As the nights draw in, temperatures drop and darkness spreads across our lives like so much bad gravy, many of us will become crepuscular. Don’t worry, it’s not contagious – and there is really very little by way of rashes or twitches to give us away. Rather, like barn owls, bats or skunks, we can often be found haring through the half-light like – well, like a hare.
You see, one of the great joys of our creaking, pink-edged tumble into autumn and the misty creep of winter in the willows is that regular, full-fat, white-flour schlubs can start to live through beautiful sunrises almost every day. Suddenly you don’t need to be the sort of person who starts the day with ice baths to get that first-light rush. This week, the sun is rising at 6.45am in the south of England, soon to be 7am. By the end of October, before the clocks change, we’ll be having crunchy orange dawns at a heady 7.42am. Sure, the lack of daylight may eventually turn us into miserable husks, staring at toaster filaments in lieu of UV rays as our skin turns to clay. But for this moment, this conker-strewn, apricot-sky early autumn, those early mornings are a slice of magic.
I’m writing from experience here. I am not just crepuscular, but matutinal – one who glories in the dawn. Thanks to a young son who would rather read about the technicalities of anthropomorphised steam engines at 5am rather than, oh, I don’t know, get a humane amount of sleep, I see a lot of sunrises. During July and August there is something quite strange about getting to 9am, as everybody else’s day is just grinding into gear, and realising that not only have you already been up for four hours but the sun is now high in the sky, wasps are shagging on top of fallen plums and the milk on your doorstep will have lost its beads of condensation.
My most productive, most enthusiastic, most clear-headed hours have always been between 5am and 7am. Even as a mascara-encrusted, wine-stained student I would often wake up at 4.30am and work through the morning before a big deadline, instead of trying to pull an all-nighter. (In truth, as a student I had trouble pulling anything.) I can well remember the sight of pink clouds and morning stars above the rows of terraced Victorian houses as I popped my head out of my attic window during my final year and breathed in the morning air before slamming my brain into work, deadlines and words. There is something almost electric about that time of day. The space for thought as everyone lies unconscious around you, the sense of potential as you alone cut through the foggy blanket of sleep.
Perhaps this is why sunrise plays such a major role in many of our major religions. In her beautiful essay Ramadan Mornings, in the book Life Honestly, Javaria Akbar writes about the crisp and tantalising beauty of Tahajjud, the pre-morning prayer that often takes place in Britain at around 4am. “The fresh, featherweight air is waiting to be filled with whatever I wish to fill it with,” writes Akbar, describing the singular quiet of a breastfeeding mother, awake before the rest of the world. “You’re a minuscule part of a big beautiful universe, while simultaneously realising that little old you matters,” she continues. “You are one in a million and the million is in you.” As I understand it, Catholicism has Lauds, prayers that are sung and spoken before the morning Matins, and Judaism has the Modeh Ani, a prayer of thanks for the returning of the soul to the body after the little death of sleep.
It appears to be written deep into human nature that those liminal, twilight hours are particularly ripe for spiritual, intellectual and personal contemplation. For some that means kneeling and stillness; for others it means cold air and faint light slipping across your skin. Personally, I would much rather be spending mine running through dew-wet grass or swimming through rivers still black with night-time darkness than picking Lego bricks out of discarded porridge or trying to persuade a crumple-faced toddler to lie down quietly and think of the Fat Controller. But some things are beyond negotiation.
The glimmerings of dawn, or aurora, fill us with an energy quite unknown to the 3.30pm crisps-and-caffeine desperation of our afternoons, while even the language of twilight is beautiful. Who can resist the whispering hint of possibility in words such as dusk, gloaming, dimmet and eventide? Sundown, dimday and nightfall all have a melancholic poetry to them that “lunch” and even “teatime” cannot muster. So whether you are matutinal like me or vespertine like the moth, take heart this week in the loss of daylight. Cheer on the drawing in of night. Winter is going to be hell, of course, but at least we get a daily light show to ease us into our misery.
