Twilight thoughts, twilight haints

On a recent visit to my parents in the twice-failed utopia of New Harmony, Indiana, I experienced something I'd not seen for a long time, yet not really realized I'd lost: true, nearly unadulterated shimmery blue-dark summer twilight. "As daylight recedes," A. Roger Ekirch writes in At Day's Close: Night in Times Past,

color drains from the landscape. Thickets grow larger and less distinct, blending into mongrel shades of gray. It is eventide when, say the Irish, a man and a bush look alike, or, more ominously, warns an Italian adage, hounds and wolves. The darkness of night appears palpable. Evening does not arrive, it "thickens."

Winter twilight, Thoreau observes, is white; summer's is a "fading world of slate-blue, smoke, and umber," as Peter Davidson calls it in The Last of the Light: About Twilight.

When in that advancing obscurity, it is best to be with those you know, your family and friends--who, visible and audible near you, help you orient yourself and your ancient fears in that neither dark nor light world. Even more so when that is walk through the streets of New Harmony--streets that have seen some of the most unusual history in all of America ("Almost every citizen is aware of New Harmony's strangeness," wrote Marguerite Young in 1945). It's not a place of violent death or dark secrets, but any community with a history of enforced celibacy and religious fervor can't help but generate some residual shivers when the darkness begins to rise and spread from the surrounding fields.

All of that perhaps primed me for my encounter with the following account of a creepy twilight experience related by Harold Owen, brother of the famous war poet Wilfred Owen, in his 1963 memoir, Journey from Obscurity, which Peter Davidson shares in The Last of the Light.

 


Doesn't that have everything one wants in a creepy twilight story? Inexplicable sights and movements, a feeling of another world encroaching inexorably on our own, the recourse to companionship as the only solace. Wonderful.

For all but the most recent era of human history, "daily experience," Davidson writes, "would have included the slow fall of the light, an awareness of the slow process of twilight." We've all but lost what Nabokov (via Davidson) called the "gradual and dual blue" which "At night unites the viewer with the view."

I am a morning person, at my best in the gentle yet vigorous light of the earliest summer hours. But I see the value of twilight, and I can't argue with Thoreau:

For what a man does abroad by night requires and implies more deliberate energy than what he is encouraged to do in the sunshine. He is more spiritual, less animal or vegetable, in the former case.

Hie thee to your campsites and fields and wildest parks sometime this summer, folks. Watch the buzzing dragonflies at dinner give way to the dramatic swirl of the swallows, then the awkward swoop-drop-recovery of the bats, and the sleek stealth of the nighthawk. Watch the light fade, and see what it reveals.

The ghosts? Oh, they all moved out long ago.

In my October wanderings, I've drawn before from A. Roger Ekirch's history of nighttime, At Day's Close, because of course when there is darkness there are ghosts. But their number, it seems, varies with time.

Though 1762 was the year of the celebrated Cock Lane Ghost, Ekirch notes that the same year, nonetheless, also brought a bit of rationalist cheerleading from the Public Advertiser:

We experience every day, that as science and learning increases, the vulgar notions of spirits, apparitions, witches and demons decrease and die of themselves.

By 1788, the Daily Universal Register was ready to take it a step further, making the bold claim that

Not a single building in all London is perhaps now to be heard of, which bears the repute of being a haunted house.

Methinks the editors of the Daily Universal Register, even granting that they were accurate at that moment, may have been extrapolating too much into the future. As Peter Ackroyd points out in his introduction to The English Ghost, the best, ghost-wise, was yet to come:

Nineteenth-century England was perhaps the golden age of the ghost. It may have ceased to have any messages or any advice for the living, but it was everywhere. The yearnings associated with the Romantic movement of English poetry found fruition in the spectacle of the melancholy ghosts. There as much popular interest in spirit-rappings and in spirit-tappings. The fashion for mesmerism, in the middle of the century [Which, let's not forget, swept up Dickens!--ed.], provoked belief in some form of plasma or magnetic fluid that might harbour the forms of spirits. Technological progress also seemed to affirm the existence of spectral bodies, with the appearance of photographs intending to reveal the ghostly occupants of rooms and chairs. The Society of Psychical Research, founding in 1882, lent seriousness and credibility to the quest for spirits. A questionnaire sent out by the society in 1894 revealed that out of seventeen thousand people, 673 claimed that they had seen a ghost in one form or another. It is perhaps curious, however, that the majority of them did not know the identity of the spirit in question. The manifestation appeared arbitrary and purposeless.

