We saw the world through film grain, ten minutes before the totality. It was 1:50 PM central time, and we stood in a clearing outside the ghost town of Kaskaskia, Illinois, where we spent the afternoon grilling ham and cheese sandwiches on a Coleman camp stove and trying to keep my two-year-old from falling into ditches.
We watched the slow advance of the sun’s doom throughout the one o’clock hour through our paper sunglasses. A dark crescent cut deeper and deeper into the meat of the star, but it was only a curiosity at first. Without our polarized lenses, we never would have noticed anything was different, until suddenly everything was different, until we could blink once and notice something had changed in the quality of the light.
Last night, after my wife and I put the baby to bed, I stayed up to re-read Annie Dillard’s “Total Eclipse,” written after she experienced totality in February 1979. Dillard, perhaps my favorite writer of the 20th century, describes totality as delirium, as frenzy, as apocalypse: “The sun was going, and the world was wrong,” she writes. “The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print. This color has never been seen on Earth.”
I remembered those lines and looked around as the end of light approached; the world did not appear to me in the shades of silver nitrate Dillard had described, but something more like the soft indigo of an underexposed Polaroid. On the horizon I could still see the orange glow of waking life. We were not so far from the edge of shadow.
Look how bright everything still is, I said. How bright the world is even with just a sliver of the sun.
And then the sliver itself was gone.
The best picture of totality the author’s iPhone could capture. [E.O. Scott]
Sköll had caught Sunna; Fvni Lusa had begun his meal; Apep’s gaze had overwhelmed mighty Ra. In town, the church bells tolled, sounding that it was two o’clock or the end of the world. My father complained that he couldn’t see the corona through his eclipse glasses, and I told him they weren’t useful anymore. We only need protection from light; we can look upon darkness directly.
How to describe a total eclipse? A well of night, a halo of silver? A hole in the sky? A ring of silver fire encircling nothing at all? Already the sensation is fading from me, and nothing I can say with words can bring it back. It was strange; it was beautiful. It was three minutes under a black sun that, despite all the comforts of scientific explanation, still strike me as fundamentally unreal.
I am not much of an oracle or a sibyl; I don’t know what the eclipse portends, or what difference it makes that it was in Aries. What I know is that twice in the past decade I have seen the end of light, wherein I was reminded of the fathomless scale of creation, of my fortune at being able to contemplate its mystery. I think the stars, even our own sun, have very little to say about my life or fate. But they offer the chance to wonder, and that is a greater gift than any astrology could provide.
Soon the shield slid away and the bare sickle of light reappeared. We had to wear our paper glasses again. Cars began pulling away from Kaskaskia, now that the miracle was over. My child, apparently oblivious to everything that had just happened, pushed his red plastic ball toward me. I watched him stomping through the grass, his laughing face. How bright his eyes were, I thought, even with just a sliver of the sun.
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