In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue.
This period of the blue
nights does not occur in subtropical California, where I lived for much of the
time I will be talking about here and where the end of daylight is fast and
lost in the blaze of the dropping sun, but it does occur in New York, where I
now live. You notice it first as April
ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming — in fact
not at all a warming — yet summer suddenly seems near, a possibility, even a
promise. You pass a window, you walk to
Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course
of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and
fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres,
or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of
nuclear reactors.
The French called this
time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the
English it was “the gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes — the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter,
the glisten, the glamour — carrying in its consonants the images of houses
shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the
shadows.
During the blue nights you
think the end of day will never come. As
the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an
actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already
shortening, the summer is gone. This
book is called “Blue Nights” because at the time I began it I found my mind
turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the
days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of
the brightness, but they are also its warming.
- Joan Didion, Blue
Nights
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