Ever since Flannery O’Connor packed so much meaning onto the toilet stall in Wise Blood, I have believed that the liminal spaces are where it’s at for the best writing.
I am pulled to these in-between, indistinct, vague, umbrous spaces in art, but also gravitate to them in life, as I prefer the nuance of gray-tinged opining. Our days are bookended by my favorite subtle purply moments of pre-sunrise and post-sunset. Language seems to expand in such transitional times, as there are plenty of poetic ways to define this: dusk, twilight, gloaming, violet hour, and my favorite: crepuscular.
A fun aside on gloaming from Merriam-Webster:
If The Gloaming were a Stephen King thriller, the climax would undoubtedly take place at the crepuscular hour. But despite its ties to darkness, the origins of gloaming are less than shadowy. Originally used in Scottish dialects of English, the word traces back to the Old English glōm, meaning “twilight,” which shares an ancestor with the Old English glōwan, meaning “to glow.” In the early 1800s, English speakers looked to Scotland again and borrowed the now-archaic verb gloam, meaning “to become dusk” or “to grow dark.”
So gloaming contains the seeds of glowing, which I love, and violet hour, as depicted so famously in T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, contains the power to have a blind prophet “throbbing between two lives”:
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
I too awaited the expected guest.
While the violet seems to slant toward end-of-day (life) activities, crepuscular (a word I used once to introduce my short story “Gray Area”), can go either way. It means “of, relating to, or resembling twilight; dim” or “occurring or active during twilight” according to Merriam-Webster, with a historical footnote:
The early Romans had two words for the twilight. Crepusculum was favored by Roman writers for the half-light of evening, just after the sun sets; diluculum was reserved for morning twilight, just before the sun rises—it is related to lucidus, meaning “bright.” We didn’t embrace either of these Latin nouns as substitutes for our word twilight, but we did form the adjective crepuscular in the 17th century. The word’s zoological sense, relating to animals that are most active at twilight, developed in the 19th century.
I had always thought of twilight as the precursor to nighttime but apparently it’s more richly defined to encompass the quality of lower light found at both pre-sunrise and post-sunset.
Twilight, from Etymonline.com, is sort of the developmental equivalent of the tween era, which is not to say I prefer that time of life in my own household.
“Light from the sky when the sun is below the horizon at morning and evening,” c. 1400 (late 14c. as twilighting), a compound of twi- + light (n.) Cognate with Middle Flemish twilicht, Dutch tweelicht (16c.), Middle High German twelicht, German zwielicht. Glossing Latin crepusculum.
The connotation of twi- in this word is unclear, but it appears more likely to refer to “half” light than to twilight’s occurring twice a day. Compare also Sanskrit samdhya “twilight,” literally “a holding together, junction,” Middle High German zwischerliecht, literally “tweenlight.”
Originally and most commonly in English with reference to evening twilight but occasionally used of morning twilight (the specific sense attested by mid-15c.).
In reference to any faint light or partial darkness from 1660s. Figurative extension is by c. 1600, as “intermediate position or period,” also “indistinct medium of perception, state of hazy illumination.” As an adjective, “belonging to or pertaining to twilight” (1620s).
Twilight zone is from 1901 in a literal sense, a part of the sky lit by twilight; from 1909 in extended senses in references to topics or cases where authority or behavior is unclear. The U.S. TV series of that name is from 1959. In the 1909 novel In the Twilight Zone, the reference is to mulatto heritage (“She was in the twilight zone between the races where each might claim her ...”). James Russell Lowell (1889) has twi-life “life marked by indistinct consciousness or awareness.”
“Twi” can mean half Indian, half Black, to cite one timely example, but I like the Sanskrit idea above assembling both in full and held together in union—an identity not divided as much as doubled and complicated.
Speaking of The Twilight Zone, it seems important to insert this summary of the 10 Scariest Twilight Zone episodes, whose titles reflect twilight-rich themes like “The Howling Man,” “And When the Sky was Opened,” “The After Hours,” “Dream,” “Perchance to Dream,” the “Midnight Sun.”
Here in the Hollow during the October apex of our three-month Halloween, I can point people to our own “Twilight Village” event happening now at the former plantation Philipsburg Manor.
Looking for the true heart of Sleepy Hollow? You’ll find it at Twilight Village at Sleepy Hollow. Discover delightful and mysterious creatures who will tell your fortune, croon creepy tunes, and tell tall-ish tales of legends and lore. Shop for super Sleepy Hollow swag at our Halloween night market and enjoy cocktails, mocktails, and tasty snacks. Watch where you’re going, or you could come face-to-no-face with the Headless Horseman himself!
How can we more precisely define the semi-light/dark of twilight where such a character could sneak up upon you and bop you with a pumpkin? Well, that depends.
There are three types of twi- going from brighter to darker: Civil (when the center of the sun is 6 degrees below to the horizon); Nautical (12 degrees); and then Astronomical (18 degrees), as outlined by Weather.gov and in this handy and well-balanced chart.
Such as the Horseman of Legend of Sleepy Hollow, crepuscular comes with a whole host of creatures. Those lucky “crepuscular” differentiate themselves from diurnal (active by day) or nocturnal (by night), but also might sometimes be confused by weather or planetary events. Animals can be fooled into crepuscular activity on an overcast day or a moonlight night.
And then there are those fiercely loyal to one side or the other. The “matutinal” are active before sunrise and definitely include the crows that wake me up at this ungodly hour, and the “vespertine” for those after sunset.
Animalia.bio has a list of the many crepuscular (584 species!)—which in the US includes brown bear (grizzly), black bear, raccoon, coyote, bobcat, peregrine falcon, red fox, skunk, common snapping turtle, fisher (misleadingly referred to as a fisher cat), elk, muskrat, white tailed deer, sea otter, red deer, brown rat, common mouse, some bats, moose, great blue heron, ring-necked snake, eastern gray squirrel, sei whale, bobcat, and even pets: the domestic guinea pig, ferret, house cat. Most among these are mammals. Snakes, lizards and frogs may be crepuscular, especially in desert environments (like the rosy boa). Birds include the common nighthawk, barn owl, owlet-nightjar, chimney swift, American woodcock, spotted crake, and common buzzards.
But since I’ve been fixated on howling recently, let’s look at wolves. From IFAW.org:
Wolves do move around and hunt at night, though they are not strictly nocturnal. Typically, they display crepuscular behavior, meaning they prefer times of low light and are most active around twilight, dawn, and dusk. This is due to the tapetum lucidum in their eyes, a reflective layer that allows wolves to see well in low-light conditions.
Do all crepuscular creatures have that creepy tapetum lucidum? No. The eye shine of cats and dogs—and wolves—is not for all. Humans don’t have this; we just grope, kind of blindly, until we adjust.
We humans—though twilight technically belongs to both morning and night—definitely seem to lean toward the dark side. We culturally enjoy more these associations of the macabre in the after-hours. And Tiresias’s “expected guest” is none other than death. You are in your twilight years when nearing the end, not when you’re about to emerge from the womb. But the idea of flipping that for fetuses would definitely make for an interesting episode of The Twilight Zone.
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What a wonderful meandering through these different words and there meanings and how they capture the ‘liminalness’ (I made that word up) of twilight.
I’d never heard of the word, Crepuscular before — so thank you for enlightening me. :)
What a *great* word! Crepuscular. I also enjoyed the Twilight Zone clips. That one at the end with Billy Mumy (and Chloris Leachman!) looked very unnerving.