I welcome the rhythm of the day’s turn toward night. The sun lowers, oranges and purples intensify, time and breath stretch. Rest seeps in, and darkness caresses us to sleep.
The year has a similar rhythm, writ large. Autumn dissolves to winter. Samhain turns toward Yule. The dark descends, earlier and earlier. The sun makes its annual round, coaxing the land to rest in the sheltering darkness of year’s end, to slumber toward new life and light to come.
I enjoy harmonizing with the shadows of autumn. Most of us celebrate the return of annual light, but I also welcome the lengthening shadows of earlier and earlier dusk in the waning months. Most of us welcome the darkness of nightly sleep; I also embrace the twilight of the year.
Many lament fall’s earlier evenings: “It’s dark when I go to work and dark when I come home!” People will count the days until spring’s returning light. In doing so, they miss the gorgeous mahogany and obsidian of autumn and winter.
In the preface to The House of Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne says that the writer seeking “the truth of the human heart” needs to look to twilight, “to bring out or mellow the lights, and deepen and enrich the shadows, of the picture.” In “The Custom House,” the introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne lauds an indoor fire’s “smouldering glow,” combining with “the white moonbeams on the floor” to create a “quality of strangeness and remoteness … one remove farther from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative.” In Hawthorne’s twilight, which I always associate with autumn, the world becomes smoky, opening up wells of warm comfort and dark mystery, inviting us to peer into flickering hearth fires and the secrets of dark souls.
Several years ago, the U.S. Congress jimmied with daylight saving time so that by 2007 a return to standard time was moved from October to the first weekend in November. I regret the loss of earlier twilight in some of the most fiery orange days of the year. Some parents and public-safety-minded folks may welcome the longer daylight for trick-or-treaters. But the child in us knows that the true spirit of Halloween emerges only when the sun dips below the horizon, its fingers of twilight beckoning our dark transformations.
Nature’s twilight has been set right by our clocks in the dull browns and spare branches of November. Now, as I step off my bus after work into the blackening evening, I enter my neighborhood’s smoldering glow of romance, as Hawthorne might put it. I will celebrate the return of light in a few weeks, but for now, I embrace the strange comfort of late autumn’s approaching darkness, a time for warm fires, shadowy stories and contemplative rest. No other time of year accords with fall’s romantic shades.
Thomas Dean is a creature of light and darkness.
