Into the Dark (eBook)

CHAPTER 2

Waxing

It’s a fine evening in spring and I’m walking a wide old path in the Pyrenees. The trees are in brilliant new leaf; the day has been grassy and green. The farm where I’m staying is propped below me on a narrow plateau. Its cluster of barns and walls and courtyards is sheltered by a dip in the land and a handful of tall beech trees. This path edges out from the back of the farm, over two huge flat stones which lie across a fast stream, and up a rocky slope. It’s an ancient route from the valley to a high crossing point in the mountains, bounded by gnarly dry-stone walls and lined with more trees, hazel mostly, the lithe limbs sprouting from coppiced trunks. At this point, it rises gently although later it narrows and becomes steep, climbing up into the lingering snow.

Here in the mountains, sunset is never where you think it should be. Sunset always varies, of course, depending on location or even which way your view faces, but in the mountains, it becomes a particularly movable and uncertain experience, light and time and the incursion of the dark slipping from valley to valley, between ridge and summit. It’s entirely dependent on the huddle of peaks. At the back of the farm, where morning comes early, the sun will disappear long before it sets for someone higher up in one of the lodges I can see on the opposite slope, facing wide open skies to the west; I’ll be shuffling through the shadow of a mountain while they are still in full daylight. In such commanding terrain, sunset can douse you in a sudden gloopy shadow under one peak before a turn in the lane has it skimming away from the warmth of late sun. The colours of the fading day can feel like an intimate show, a reminder that time and space are arbitrary, and experience inescapably personal. Here in the mountains, dusk is negotiable.

For me, for this one path of many mountain paths, the sun has set. The light darkened quickly, without spectacle, and now there’s a glassy greyish-blue sky with a hint of nicotine yellow. The land has bulked up with shadow. I don’t intend to walk far but the evening is beautiful; I dawdle. It feels as though the day has slowed as the light has fallen. My steps slow, too; my breathing. There’s a touch of magic here in this twilight suspended in this nook of mountain. Glow worms spangle against the walls; a wispy mist slinks low to the ground. In the clear sky above, a waxing moon falls, leaving a slight trail of a cooler pale light.

I wonder about the dusk, its familiar strangeness; its otherworldly everydayness. I consider my expectations. Spirituality? Epiphany? Surely, at least, an intensity of sentiment. But actually nothing much happens. It’s a pleasant evening stroll. I make my way to a bend in the path, after which it becomes steep, and I walk back down to the farm. The chickens that have been scratching in the yard all day, chuntering their conversations back and forth from barn to barn, have gone to roost. That’s about all. But looking back, I remember this evening walk very clearly, the textures of the darkening foliage, the smell of distance, the sense of possibility and of endings. I remember the glow worms and the wrap of translucent mist. I remember it as special. Was it?

What was it about the dying light that set this experience apart?

In my discovery of the dark, I begin thinking about the push-pull attraction of dusk. Darkness is more than an absolute. It’s a thing of shades and stages, of evenings and mornings as well as midnights. The dark is implicit in a gloomy afternoon; it’s already there in that moment when the sun slips from the vertical. Lurking offstage in the sparkling red of a sunset – the pantomime villain eyeing up the flounces of the chorus line – we feel it as a knowledge, a presence, even as we turn our backs on it to glory in the spectacle of light. For dementia patients like dad, dusk is often a time of particular agitation, when the impulse to do something takes hold even if it’s not clear what should be done. In the fading light, dad rattles door handles and tries window latches, rushes from room to room, unloads his clothes from wardrobes and drawers and lays them all out for packing. He shifts furniture and makes the bed many times. He’s overwhelmed by the irresistible imperative to act, to move, to organise. In this short period between day and night, he can’t bear the thought of things left undone or tasks unfinished. He worries about presents he hasn’t bought and appointments he hasn’t kept. Dusk is different for him now than any other time of day; it has its own shape and necessity.

But what is dusk then? A preparation? A premonition? You’ll know the feel of dusk immediately, its distinctive smells and sounds, but it will probably also hang just out of reach, ungraspable. Unlike dad, you might not often take much notice of it. But what would the dark be without the dusk? Or is that the wrong question? Is it rather – what nature of darkness is the dusk?

Let’s start with the disappearance of the sun.

The brilliant red-orange sunset of romance is just a play of the light. When a beam of sunlight strikes a molecule in the atmosphere, it spews wavelengths in all directions – an effect known as ‘scattering’. This scattering occurs millions of times before the beam even reaches your eyes: while a sunset might look calm, the light is spilling and bouncing all over the place in a frenetic end-of-day dance. The two main components of the atmosphere, oxygen and nitrogen, have molecules that are a thousand times smaller than the incoming light. So these small molecules scatter the shortest wavelengths: blues and purples. This is why we perceive the daytime sky as blue. And it’s most likely to look a startling blue towards noon when the sun is overhead, and light takes a shorter path to our eyes. But at sunset, the angle at which the sunlight enters the atmosphere is different; the light takes a longer path. This allows the blues, purples and greens to be scattered out before reaching the lower atmosphere – leaving that swish of red and orange, those fire-lit clouds that mark the end of the day.

This scattering of molecules is just a physical process, a phenomenon of nature. It ‘means’ nothing and connects to nothing. It’s not intrinsically beautiful or moving; it doesn’t signal anything other than the onset of the dark. It’s not even essentially red: it’s only our social structures, our language, which attach the word ‘red’ and its connotations to this sight in the sky. ‘You have forgotten that no resemblance exists between primary qualities, the dull and senseless stuff out of which nature is really made and the secondary qualities with which you add a meaningless and arbitrary meaning to the senseless and meaningless hurrying of matter,’ the French philosopher and anthropologist, Bruno Latour, reminds us. But even when we know this reality of physics, is a sunset really ‘dull and senseless’, nothing more than the ‘senseless and meaningless hurrying of matter’? Say the word ‘sunset’, and a picture immediately springs to mind. But not only a picture: something beyond the pictorial, too, a memory, a sentiment, a sensation. We can feel a sunset. That brief photo opportunity when daylight blooms and then fades into dusk, holding us momentarily from the darkness, has become charged with significance, personal and cultural, an expression of what this world is, and what it is to us. We look for sunset and rate it – we know a ‘good’ one when we see one – seek it out on beaches and at tourist sites, wait for it, perhaps for hours; film classically has the hero riding towards it as the credits roll. This ‘senseless and meaningless hurrying of matter’ matters.

Across time and place, sunset has occupied artists, writers, travellers and lovers. Long before it proved such a hit on social media posts, letters home from exploration, exile or war often strained the writers’ powers of description in their efforts to capture the sunset experience. The nineteenth-century poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, wrote an extended correspondence to the journal Nature in December 1883, describing a run of autumn sunsets which followed the eruption of Krakatoa – an event that caused unusually colourful sunsets to be noted across the world. His accounts combine the precision of meteorological observation with rhapsodic efforts to describe a display that he never quite manages to pin down:

Poems and novels, too, are scattered with sunsets, some described more effusively than others. Daphne du Maurier, for example, evokes a simple Cornish moment ‘while the setting sun dappled the water with copper and crimson’ in her historical novel Frenchman’s Creek (1941). In Little Women, Louisa May...