Walking the Liminal
On twilight, potentiality, and the spaces in which meaning emerges
In 2021, I went hiking and returned home late.
I had taken a series of photographs with my cell phone along the way. At the time, they were simply photographs of an experience I wanted to preserve. I had been out walking, and the day had carried me further than I had anticipated.
Looking back at them, I find myself returning to something that is difficult to describe. There is a particular quality to the time when daylight begins to recede, when the familiar distinctions between things become less pronounced and the world seems to occupy a different kind of space.
I did not have a name for what I was experiencing then. Nor did I have a particular question in mind. Yet I participated in a lasting encounter.
Recently, however, I came across a description of Pradosh Kaal, an auspicious twilight window associated with Diwali. As the sun sets and the sky takes on soft shades of pink and purple, the first diyas are lit.
I was moved by this cultural interpretation of twilight. Until then, I had not known that this particular interval of the day held such significance.
It took me a few hours to understand what had touched me so deeply.
I think it was the recognition that the in-between can matter in its own right.
The significance of twilight
We tend to organise our understanding of the world through distinctions. Day and night, beginning and end, presence and absence. We identify things by distinguishing them from what they are not, and we often understand transitions in terms of the states they connect.
Twilight can be described as the transition between day and night. From this perspective, its significance lies in its position between two more clearly defined states.
But what if this description overlooks something essential?
Twilight is not simply an incomplete day or an early night. It has its own qualities, its own atmosphere, and its own possibilities of experience. The changing light is not merely a sign that one state is ending and another beginning. It is something we can encounter, attend to, and inhabit.
The significance of Pradosh Kaal offered me a way of seeing this interval differently. Here was a cultural practice that recognised a particular period of twilight as meaningful in its own right.
I do not mean to suggest that my experience of dusk is equivalent to the religious significance of Pradosh Kaal. Rather, encountering this interpretation helped me recognise something in my own experience that I had not previously been able to articulate.
It gave me a different way of seeing.
And this made me wonder: how often do we overlook something because we understand it primarily through what comes before or after it?
What if the in-between is not an absence?
An interval is often understood as a space separating two things. A gap between words, a pause between sentences, a boundary between categories. We can regard these spaces as incidental, as though their only purpose were to connect what is already there.
But the space between things is not necessarily empty of significance.
Consider the spaces between words. They allow us to distinguish one word from another, but they also contribute to the rhythm and intelligibility of language. A pause can change the way a sentence is experienced. A misplaced punctuation mark can interrupt an established reading and make another relationship between words perceptible.
The space between two musical notes is not simply the absence of sound. A pause can create anticipation, tension, or release. Its significance depends on the sounds surrounding it, but it cannot always be reduced to them.
Perhaps twilight invites us to consider a similar possibility.
It is neither simply day nor simply night. Yet it is not an absence of either. It is a particular configuration of light, time, perception, and atmosphere, one that cannot be adequately described by assigning it to either category alone.
The in-between need not be a third thing, situated between two others. It might instead be a condition in which their relationship becomes perceptible.
And perhaps this is where the question becomes more interesting.
What if the in-between is not merely where things meet, but where something becomes possible?
Where meaning emerges
In an earlier essay, Where do meaning and belonging reside?, I explored the possibility that home might not be found in any particular place or object, but in the relationships between things.
The poem Home, which I wrote in 2023, begins with the thought that home is an imaginary place without a direct equivalent in the physical world. It exists between letters, words, sentences, lines, and books.
At the time, I was concerned with the peculiarities of language and the ways in which something can belong without having to conform entirely to what surrounds it.
I have since come to appreciate another dimension of that thought.
If meaning emerges through relationships, then those relationships are not merely connections between things whose significance is already established. They may also be productive in their own right.
A word acquires meaning through its relationships with other words, through the contexts in which it is used, and through the people who encounter it. A photograph becomes meaningful not only through what it depicts, but also through the circumstances of its creation, the act of looking at it, and the associations that arise in the encounter.
Meaning, in this sense, is not simply contained in an object waiting to be extracted. Nor is it merely something we project onto the world. It can emerge through the relationship between what we encounter and the ways in which we are able to perceive it.
This does not mean that meaning is arbitrary or that anything can mean anything. The things we encounter have their own histories, forms, and characteristics. They place demands on our attention and resist some of our interpretations.
But the possibilities of an encounter are not necessarily exhausted by what we already know about its participants.
There is room for something to emerge that neither side could have specified in advance.
Perhaps this is what I mean by the potentiality of the in-between.
Potentiality is not a promise that something new will emerge, nor is it simply a collection of predefined possibilities from which we must choose. It is the openness of a relationship to becoming something that cannot be fully determined beforehand.
The in-between is generative not because it guarantees novelty, but because it need not be exhausted by the identities of the things it connects.
Encounter before explanation
This brings me to Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation.
In her 1964 essay, Sontag challenges an approach to art that seeks to translate the artwork into an underlying meaning, as though the work itself were merely a vehicle for something that could be stated more directly elsewhere.
Her argument is not that we should never interpret art. Rather, she questions what happens when interpretation becomes the dominant way of relating to it: when the demand to explain a work takes precedence over our attention to its form, its force, and our experience of encountering it.
