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Books

At the going down of the sun

Peter Davidson’s meditation on the role of twilight in European culture is too nebulous — or protean — to be very illuminating

6 February 2016

9:00 AM

6 February 2016

9:00 AM

The Last of the Light: About Twilight Peter Davidson

Reaktion, pp.208, £20, ISBN: 9781780235103

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.

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