the taste of twilight (2)

Speaking of twilight, I can hardly think of another writer who has inhabited it so painfully and passionately throughout his life, aware as he was that identity - personal, cultural, linguistic, national - entails, not an elusive sense of security, but endless multiplicities, irresolutions, inner conflicts and divisions.

As he acknowledged in one of his final poems, long after the disappearance of the Celtic faery world of his early work and the shattering of his hopes for Ireland:

Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul.

W. B. Yeats, 'Under Ben Bulben' [1939], in The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1990). p. 373.


For Yeats, the 'race' was the Anglo-Irish, and the 'soul' was that of 'ancient Ireland [that] knew it all', as well as that of the English language through which he expressed this knowledge. And has there ever been a poem which so movingly embodies the inevitable pain and, at the same time, the productivity of such inner exile and dissociation?

There are many, many more, of course. In a less poetic tone, and still in an Irish context, another unforgetful expression of the same dissociation, from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In a conversation between the young Stephen Dedalus, aspiring craftsman of the English language despite his Irish Catholic background, and his English Dean of Studies, Stephen ruminates:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; London: Penguin, 1992), p. 205.

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But, reverting to the 'taste of twilight', I can't resist getting back to the first Yeats and his nostalgic longings, which gave birth to all sorts of eerie twilight worlds, including this one:


Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight;
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey,
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will.

And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.


W. B Yeats, 'Into the Twilight', in The Celtic Twilight [1893], Mythologies (1934; London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 141.

the taste of twilight (1)

A few days ago, on my way home, I caught through the train window the briefest glimpse of that eerie, subtle moment - neither light nor darkness, neither day nor night - which Izumi Kyoka so obsessively attempted to capture in his writings and perceptively coined as 'the taste of twilight' (tasogare no aji).

Transfixed, spellbound, suspended, I recalled his words about this singular world in-between that provides the deepest insight not only into the reality of things but into people as well. A view of the world I wholeheartedly embrace, more and more.

I can't resist transcribing the passage again, posted here quite a while ago.

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I wonder how many people there are in the world who truly have a sense of taste for twilight? It seems to me that many people have lumped twilight and dusk together. When speaking of "dusk" the sensation of the color of night, the color of darkness, becomes dominant. However, twilight is neither the color of night nor the color of darkness. So saying, it is neither simply a sensation of day, nor of light. In the momentary world of entering night from day, at the momentary boundary of entering darkness from light, is that not where the twilight world lies? Twilight is neither darkness nor light, and nor is it a mixture of light and darkness. I think that twilight is a world of singularly subtle shades that exist solely in that momentary space of entering darkness from light, of entering night from day. Similar to the singularly subtle twilight world, existing in the space of entering darkness from light, there is a world of subtle shades called dawn on the boundary of entering light from darkness, in the momentary interval of moving to day from night. This too is a singularly subtle world that is neither darkness nor light nor a mixture of darkness and light. I consider it a great mistake that people in the world think as though there were no other worlds outside of night and day, darkness and light. It is my belief that there is certainly a singularly subtle world of the in-between outside of sensations that approach the two extremes of dusk and day-break. [...]
This taste for twilight is not something that exists merely in the relation of day with night. I believe that in similar fashion among all things in the universe there are singularly subtle worlds. For example, even when it comes to people, good and evil is something like day and night, but in between this good and evil there is in addition a singularly subtle place that we should not destroy, that we should not extinguish. In the momentary space of moving from good to evil, in the momentary space of moving from evil to good, humans display singularly nuanced shapes and feelings. I would like primarily to sketch and to transcribe such a twilight-like world. I have been thinking too that I would like to impart in my works a world of the singulary in-between, which is on neither extremity of good and evil, right and wrong, pleasure and displeasure.
Izumi Kyôka, "Tasogare no aji" / The Taste of twilight (translation by Gerald Figal)
from Gerald Figal, Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Durham: Durham UP, 1999) 1-2.

Photo by DK. 

tasogare no aji / the taste of twilight

I wonder how many people there are in the world who truly have a sense of taste for twilight? It seems to me that many people have lumped twilight and dusk together. When speaking of "dusk" the sensation of the color of night, the color of darkness, becomes dominant. However, twilight is neither the color of night nor the color of darkness. So saying, it is neither simply a sensation of day, nor of light. In the momentary world of entering night from day, at the momentary boundary of entering darkness from light, is that not where the twilight world lies? Twilight is neither darkness nor light, and nor is it a mixture of light and darkness. I think that twilight is a world of singularly subtle shades that exist solely in that momentary space of entering darkness from light, of entering night from day. Similar to the singularly subtle twilight world, existing in the space of entering darkness from light, there is a world of subtle shades called dawn on the boundary of entering light from darkness, in the momentary interval of moving to day from night. This too is a singularly subtle world that is neither darkness nor light nor a mixture of darkness and light. I consider it a great mistake that people in the world think as though there were no other worlds outside of night and day, darkness and light. It is my belief that there is certainly a singularly subtle world of the in-between outside of sensations that approach the two extremes of dusk and day-break. [...]
This taste for twilight, this taste for dawn, is not something that exists merely in the relation of day with night. I believe that in similar fashion among all things in the universe there are singularly subtle worlds. For example, even when it comes to people, good and evil is something like day and night, but in between this good and evil there is in addition a singularly subtle place that we should not destroy, that we should not extinguish. In the momentary space of moving from good to evil, in the momentary space of moving from evil to good, humans display singularly nuanced shapes and feelings. I would like primarily to sketch and to transcribe such a twilight-like world. I have been thinking too that I would like to impart in my works a world of the singulary in-between, which is on neither extremity of good and evil, right and wrong, pleasure and displeasure.

Izumi Kyôka, "Tasogare no aji" / The Taste of twilight (translation by Gerald Figal)
from Gerald Figal, Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Durham: Durham UP, 1999) 1-2.