âYou notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warmingâin fact not at all a warmingâyet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the colour blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day âlâheure bleue.â To the English it was âthe gloaming.â The very word âgloamingâ reverberates, echoesâ the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamourâcarrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows.â
â Joan Didion, Blue Nights
