Defiance in Half-light

By Taylor Hood

In these days of perpetual revolution, growing political divides and mounting fears of global conflict, I find myself nodding as I read Lord Dunsany’s short story ‘The Day of the Poll’, in which a lonely poet pulls a flustered citizen into his motorcar and drives away from all the scorn and noise:

But it was not to the polling-booth that the motor went, it passed it and left the town and came by a small white winding road to the very top of the downs. There the poet dismissed the car and let that wondering voter on to the grass and seated himself on a rug. And for long the voter talked of those imperial traditions that our forefathers had made for us and which he should uphold with his vote, or else it was of a people oppressed by a feudal system that was out of date and effete, and that should be ended or mended. But the poet pointed out to him small, distant, wandering ships on the sunlit strip of sea, and the birds far down below them, and the houses below the birds, with the little columns of smoke that could not find the downs. [1]

Like the voter, more and more of us find ourselves rallying and crying for this and that cause, however remote, and deriding anyone who doesn’t pick a side or refuses to join in altogether. This isn’t to impugn the moral integrity of those struggling for just causes, nor is it to suggest that political engagement is futile. Yet even those advocating justice for nature increasingly succumb to a petulant style of activism, often going out of their way to destroy the good as a comment on the loss of the good. One imagines protestors dropping down from exhaustion at the end of the day, knowing nothing of the wild things they’ve made it their mission to defend. The fact that such vitriol has infected even green causes shows to what extent a sense of white-hot anger is rising in the world, to say nothing of how all of this plays into the schemes of elites who would prefer we stay distracted or the absurdity of megalomaniacal leaders measuring their worth in megatons as we tear at each other’s throats. It appears increasingly likely that no one will be around to behold ‘ancient beautiful things’ until ‘the stars come blinking out to look upon our littleness’, as do the poet and his companion in Dunsany’s story. [2]

Amidst the chaos I find a small measure of peace at Chinnor Hill, Oxfordshire. This isn’t the nature reserve I love the most, being a native Scot, but I’ve come to know it best of all those I’ve had the pleasure of living near or working in since leaving home a decade ago. I’ve spent countless hours wandering the shady woods of oak, ash, hazel and cherry and, further afield, the spacious alleys of beech clinging to the hillside. Navigating my way through dense scrub, I’ve enjoyed bird spotting, looking for signs of dormice, and searching sunspots or under reptile refugia for slow worms. In a less adventurous mood, I’ll read and think on the chalk grassland overlook surrounded by clusters of rare juniper bushes and rich assemblages of marjoram, thyme, bee-orchid and distinctive Chiltern gentian, amongst which butterflies daintily float. At times Dexter cattle can be seen here slowly browsing the scrub as red kites soar above them. If one is lucky, one may also catch a glimpse of a steam train chugging its way through the landscape at the bottom of the hill. To visit Chinnor Hill is to travel into the past, become invisible, like the now mostly obscured Bronze Age barrows that rise up out the earth behind the overlook, telling of a time when the Chiltern escarpment was inhabited by people who knew a quieter life rooted to the land.

My fondest memories at the reserve involve sitting on the cap of the hill in the twilight and looking out across the patchwork of towns and fields that make up the Vale of Aylesbury. Submersed in half-light, I’m able to forget myself for a while and disconnect from the events of the day, which Karen Blixen assigned to ‘the domain of organising and universal powers’. [3] For it’s with the coming of the twilight and all its mysterious gradations toward dusk or sunrise that ‘things will become what they really are’. [4] And nature is really immemorial, cyclical, unconcerned with progress toward some goal or any inevitability except the coming of the night or the next morning. Nature is also more-than-human since it includes but vastly exceeds us; the landscape darkens in our perception but not for crepuscular animals. Thus, before the curtain of night falls or the sky fully brightens, twilight reveals a world that exists independent of our will, yet we’re still privy to its beauty, blessed even. By contemplating the twilight, we become not merely creatures of the day - advocators, managers, defilers - but wonderers in a wider world.

Delight in nature has traditionally been treated with suspicion, however. Many have held that attending to the beauty of the natural world is the purview of the feckless dreamer and, more heinously, pulls us away from the serious business of life. [5] George Orwell famously argued against this sad idea, asking whether it is ‘wicked to take a pleasure in Spring and other seasonal changes’ when so much is wrong with the world. [6] He understood that even when ‘the atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers’, it’s precisely in ‘retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies [that] makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable’. [7] We shouldn’t therefore feel ashamed if we desire to go against ‘the general human flow’, as ecophilosopher Patrick Curry puts it, yet it’s becoming more difficult to escape from the flow and find solace in this ‘ever-increasingly crowded, noisy, over heated and brightly lit world’, this perpetual day that is the so-called Anthropocene. [8] And it’s not difficult to understand how things have become like this given that our society has always worshipped light, equating it with ‘logos, reason, heaven and maleness’ so that we constantly strive to reveal, conquer and subdue, thereby diminishing ‘the sources of enchantment in mythos, emotion, Earth and the female’. [9] Indeed, it’s only ever through the former’s terrible reign of ‘sleepless reason’ that intense strife and even the prospect of nuclear annihilation looms, the brightest day any of us will ever experience before there are no more. [10]

The wellbeing of humanity and those of other animals and their homes depend quite literally on our ability to be still in the twilight. Going to places like Chinnor Hill to experience this calming illumination is in these times an act of defiance, a necessarily quiet and restrained one. Perhaps if more of us who already care for nature trekked out to our nearest reserve to take in the ending of the day or woke up with the dawn, we might come to dispose ourselves in a more civil manner, remembering what we love so dearly. And those for whom nature is simply a set of green things standing in the way of a hard day’s work may find themselves alive on a planet beautiful yet fragile as twilight itself.

[1] Lord Dunsany, ‘The Day of the Poll’, in Time and the Gods (Gollancz, 2000), pp. 332—34 (p. 333).

[2] Ibid., p. 334.

[3] Karen Blixen, Shadows on the Grass (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 112.

[4] Ibid.

[5] For a defence of beauty against these claims, see Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002).

[6] George Orwell, ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ in Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, ed. by George Packer (New York: Mariner Books, 2009), pp. 214-18 (p. 216).

[7] Ibid., p. 218.

[8] Patrick Curry, Enchantment: Wonder in Modern Life (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2019), p. 93. For a comprehensive discussion of our changing attitudes to darkness, see Nina Edwards, Darkness: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2018).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

Bibliography:

Blixen, Karen, Shadows on the Grass (New York: Random House, 1961)

Curry, Patrick, Enchantment: Wonder in Modern Life (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2019)

Dunsany, Lord, ‘The Day of the Poll’, in Time and the Gods (London: Gollancz, 2000), pp. 332–34

Edwards, Nina, Darkness: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2018)

Orwell, George, ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’ in Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, ed. by George Packer (New York: Mariner Books, 2009), pp. 214–18

Scarry, Elaine, On Beauty and Being Just (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002)

Taylor Hood is a Scottish writer, naturalist and artist. He wrote his MA English Literature (by Research) thesis on Earth-centred sacrality in the fantasies of Lord Dunsany and JRR Tolkien. He also holds a BSc (Hons) in Wildlife Ecology and a Level 3 Extended Diploma in Countryside Management. He is Publicity and Outreach Manager for The Ecological Citizen and the editor of Thitherword.