THAT point in the day when evening slips into night is the subject of The Last of the Light. Its publisher suggests it is a “meditation”, which sounds pretentious and perhaps it is, but who cares? Peter Davidson, who has taught at the University of Aberdeen and other such institutions, is the kind of the writer who is as effortlessly erudite as he is naturally lyrical. He wears his learning not so much lightly but as one does old boots with which one cannot bear to part; he sees with the eye of a poet and scrutinizes with that of a scholar.

The result is an exotic cocktail whose ingredients include history and memoir, poetry and art. This is the kind of book that demands to be read slowly and which will repay re-reading. It is imbued with melancholy, “the overwhelming English disease”, of which loss is one of the symptoms. Time passes and cannot be regained even by the most imaginative and inventive writers and painters. The human story – or curse? – is one of forward movement. On and on we go, propelled into a future which takes us ever closer to our end.

Davidson’s vision of the past is one of hopeful youth, of fond remembrance, of sepia hues and unwelcome and welcome change. It is one of literature’s great themes. As the sun sinks over the yardarm and the lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea darkness falls and we must face the twilight hour. And as the light goes so, too, it feels, does life. For how can there be one without the other?

In a previous book, The Idea of North, Davidson discussed the variousness of the north through an impressive range of reference. His approach to twilight is similar. Come dusk and the disappearing sun we sense that things are going into decline, that growth has halted, and that sadness has entered the soul. As I read The Last of the Light I kept thinking of Richard Thompson’s plangent song, Dimming of the Day, and in particular that lovely line, “When all my will is gone you hold me sway.”

Music, however, is not part of Davidson’s template, his preference being for prose and poetry and painting. He is avowedly, resolutely old-fashioned and his book is all the better for it. He is drawn to writers such as Ronald Firbank, John Ruskin, Lawrence Durrell, John Henry Newman and Gerard Manley Hopkins who are not much mentioned these days unless it is to deride them. The painters he references – Caspar David Friedrich, Samuel Palmer, John Sell Cotman, John Atkinson Grimshaw – are no more part of modern consciousness. What interests Davidson is how such artists have captured the crepuscule and what they set out to communicate by doing so.

Davidson himself, in exquisitely paced paragraphs, roves from his home in the north of Scotland where he was born to Spain and Italy and England, where he attended Cambridge University. He is a bred in the bone Catholic and that is a constant, comforting influence, its routine and rituals. A student at Cambridge in the 1970s, he rejoiced in its ancient mistiness, arriving in autumn, that most melancholy of seasons, when “the lasting impression was of a place grown almost otherworldly in short-lived, failing light”. It was a perfect setting for detective fiction of the sort produced by Edinburgh-born Michael Innes, the pseudonym of the academic J.I.M. Stewart, another writer who is so neglected his novels aren’t even to be found in charity shops.

Patrolling Cambridge’s streets or exploring churches in the surrounding countryside with like-minded friends, Davidson felt that the past and its attendant traditions were under threat, that things were falling apart. At the same time, though, he was intrigued by what was coming.

“Only three colleges (one of them mine) then admitted both women and men,” he writes, “and our lodgings were all on the far side of the river from the town. For me to cross the baroque stone bridge, through the light-scattering mists moving on the surface of the water, was to enter what felt like a secondary world, almost like making a journey into the past, where the streets seemed full of of short-haired, broad-shouldered young men in tweed jackets.”

Such Proustian passages, of which there are many, add to the book’s air of melancholy. The writer with whom it seems to me Davidson has a shared sensibility is Claudio Magris, author of Danube. Magris is based in Trieste, whose very name evokes sadness. Fittingly, this is where Davidson’s meditation on twilight draws to a close, as he strolls in the fast-fading light “on the still-warm flagstones, music coming and going on the water, as if there were no night, nor morning, nor death”.