Beyond that--and setting science, rationalism, and facts aside--the Daily Universal Register's assertion seems questionable. Has there ever been a human settlement of more than about 100 souls where someone wasn't claiming to be haunted? It seems a basic condition of a species that lives with the awareness of mortality. I can't think of any haunted houses in my small hometown, but I know second-hand of such a claim in London (to say nothing of the many post-1788 accounts found in Roger Clarke's A Natural History of Ghosts), and third-and-beyond-hand of countless claims in Chicago. And, on this autumn evening, blessed with the full moon: what about you and your hometown?

Just popping in for a look, or, Daytime ghosts

One of many fun digressions in Roger Clarke's A Natural History of Ghosts comes when he reminds us that while in our age, midnight is the proper ghostly hour,

traditionally, ghosts are summoned by the extreme transitional stages of the clock. You are as likely to see a ghost before lunch as you are after going to bed. In later years, this tradition died out, since it seemed ghosts were inalienably connected to the night. Indeed, the whole nature of the ghostly at this period [the early eighteenth century] was linked to the vapours exhaled by the earth when the world turned dark.

Clarke goes on to share stories of several daytime ghosts from that period, including one of a soldier recorded in John Aubrey's ever-bountiful Miscellanies.

Any ghosts in earshot should definitely not take this as a challenge . . . but it is hard to picture ghosts being nearly so terrifying under bright skies. As A. Roger Ekirch writes in At Day's Close: A History of Night in Times Past, there's a reason night scares us, beyond its actual dangers:

Night dramatically transformed the communal landscape, investing innocuous landmarks with sinister portent. In a Yorkshire valley, for example, the decayed ruins of a small chapel were a "perfect paradise for boys" by day, but "not to be approached for the world by night, being haunted by a variety of strange ghosts."

Darkness invites imagination to fill it, and those we conjure as its denizens are more frightening, by far, than any spirits we could imagine encountering under full sun.

a So, tradition aside, midnight it is. Ekirch tells of laborers afraid to leave for work too long before the arrival of dawn, with its powers to chase demons:

According to the Newcastle antiquary Henry Bourne, . . "Hence it is, that in country places, where the way of life requires more early labour, they always go chearfully to work at that time; whereas if they are called abroad sooner, they are apt to imagine everything they see or hear, to be a wandring ghost."

Late eighteenth-century folklorist Francis Grose, meanwhile, writes Ekirch,

estimated that the typical churchyard contained nearly as many ghosts at night as the village had parishioners. "To pass them at night was an achievement not to be attempted by any one in the parish, the sextons excepted."

Elsewhere in his book, Ekirch notes that some communities were plagued by recurrent visits from the same ghost, including "Wiltshire's Wilton's Dog." Frustratingly, Ekirch doesn't elaborate, but the introduction of a ghostly animal does enable me to bring this post full circle, back to daytime ghosts--and the story of the only possible ghost I remember seeing. When I was a young boy, aged probably three or four, we had an black, white, and orange cat named Angel, who lived with us for probably a year, then wandered away. Much later--in my memory, it's at least three years--I was playing in our front yard one day when I looked up and saw Angel walking up the end of the driveway. I watched as she walked halfway up the drive and sat down. More confused than pleased to see her, I looked away briefly, and when I looked back, she was gone.

Oh, fine--there probably is a reasonable explanation for it. Be rational, if you must, about the lifespans and habits of wandering cats. But it's October, and the memory is powerful and clear all these decades later, so tonight I'll amuse myself by thinking that Angel, like the ghost of the dying soldier chronicled by Aubrey, who visits his mistress merely to "come to her bedside, draw the curtain, look upon her and go away," simply wanted one last spectral look at her old home.

Lost in the night

{Cottage on Fire at Night (c. 1785-1793), Joseph Wright of Derby}
From Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

NIGHTWARD
Approaching towards night.

Their night-ward studies, wherewith they close the day's work.
MILTON ON EDUCATION.

