The Last Hour of Daylight

Every evening, somewhere between the clearing of the dinner plates and the first lamp being lit, there comes an hour that does not belong to the rest of the day. I have loved it since childhood. It is the last hour of daylight, and it behaves unlike any other. The light goes long and low and honey-coloured. Shadows stretch across the lawn like cats. Everything that was plain at noon acquires a faint, absurd importance, even the dustbins, even the neighbour's washing line with its row of patient socks.

I've tried to account for why this hour affects me so, and I've come up with several explanations, none of which is quite satisfying. The simplest is physical. Light low on the horizon passes through more air, loses its blue, and arrives warm. But that explains the colour and not the feeling. The feeling is something else: a sense that the day is being generous at the last moment, as if it knew it was leaving and wished to give you something to remember it by.

A small education

As a boy, I was sent out at this hour to fetch the washing in, and I remember doing it with a kind of reluctant reverence. My mother would call from the kitchen, and I would stand in the garden with an armful of warm sheets, half-wanting to hurry in and half-wanting to stay. There was a particular smell, of cut grass and cooling brick and somebody's distant bonfire. I couldn't have named what I felt. I only knew that the garden, for those ten minutes, seemed to be paying attention to me.

There is, too, the matter of sound. As the light lowers, the world seems to lower its voice with it. Blackbirds start up their last and most careful song. Somewhere a door closes gently, a tap runs, a child is told for the third time to come in. The noise of the day thins out until you can hear the small things underneath it, and I have often thought that this is why the hour feels like attention itself: it is the moment the world begins to listen to its own quiet.

I think this is what the last hour does. It rewards looking. The rest of the day asks us to be useful; the evening, with its long light, asks only that we be present. It's the closest thing most of us get to an unscheduled sacrament.

What the hour is for

For some years I have tried to protect it. I don't always manage. But on a good day I stop whatever I am doing, no matter how important, and go outside. I stand at the back door with a cup of tea. I watch the light climb the garden wall, brick by brick, until it reaches the top and slips off the edge like water.

I have tried company, too. A friend who visited in July stood beside me one evening, mug in hand, and for ten whole minutes neither of us said a word. Afterwards she told me it was the best conversation we had had in years. I think she meant the silence, which had been, in its way, perfectly articulate.

It is an unproductive thing to do. I accomplish nothing. And yet I come back inside with a kind of settled quiet, as though a small repair had been made somewhere.

The day owes us nothing, and still it pays out in gold at the end.

I wrote this line in my notebook one September evening and left it alone, because it seemed to be telling the truth.

Closing the door on it

There is, of course, a melancholy in the hour. It is the last of something, and the dusk behind it is cold. We know the light will go. But I suspect the beauty and the melancholy are one thing seen from two sides. The gold is gold because it is going. If it stayed, we would stop looking, as we stop looking at anything that does not leave.

So I go out. I stand at the door. I let the light find the wall, the dustbins, the washing line with its sentimental socks. And when it is gone, I come in and put on the lamp, and I am a little less hurried than I was before.

I wish the same for you tonight, if the sky is kind.