I find this particularly relevant to the question of the in-between.
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If we approach an artwork primarily as something to be understood, we may assume that its meaning exists independently of our encounter with it. Our task then becomes one of identifying and explaining what is already there.
But what if the encounter itself matters?
An artwork may affect us before we know why. Its composition might draw our attention to something we had overlooked. Its rhythm might unsettle us. Something in it may resonate with an experience we have not yet found the words to describe.
We may not be able to explain what has happened, and perhaps we do not need to do so immediately.
The encounter is not merely a preliminary step toward understanding the artwork. It is an experience in its own right, one through which new perceptions and questions may emerge.
Interpretation can help us reflect on that experience. But it cannot necessarily exhaust it.
Perhaps the same is true of the photographs I took in 2021.
I can look at them now and ask what they mean to me. I can connect them to my recent encounter with Pradosh Kaal, to my thoughts about liminality, and to my earlier writing about home and belonging.
But these connections do not mean that the photographs were waiting all along to illustrate a philosophical argument I had not yet developed.
Their significance has unfolded through time, through subsequent experiences, and through my returning to them with different questions.
The encounter preceded the explanation. And the explanation has opened the encounter again.
Walking the liminal
Perhaps there is a reason I find myself returning to the image of walking.
Walking involves movement, but it does not always require a clearly defined destination. We may set out to reach a particular place, yet the experience of getting there is not reducible to the endpoint. The surroundings change as we move through them. Our attention shifts. Something we had passed without noticing may suddenly become significant.
To walk is to inhabit a relationship with a place that unfolds over time.
Walking the liminal might therefore mean more than moving through a landscape at twilight. It might describe a way of attending to experiences that do not fit neatly into established categories, without immediately treating them as problems to be resolved.
This is not an argument against distinctions. We need categories to orient ourselves, communicate, and make sense of the world. Nor is every ambiguity productive, or every space between things a place of possibility.
The question is what happens when our categories become the only measure of what we are willing to recognise.
We may mistake what is unfamiliar for what is meaningless. We may treat what is not yet understood as something incomplete. We may try to resolve an ambiguity before allowing ourselves to discover what it makes possible.
Sometimes, the more useful response may be to pause.
To attend to what is there before deciding what it means.
To remain with an experience long enough for it to change the questions we bring to it.
What makes belonging possible?
I return to the question that accompanied my earlier essay: where do meaning and belonging reside?
Perhaps the question itself invites us to look for something that can be located, identified, or possessed. But if meaning emerges through relationships, then perhaps we should also ask what makes those relationships possible.
What allows something to acquire significance without first having to conform to an established category? What allows a difference to remain a difference without becoming an obstacle to relating? What allows an encounter to unfold without requiring its outcome to be known in advance?
I do not think the answer lies in abandoning categories or celebrating the in-between as inherently better than what is clearly defined.
Rather, it lies in recognising that our categories do not exhaust what can be encountered, and that the relationships between things may possess a significance that cannot be reduced to the things themselves.
Perhaps belonging is not simply a matter of finding the right place, or of being recognised as something familiar. It may also depend on the possibility of entering a relationship in which something can remain unfamiliar, unfinished, or a little out of place.
In my earlier essay, I suggested that home might exist in the spaces between letters, words, and books. I still find that image meaningful. But I now wonder whether those spaces are more than the places where belonging can be found.
Perhaps they are also where belonging becomes possible.
And perhaps the same is true of meaning.
The in-between is not necessarily a place we must cross to arrive somewhere else. It may be where the encounter takes place, where relationships unfold, and where possibilities emerge that could not have been determined in advance.
I think back to the photographs from my hike in 2021. I took them without knowing that, years later, I would return to the experience through a different question. The recent discovery of Pradosh Kaal gave me a way of recognising something I had not previously been able to articulate.
It did not resolve the experience. It opened it.
Perhaps this is what it means to walk the liminal: not to seek an answer in the space between things, but to recognise that the space itself may hold possibilities we have not yet learned to perceive.
Sometimes, an encounter does not answer an existing question.
It changes what we are able to see — and, consequently, what we are able to ask.
Where the boundaries fold
There is another image I find myself returning to, one that takes this question in a different direction: the Klein bottle.
At first glance, we tend to understand the world through distinctions such as inside and outside, this and that. We assume that one side can be separated from the other, even if a boundary connects them.
The Klein bottle unsettles this intuition. It is a mathematical non-orientable surface for which the distinction between inside and outside cannot be maintained globally. Unlike an ordinary bottle, it does not have two consistently distinguishable sides.
This does not mean that distinctions cease to exist. Rather, it challenges the assumption that every distinction we make can be maintained in the same way, everywhere.
Perhaps this offers another way of thinking about the liminal. Not simply as the space between two things, but as an invitation to reconsider the distinctions through which we perceive them.
What if the relationship is not merely something that exists between otherwise independent sides, but something that also shapes how those sides become distinguishable?
The Klein bottle does not give us another place to stand. It makes us question the assumptions that allow us to describe where we are standing at all.
And perhaps this is another reason to keep walking.
