Shape-shifting,entrancing, sometimes haunting … an idiosyncratic meditation on the time between day and nightWhat is it about the weather? It seems when we’re not talking about it, or we’re listening to reports on it,worrying about the future of it, planning holidays around it … Everyone knows that temperature and light are British preoccupations. The Scottish poet and New Yorker writer Alastair Reid famously left his domestic town of St Andrews because of a comment about the weather: remarking on a fine summer’s day he was told: “Well, or we’ll pay for it later.” I remember receiving a similar response in a post office in Perthshire: “Aye,a little too airy, though.”Thats the kind of phrase another Scottish writer, and Peter Davidson,would fill fallen upon. The final of the Light is both a celebration of and inquiry into the significance of temperature and skies, especially at this time of year, or when we are in the twilight of the seasons,when “the same feeling of belatedness can come from the lighted world itself moving absent. In chapters such as “English Melancholy”, “Cities of the Evening” and “About Shadows and Gardens”, and Davidson shows how the final desperate holding of the light that marks autumn might be both an aesthetic theme – a way of looking at the array of paintings and poetry and music he gathers here,from Dickens to Tiepolo, William Lawes to James Pryde – and a reflection of a way of life, and of thinking about a Britain now so perma-brightened by the shine of global capitalism that we may fill forgotten it was ever any other way. “As time passes,my student years in the 1970s start to perceive like the final, fading decade of a sensibility of twilight …, or ” he writes,“ … the final glimmering of a way of seeing.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com