This selection is from A Philosophy of Solitude (1933), written by my cosmic ecstasy hero John Cowper Powys.  Here he is at his visionary best when he describes the powers of twilight:

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.

And the thoughts of men and women return to the moments when there has been no screen between them and the Unspeakable; no barrier between them and the withdrawingness of Matter. Like flying birds gathering homeward in the dusk, their thoughts follow long, dim, moss-cool vistas of obscure feeling, avenues of emotion far too tremulous, far too vague, to be put into words.

And whence do these feelings Come? From the mystery of the Inanimate; from that vast volume of the dim body of Matter against which the idealists tell us the Spirit must ceaselessly contend!

And Twilight is not only the mother of healing thoughts; it is the grand releaser from the prison of vulgarity, the great liberator from the pressure of the crowd. With whatever hot, feverish constriction the crowd-consciousness shuts us in, Twilight enables us to slip out upon the cool balconies of our own mind.

Not a solitary soul alive growing aware of that strange blueness at the window, of that undulating sea of spaciousness into which all opacities melt and lose themselves but can flee away to the ocean-banks of its own widest horizons, and keep its vigil there, listening to the breaking of the great tides. And while the eternal Twilight thus separates souls that the world has joined, it unites those that the world has separated!

This is the hour when all divided lovers send their spirits forth, each to each, across land and sea.

The man leaning against the door-post, that girl standing at the window, what has broken the laws of space and time for these two, that their souls may rush together and be at rest? Has humanity done it? Has Christ done it? Has Spinoza done it? Not one of these! The Inanimate has done it. Matter, the old antagonist of the Spirit, the old aboriginal, elemental Titan, has come to the rescue of these lovers. What the world has joined, the Inanimate has separated. What the world has separated the Inanimate has joined.  next

Twilights  •  William Butler Yeats   •  AE   •  John Cowper Powys   •  Anna de Noailles   •  Chinese Twilights   •  Japanese Twilights