The Glory of a Gray Day

“Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks.” G.K. Chesterton 

I was driving about yesterday under dark, cloudy skies when I looked into the horizon, and was startled to see a huge puff of a cloud moving at a high rate of speed as if it were late for a meeting; an American thought, eh?  Yes, it seemed as if the cloud was on a mission; perhaps it was, maybe it had to get somewhere to drop a bit of rain on a specific plot of land? I had not considered that yesterday, but, today, it makes sense.

There has been quite a bit of darkness to the skies over the past several weeks. This gray* weather seems to get some people down. It incites in them moodiness, and a depression of spirits. I understand this, but cannot conjure up such depressive thoughts when a gloomy day is in the forecast. It must be my Scottish/British genetic make-up, for the thought of a cold, gloomy day, wherein the Spouse builds a fire in the hearth, and I take to the chair with a cup of coffee, Kitty seated nearby, feels like a mini- Christmas morning. Yes, a gray day, is a glorious day, as noted by Gilbert Keith Chesterton in his essay, The Glory of Grey. In this essay, he lauds the historically changeable English weather, especially noting the glory of gray days, and the glory of the often maligned color, gray.  Here is an extended excerpt of this essay which I think you will enjoy:

“…Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit of calling a grey day a ‘colourless’ day. Grey is a colour, and can be a very powerful and pleasing colour. There is also an insulting style of speech about ‘one grey day just like another’. You might as well talk about one green tree just like another. A grey clouded sky is indeed a canopy between us and the sun; so is a green tree, if it comes to that. But the grey umbrellas differ as much as the green in their style and shape, in their tint and tilt. One day may be grey like steel, and another grey like dove’s plumage. One may seem grey like the deathly frost, and another grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens. No things could seem further apart than the doubt of grey and the decision of scarlet. Yet grey and red can mingle, as they do in the morning clouds: and also in a sort of warm smoky stone of which they build the little towns in the west country. In those towns even the houses that are wholly grey have a glow in them; as if their secret firesides were such furnaces of hospitality as faintly to transfuse the walls like walls of cloud. And wandering in those westland parts I did once really find a sign-post pointing up a steep crooked path to a town that was called Clouds. I did not climb up to it; I feared that either the town would not be good enough for the name, or I should not be good enough for the town. Anyhow, the little hamlets of the warm grey stone have a geniality which is not achieved by all the artistic scarlet of the suburbs; as if it were better to warm one’s hands at the ashes of Glastonbury than at the painted flames of Croydon.

Again, the enemies of grey (those astute, daring and evil-minded men) are fond of bringing forward the argument that colours suffer in grey weather, and that strong sunlight is necessary to all the hues of heaven and earth. Here again there are two words to be said; and it is essential to distinguish. It is true that sun is needed to burnish and bring into bloom the tertiary and dubious colours; the colour of peat, pea-soup, Impressionist sketches, brown velvet coats, olives, grey and blue slates, the complexions of vegetarians, the tints of volcanic rock, chocolate, cocoa, mud, soot, slime, old boots; the delicate shades of these do need the sunlight to bring out the faint beauty that often clings to them. But if you have a healthy negro taste in colour, if you choke your garden with poppies and geraniums, if you paint your house sky-blue and scarlet, if you wear, let us say, a golden top-hat and a crimson frock-coat, you will not only be visible on the greyest day, but you will notice that your costume and environment produce a certain singular effect. You will find, I mean, that rich colours actually look more luminous on a grey day, because they are seen against a sombre background and seem to be burning with a lustre of their own. Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch. A bright blue sky is necessarily the high light of the picture; and its brightness kills all the bright blue flowers. But on a grey day the larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the red daisies are really the red lost eyes of day; and the sunflower is the vice-regent of the sun.

Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless; that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue or blanching into white or bursting into green and gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather in our hills or grey hairs in our heads, perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.”

So, embrace the gray day when it strikes. Notice the heightened colors of fall leaves amidst the background of gray. Notice how the gray sky changes as the wind blows, and the clouds move. Notice how “grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue or blanching into white or bursting into green and gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather in our hills or grey hairs in our heads, perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.” (GKC)

Yes, if “there is grey weather in our hills…they may still remind us of the morning,” and this remembering of the morning is that spark of hope which flits about the heart when the gray day arrives in all of its glory.

Hail gray days!

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*throughout post, the American spelling of gray is used; while the Chesterton quotes contain the English spelling, grey.

•Information on the color gray: link

•Information on Gilbert Keith Chesterton: link

Extraordinary Ordinary Rain: link