The Last of the Light: About Twilight [Hardcover]

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.

Peter Davidsonis fellow of Campion Hall at the University of Oxford. He is the author of a book of essays about northern culture, Distance and Memory, and a collection of verse, The Palace of Oblivion.

Introduction 
1. About Shadows and Gardens 
2. English Melancholy 
3. Cities of the Evening 
4. Dark Corners 
5. Hesperides 
Epilogue: Fireworks and Reflected Lights 
References 
Acknowledgments 
Photographic 
Acknowledgments 
Index

“The Last of the Lightis both a celebration of and inquiry into the significance of temperature and skies, especially at this time of year, when we are in the twilight of the seasons. . . . Davidson takes us to places that are vast and lovely as well as somehow underlit and shadowy, where a kind of emptiness and uncertainty prevails. . . . He loves the lost, the fading, the ‘fugitive’ as Robert Macfarlane, in hisLandmarks, quoted Davidson’s word back to himl##