"Among the elemental presences of Nature is there anything more potent than what we name Twilight? What a thing it is, when you come seriously to note it, when you allow its magic to work upon you, this daily sinking down of darkness upon the face of the earth! Many, ere now, have sung hymns to the Sun; but it is only when twilight begins to fall that a certain largeness of the atmosphere, obliterating the transitory and ephemeral, flows around us, and lifts us up, and out and away, upon its full-brimmed tide.
Who can deny that by the feelings released in the twilight, so common, so simple, so universal, all the tenderer, wiser, gentler, second-thoughts of our race are nourished and sustained?
From the populous pavements of our cities, from the bleak desolations of all those strange no-man’s lands between city and country, from mountain-ridges and umbrageous valleys, from pebbled shores and tossing waters, Twilight, this faint recurrent sigh of our familiar landscape as it sinks into its diurnal sleep takes away something hard and opaque: something that separates us from the ultimate mystery.
Yes! It rolls back for us, each mortal evening, whether the weather be foul or fair, those clanging brazen gates that separate us from the calm, cool, restorative wells of life. Over our forlornest human thresholds, across the sills of our wretchedest human windows, flows this ocean of release. And under its power everything grows larger, more ethereal, more transparent. The harsh outlines recede, the crude colours withdraw, the raucous noises die down: and out of the vaporous grey upon grey an indescribable luminousness — not light, but, as it were, the spirit of light — like the blueness of fathoms of deep water, floods the exhausted world."
(John Cowper Powys, The Philosophy of Solitude)
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