The Last of the Light: About Twilight by Peter Davidson

by Peter Davidson

Neither day nor night, twilight has long exerted a fascination for Western artists, thinkers, and writers, while haunting the Romantics and intriguing philosophers and scientists. In The Last of the Light, Peter Davidson takes readers through our culture’s long engagement with the concept of twilight—from the melancholy of smoky English autumn evenings to the midnight sun of northern European summers and beyond. Taking in poets and painters, Victorians and Romans, city and countryside, and deftly combining memoir, literature, philosophy, and art history, Davidson shows how the atmospheric shadows and the in-between nature of twilight has fired the imagination and generated works of incredible beauty, mystery, and romance. Ambitious and brilliantly executed, this is the perfect book for the bedside table, richly rewarding and endlessly thought-provoking.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature, Art, History, Essays, Art History

Hardcover

First published October 15, 2015

Reviews

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I may always remember this as the book I was reading when the Brexit vote happened. When the country whose literary landscape, both historical and contemporary, is more familiar to me, more beloved by me, than any other, decided to turn its back on Europeans and cosmopolitans like myself, I was reading a British (Scottish and Cambridge-educated) author that I had first come across either in a review in The Guardian or the LRB, or mentioned in a book by some other contemporary British non-fiction author/ prose poet. (Robert Macfarlane, maybe?) But while you may be able to keep the complicatedly root-weak internationalist (me) out of Britain, you can never keep Britain out of me - whatever you do, however you vote, I will continue my own private literary odyssey, which was never not going to weigh anchor by the shores of those little islands whose language and literature have made me who I am, both as a reader and as a writer.
The timing of my reading of this book has ineluctably made it particularly poignant for me, and the subject matter - of endings and of belatedness, of regret and the sense of living in an after-world - naturally adds to that poignancy. As Davidson himself writes with eerie prevision on p. 10: 'our own age can readily be seen as a spoiled and darkening one, littered with a tidewrack of failing monuments to the hopes of post-war Europe'.
This is a beautiful book of Angelus bells, Spanish cathedrals, Anglican vespers, fireflies, starlight and long-lost Arcadias. There are descriptions, by Ruskin and Goethe, Friedrich and Virgil, of specific and particular twilights and sunsets witnessed, but the parts of the book that I particularly felt myself responding to were the ones where the state of twilight is treated more metaphorically and given its place in the cultural (literary, philosophical, theological, artistic) constitution of Europe.
Brexit or no, anyone even with a far more superficial acquaintanceship with Britain than I can lay claim to, could tell at a glance that this island nation is unequivocally part of the European culture of twilight that Davidson so poetically - and painfully - evokes. His final line before the epilogue is masterful and almost more than I can bear: we can't but stand 'together in this moment of lastness, with all of our night to come'.

[Helen McClory]

A whole book on the evocation of twilight in Europe from ancient times to modern day, a thoughtful, obsessive book on light and light's going.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Twilight is that moment when the sun is below the horizon, but the light from our star is still illuminating the lower atmosphere. That moment between light and dark, the gloaming, has been split into three twilights by scientists, civil, nautical, and astronomical before either dawn or dusk. This moment as the world turns inexorably on has fascinated people for millennia and has provided inspiration for writers and artists to explore something that is not quite daytime and not yet night.

Watching through the windows the wastes of evening / The flare of foundries at the fall of the year

In this meticulously researched book, Davidson takes us through the twilight zone into the world of poetry and fine art that is the response to those beautiful sunsets. But is more than those moments, as he expands on the meaning behind the poems, critiques fine art portraits and contemplates foggy autumn days in photographs of a London past. With him, we will discover the extra depth to famous paintings, writers both well known and forgotten and some of the finest prose ever written on the melancholic events of dusk. It is printed on a fine glossy paper to ensure that the reproductions of the art are top notch. It is a book for all those that love the art of all forms and their responses to twilight and one to dip into again and again.

[Benita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Last of the Light: About Twilight by Peter Davidson

This was a hard book to find. I had to get the book through Inter-Library Loan because our library didn't have it. Last of the Light: About Twilight by Peter Davidson was a poetic book. By that I mean, that it read like a poem or a piece of literature and was very descriptive.

I read a review of this book back in the summer of 2018. The reviewer said that it was a cabinet of curiosities, paintings, poems, and music about European regret and how the setting of twilight is the symbol for all this. After reading the book, I concur. The author quotes from poets from Sappho and Virgil all the way to A. E. Houseman. He also analyzes paintings, photographs, and other works of art that are set in twilight. He also discusses music that is set in twilight.

The book was amply illustrated and full of quotations and insights that backed up the author's take on twilight as being a state of being as much as a state of daylight. This was a heavy book. It was printed on heavy stock paper to allow for the inclusion of many works of art and chocked full of quotations from poems, essays, and memoirs where twilight played an important roll. The inclusion of these pictures was helpful as they helped to illustrate the setting and tone of the work.

It was a very interesting in-depth study of the concept of twilight that was poetic and challenging to read. This is a work about symbolism. At times I found it engrossing but it was more critique than I could concentrate on at this time. Even though it was not a long book, (260 pages) I was simply unable to give it my full attention at this point in time and therefore, I am sure that I did not give this book the full justice that it deserved. Even so, I count this book as a worthy read.

[Ade · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engrossing read with reproductions of some stunning paintings (although sadly not all the ones discussed in the text can be shown - keep google handy). Particularly taken with the concept of twilight as a metaphor for a mood of 'belatedness'. All beautifully written too; it takes a poet to create prose like this.

[Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite disappointed with the verbose style which hindered the enjoyment of an original concept.