Crépuscule
When I see a twilight sky ….
Crépuscule - a beautiful and poetic word meaning dusk, dark creeper in Latin. Dusk is that moment, that feeling, when the boundary between the existential and metaphysical blurs and a transient moment of nothingness occurs. It is a moment when a feeling of the numinous hangs in the air. It is a moment when the sky reflects a mystery about the journey of our lives into the unknown. Looking up into that sky is like being beckoned … and its literature which prompts me to reflect upon the impossible questions …
In The Darkling Thrush Thomas Hardy writes of dusk as
The weakening eye of day
The weakening eye of day when light goes, the world disappears, darkness grows and sleep creeps towards us. Sleep inexorably bringing its second self – death.
In life there is always death. Et in Arcadia Arcadia
Eliot considers this relationship repeatedly in The Waste Land:
There is always another one walking beside you.
For him, as for so many poets, dusk is a starting place:
Or your shadow at evening rising up to meet you
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock starts with that giddy moment when dusk swells into evening:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Beckoned on a journey down streets of ‘insidious intent’ -
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Eliot’s journey into the unknown is to pose and reflect upon the impossible questions and their significance for being. Is there life after death or nothingness?
Another journey into the unknown is found in Sebastien Japrisot’s Un long dimanche de fiançailles. Set in the First World War, a group of men play a game of chance at dusk for their very lives. Having been found guilty of cowardice and sentenced to death, they are forced into no-mans-land from the aptly-named dugout Bingo Crepuscule. Like Eliot, Japrisot uses dusk to make the reader reflect upon the equally random journey of life, and to consider the impossible and perplexing questions …
The opening of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has Marlow on a dusk-shrouded boat telling of a great and terrible journey:
We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun.
It is the journey into the very heart of the meaning of being. Like Eliot, Conrad considers what it would mean if there were only nothingness, if there were no God? What would be the point of living? If there is no God would that explain why there is evil in the world? It is the existence of evil that Dostoyevsky explores in The Brothers Karamazov. Dimitri Karamazov renounces God because of the evil in the world and asks the eternal question ‘Why?’
It is Shakespeare’s sonnet LXXIII that so concisely describes the dusk of life and end of life’s journey:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.
Dusk heightens the mystery and confusion surrounding the notions of existence, being and evil, and as Eliot says leads ‘you to an overwhelming question ...’
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