Tonight I'm returning one last time to the well of fascinating knowledge that is Richard Holmes's Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (1993). The book's primary story, which I've barely addressed in the couple of posts for which I've already drawn on the book, is in itself full of interest: Holmes applies all his skills as a biographer to discover the nature of Samuel Johnson's friendship with the poet Richard Savage, whose biography Johnson would write in the year after Savage's death. The pursuit of that friendship allows Holmes to draw attention to--and conclusions about--the young Johnson in the years before his fame; to that, he adds an affecting portrait of the talented, maddening, irascible, self-destructive Savage.

But what I enjoyed most in the book were the incidental discoveries and asides that Holmes delivers, the facts and ideas that help him to flesh out his portrait of Augustan England. I wrote a few days ago about some archaic points of eighteenth-century English law that caught my eye; today I'll turn to one last example in that line. Holmes points it out during Savage's last months, at the end of 1742, when, broke and increasingly forlorn, he became an increasing burden on his friends and patrons, and,

[B]y the end of the year, the old pattern of his city life reasserted itself. "All the Charms of his Conversation could not compensate" for his hopeless irregularity as a house-guest. He harassed friends with his talk and his drinking; and he finally repelled them with his endless schemes and demands. His clothes, like his novelty value, started to wear thin. He began to be pursued by small debtors, and slowly reverted to the tramp-like existence of his former days, lodging at taverns and wandering the streets at night.

That wandering was in part habitual, possibly even preferred: Savage had long been a late-night carouser; in fact, the event that brought him his greatest fame--his conviction for murder--had come about as a result of a wee-hours brawl.

NIGHTBRAWLER
One who raises disturbances in the night.

You unlace your reputation,
And spend your rich opinion for the name
Of a night-brawler.
SHAKESPEARE'S OTHELLO.

But his turn to the nocturnal this time had a further, more specific purpose as well. As Holmes explains,

This grim, lethargic life was partly forced on Savage by municipal laws, which prevented bailiffs from arresting anyone for debt between the hours of sunset and sunrise. Night thus became the only time Savage could venture out from his hiding-place, which was a back-street tavern called the White Lion.

In his At Day's Close: Night in Times Past (2005), A. Roger Ekirch fleshes out the picture a bit:

Numerous folk, besides burglars, robbers, and other hardened rogues, exploited the evening darkness, often for illicit purposes. . . . For poor families, social and legal constraints of all sorts eased. . . . Likewise, debtors and other fugitives, fearful of arrest [in the day], traveled freely. At night, wrote Thomas Dekker, "The banckrupt, the fellon, and all that owed any mony, and for feare of arrests, or justices warrants, had like so many snayles kept their houses over their heads all day before, began to creep out of their shels."

Ekirch even points out a custom that could possibly have helped Savage, exiled (at the suggestion of and with a handsome stipend provided by Alexander Pope) as he was in Bristol, save on lodging:

Squatters in parts of Western England and Wales laid more permanent claims. A local custom of uncertain origins permitted one to occupy a piece of waste or common land by building a turf cottage overnight, generally known as a caban unnos. The work had to be completed between twilight and dawn, though friends and family were permitted to help.

It's impossible, though, to imagine Savage, whose self-styling as a gentleman bastard was one of the great sources of his misery, turning his hand to such low building work. Instead, he remained afoot and a-stagger in the lanes of Bristol, suffering increasingly from illness, drink, and depression. As the winter wore on and the nights of wandering grew longer, Johnson tells us that "Distress stole upon him by imperceptible Degrees."

NIGHTFARING
Traveling in the night.

Will-a-Wisp misleads night-faring clowns,
O'er hills, and sinking bogs, and pathless downs.
GAY.

Finally Savage lost even his battle with the diurnal cycle, being nabbed when returning to his quarters after dawn from a too-long party. A group of bailiffs arrested him for a debt of eight pounds to a Mrs. Read, owner of a coffeehouse--whom Savage, with his usual ferocity towards his enemies, later referred to in letters as "Madame Wolf-Bitch."

Savage would die in jail just over six months later, leaving, in a sense, Johnson to write his epitaph, in the Life of Savage:

There are no proper Judges of his Conduct who have slumber'd away their Time on the Down of Plenty, nor will a wise Man easily presume to say, "Had I been in Savage's Condition, I should have lived, or written, better than Savage."

For tonight, though, I'll let Dr. Johnson reassume his lexicographer's hat and have a different--and single--last word.

NIGHTFOUNDERED
Lost or distressed in the night.

Either some one like us night-foundered here,
Or else some neighbour woodman, or at worst,
Some roving robber calling to his fellows.
MILTON.