can be born from these fires and shadows – the mental ambiguity in echo with that of the privileged moment.    Every being anguished by its own existence experiences an irresistable attraction for those end of the day contem- plations. Can it itself foresee what its feeling will be? Weary of life and desiring the Night ... or on the contrary, sparking off internally at the sight of the last flarings? Two extreme examples, amongst others, to show the nodal character of that moment when all subjective experiences are summed up, when all of each day’s conflicts are replayed.    CLEMENS BRENTANO, the German romanticist, wrote this intuitive sentence: "...Impressively, the night veils the immense porch of dusk, and every human heart knows who has won, who has lost".    The opposition of clarity to darkness as a reflection of the battle between reason and the delirious, but equally a point where the two empires cloud over reciprocally, as in a kind of reconciliation. Mad and secret hope of the distressed being ... Hope that the symbolic ritual, cosmic and everyday, will induce by its exemplarity, the synthesis of that which, in its own mind, is separated. Perhaps if the Star at that precise moment suspended its fall. But coexis- tence never establishes itself, it is usually meIancholy and despondency which accompanies the setting. Destiny of those who desire the half – light, who refuse to choose between analysis and delirium. Hesitant people from inter- mediary zones, from the uncertainty, from shadows and almost horizontal lights, from half – open doors and broken windows.    Others opt for the darkness. They will call up the abstract, will desire the rise of secret forces, of dream, of phantasms and of the unconscious ... but with some restrictions, in truth even a certain intellectual dishonesty.    HEINREICH VON KLEIST, that other great Romanticist, states that "in the organic world, in so far as the conscious reflection becomes darker or weaker, grace advances more radiant and triumphant..."; it is no less true of it that he hesitates to annihilate all conscience in him- self. He seeks only in fact the awakened dream, a kind of somnambulism where the observer, though in retreat, would remain vigiIant. The unconscious is here a super– conscience, a reservoir of occult knowledge in which the awakened part desires to drink deep. As MARCEL BRION notes in his work the Romantic Germany, the question is one of "sleep and active dreams". One enters the night in order to explore it and the twilight is its threshold. Interior darkness, darkness of the terrestrial depths, the romantic symbolism passes with ease and intuition from one world to the other. The nocturnal sky blends with the subter- ranean world of hells. The texts of that time testify to that... Thus that magnificent letter from Caroline Von GUNDERODE to Bettina BRENTANO (Clemens Brentano’s sister): "You don’t yet understand that these paths lead right to the bottom of the spirit’s mine; but the day will come when they appear to you as such, for man walks often through deserted ways; the more he has the desire to advance, the more solitude becomes terrifying, and the more the desert spreads onwards. But when you realise how far you have descended into the well of thought and when you find there below a new dawn, when you re–emerge joyous, when you speak from your subter- ranean world, then you will be consoled; for the world will never be with you".    Most paradoxically, it is the light that she seeks in the blackness of the inner worlds, a new dawn (that twilight of the morning) with an essential different quality – the revelation of herself. 0 lamps of luminous fires In your splendours the hollow grottoes Of blind and dark feeling Through advantageous favours Give both light and warmth To the cherished object of their heart St JEAN DE LA CROIX 'The dark night of the soul' Through those who are in misery of seeing themselves without faith, one sees that God does not illuminate them; but for others one sees that there is a God who blinds them PASCAL 'thoughts'