WINTER IS CREEPING towards us. Just look out of your window. The trees have already started turning. Women are wearing black tights. Big white birds are winging in from the Arctic. Hands are getting cold on bicycle handlebars. And at the end of this month the clocks will go back.

This controversial ceremony, carried out annually amid curses and yawns and strewn electronic manuals, traditionally marks the onset of an epidemic of complaints. For a week or two, the nation will be afflicted by sharp bouts of statistics about a rise in burglary rates and increasing car crashes. You will hear the moaning of farmers feeling short-changed by the daylight, and the snuffles of hypochondriacs who get SAD without the sun.

But why get dragged down so miserably? Why not try to rescue this magical moment? It’s perfectly possible. Remember the eclipse at the end of the last millennium? Who did not gaze skywards in wonder as the darkness slowly descended? Who did not feel an almost primeval awe? As the daylight gradually drained from the face of our planet, as the songbirds fell silent and the air grew suddenly chill, imaginations all over Britain were moved.

So why don’t we start to celebrate a similar drama, annually? The situation, after all, is not really so different. In a couple of weeks’ time, at five o’clock, we will find ourselves stepping out of our offices into a sudden unaccustomed gloom. We will find ourselves abruptly confronted by that fleeting phenomenon of twilight. And until we grow used to it — physiologists suggest it takes as much as a fortnight — the otherworldly qualities of this peculiar moment will strike our senses afresh.

The special beauty of this transitional time has been recognised by artists throughout history: from the dusk-suffused visions of the great Venetian painters, through the nocturnes of Chopin to the “violet hour” of Eliot. Romanticism was entranced by its nebulous glimmer. Whistler was a master of its subtle turquoise mysteries. With Samuel Palmer the crepuscular landscape became almost a genre. And today a new show opening at the Victoria & Albert Museum reminds us once more of its strange enchantment. Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour looks at the work of contemporaries who have captured it on camera.

Of course light is the essence of the photographer’s art. The camera is attuned to its subtleties. But wander through the snow-dusted forests or stare through the suburban windows of this show and you will know that these images are about much more than the effects of photons upon light-sensitive film surfaces. A luminously charged atmosphere — as Turner whipping up his great glowing blizzards of colour or Casper David Friedrich capturing the melancholy gleam of his mountains well knew — stirs up emotion. Twilight is a psychological as much as a physical state. Remember the opening of Hardy’s The Return of the Native? The reader stands amid the lowering expanses of Egdon Heath as day draws to a close, as the sparse unpeopled landscape reaches that “transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness” at which it finds its “great and particular glory”. The reader is transported to a symbolic realm.

Twilight is a threshold that divides the familiar from the unknown. As solid realities dissolve in the darkness, as certainties are baffled and familiar lineaments melt, we enter a supernatural place in which even the most mundane things may be transformed by magic — even the damp combinations of the home-coming typist, in Eliot’s The Waste Land, are touched by the last rays of the evening light.

In this strange liminal moment, “all that the worldly day has meant/ Wastes like a lie” as D. H. Lawrence once said. The weary routines of reality may be forgotten. We can slip instead into some parallel place. We can find a wonderful breathing space.

So don’t dread the official onset of winter at the end of this month. Instead, look forward to the opportunity offered to us annually to rediscover the haunting mysteries of the violet hour, the solace of that moment “when the eyes and back/ Turn upwards from the desk, when the human engine waits/ Like a taxi throbbing waiting”. This is one vehicle which you can be sure is not going to crash just because it gets a bit darker a bit earlier in a couple of weeks.

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