One of the epigraphs to Peter Davidson’s nocturne on Europe’s arts of twilight is from Hegel: ‘The owl of Minerva begins to fly only at dusk’, an image of philosophy as posthumous, able to explain things only after we have experienced them. Or an image of dusk as threshold, the blue hour when light transforms itself, and other worlds become possible.
The Last of the Light is a cultural companion to such notions. A cabinet of curiosities — paintings, poems, music — framed by the idea of Europe as an archipelago of regret, many of whose most vital artefacts have dealt in echo and obscure longing, translated into a feeling for light. This is a trail going back to Virgil, poet of shadows, or else starting from Christian ideas of a crepuscular fallen world. The motif of ubi sunt is that we were always too late, that European culture is an enfilade of rooms, each opening forwards while looking backwards, in what Davidson calls ‘serial nostalgias’.
It is a theme rather than a subject, and he traces its variations in a patent blend of memoir, evocation of place and cultural itinerary. Davidson’s recent excursions into this terrain (his earlier book The Idea of North was a mixed-media exploration of nordicity) have been increasingly personal in register. This too is a book of the north, necessarily — long twilights only occur between the 50th and 70th parallel — rather than of places and latitudes where the sun drops like a stone.
It is also a declaration of allegiance to lost causes and shadowy histories: the landscapes of Catholic recusancy (Lancashire, the Herefordshire marches, northeastern Scotland) or the Jacobite north; Anglican ritual, the arts of the Stuart court, English Baroque in all its forms.
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