On Dusk

Dusk does not expect of you an identity. No longer do you have to be Charles, Samantha. Dusk is a time for self-naughting.

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire, says Mr. T. S. Eliot, is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

Dusk presents to you little information. And won’t just unbosom itself to any old Joe. Still you strain to listen for profundities not yet sounded.

Dusk does not seek to make friends and yet is the friendliest time of all.

Why is the sight of sunlight setting between two houses on a neighborhood block so heartbreaking?

Right before dusk, in the surprisingly vivid parlance of the moviemakers, is “the magic hour.”

Dusk’s antonym is cataclysm.

And at dusk there is no need for the messiah.

How does one touch it? And if it were a body part what would it be? The flat back of a thigh? A work-thickened shoulder? The web of flesh between thumb and index finger?

This is not a dream, says dusk.

Dawn, to use a phrase of James Wright’s, is “suicidally beautiful.” It goes for the jugular, is an agony of light, enmightier of the blood. It resists the moment of its making. Mongrel energy, wild spleenful horses. An enormous rusting ship sinking with a cargo of fabulous chandeliers. Dusk conversely is resistless. Is the sum of silence. And seeks wildness’s perfect opposite.

Dusk, to quote the Taoists, is as selfless as melting ice.

During dusk you let go of the constant need to handle the world.

At dusk you may come to understand that the essential underpassion of your life is ambition. And then one of two things happens. Either you feel liberated by this epiphany and go on listening to the crickets, or the terrible hollowness of your existence swings through your soul like a wrecking ball.

On the other side of dusk, just beyond what we can see, fly the birds of dark water.

In the evening, sings Leroy Carr, in the evening, momma when that sun goes down. In the evening, momma when that sun goes down. . . .

Dusk makes young poets and middle-aged businesswomen feel something acute and lonely along the tops of their foreheads.

Dusk, to use a phrase of T. S. Eliot’s, is “the still point of the turning world.”

In the hospice of dusk even the countries of crows flying across the sky aren’t threatening. In fact when you hear them pass overhead their faint wingbeats sound like the prayers of sand.

During dusk nothing obtrudes from the background, yet everything is noticeable.

There is another world, says Paul Éluard, and it is in this one.

There are mountains, says Dōgen, hidden in mountains.

If you handle the world gently, says dusk, it will anoint you.

Here is a poem by James Wright called “Trying to Pray”:

This time, I have left my body behind me, crying In its dark thorns. Still, There are good things in this world. It is dusk. It is the good darkness Of women’s hands that touch loaves. The spirit of a tree begins to move. I touch leaves. I close my eyes, and think of water.

Dusk is not a wonder worker, refuses to partake of miracles, and under no circumstances will dusk marshal an army.

Dusk is the gentlest creed of all.

Dusk makes everything weep a little with the tears of things. If while driving through Austin, Texas, of a summer dusk with your younger brother, for example, and you see advertising in the left field of a neighborhood baseball diamond, advertising for Jerry’s Fire-Alarm Installing, that ad—and you think of the man who ordered it, this Jerry, the man who one Tuesday morning decided it would be financially advantageous to pick up the phone and place the ad; and you think of his life installing fire alarms, how you never really knew such a vocation existed, how perhaps he’s the best at what he does in the city—will spark in you a sudden inrush of sadness, and you...