Spotting Foxes at Twilight
A short reflection I had after sunset
Twilight produces a sweet kind of loneliness. The beeping and sawing of the construction site would fall into silence, the gentle hush of traffic would echo in the kitchen, and a blackbird would sing as the colors of things dimmed until nothing remained of them but varied shades of grey.
There’s a German word used to describe the genre of literature and films made post-1945 that reflect on the war: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which translates to something like “coping, thinking about, coming to terms with, working through, and understanding the past”. For me, twilight embodies this feeling perfectly.
Like a ghost suspended between two worlds (neither night nor day), twilight is a minor crisis that has not been allowed either to live or to die and so it knocks on the door of my consciousness, asking for solutions to unformulated questions. For many, Sunday twilights are the most haunting because the thought of going back to work provokes deeper reflectio…