite, the trick of the light, the all-but, the betwixt and between. This refractory wryness, or angled Saxon attitude, prizes what pales yet persists, what lingers and lasts out, over the blaring conflagrations of noon. Emily Dickinson, who was one such ember spirit, wrote of
a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.
(Source: A Certain Slant of Light—Steven Connor. A sound-essay on the idea of twilight, broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves, October 31, 2003.)