I waffled during the weeks leading up to the solar eclipse. The line between decision and burden can feel fuzzy. Someone said the closest spot to view it was a borough in the Allegheny Forest, two and a half hours west. I typed the address into my navigation app. A country road in the woods. No towns or businesses nearby.
To place myself in the path of totality would require a little planning, but not much. The eclipse would take place on a Monday. I taught Tuesdays and Thursdays that semester. I weighed whether it would be worth it to drive west in my small Corolla on I-80 as 18-wheelers loaded with their freight of cereal grain and gravel, natural gas and textiles whizzed past.
That November, I’d lugged a stack of magazines to my intro to composition class. Game and Fish, Cosmopolitan, The New Yorker, and Astronomy. “Look at the ads,” I instructed. The goal was for students to draw connections between the magazine readership and the stories the advertisements told about adventure or beauty, sophistication or mystery. I knew from my perusal of Astronomy that an eclipse was coming. Glossy pictures for telescopes and special eclipse-viewing glasses filled the pages. As did ads placed by the chambers of commerce in towns and cities that lay in the path of totality—Plano, Texas; Muncie, Indiana; Dayton, Ohio—enticing readers to spend their time and money in these
locales. They promised a memory-making event with the family. Or maybe a window into the chasm of outer space.
At the time, it didn’t occur to me that I might procure a pair of eclipse glasses and make the trek west the following April. But some part of my brain catalogued what I’d seen. It could be because I remembered the amazement I’d felt some thirty years prior when I saw crescent shadows on the grass during a partial solar eclipse. Maybe, even though I didn’t remember the details from Dillard’s essay (I’ve since reread it), I remembered that something significant and overwhelming happened to her. Often, I hope for something significant and overwhelming to interrupt the monotony of life.
Dillard starts with the unbridled. A feeling, at once physical, emotional, and psychic. “It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass…It was like slipping into fever, or slipping down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering.” The sliding likely refers to the descent she and her husband, Gary, made as they crossed the Cascades to reach the small town in central Washington where they spent the night before the eclipse. Her experience watching the eclipse on the side of the mountain the next day is a variation on this tumbling sensation. A nod to her mortality. The frenetic descent captures both: the before and the during.
The before is the avalanche-blocked road in the Cascades, the hotel lobby with the day-drinking Keno players, the absurd picture of the clown made of fruit hanging on the wall of their hotel room, the trek up the hillside where she and Gary and a host of others wait, bathed in strange light. Then totality.
The Saturday before the eclipse, I sat in a church basement with a bunch of non-church people as I often do, and after our meeting, I overheard a friend of a friend mention she was driving to Erie to see the eclipse. I wandered over, and we started chatting, exchanged numbers, and agreed to be in touch on Monday. Maybe we would meet up. I still hadn’t decided.
From my home, the Moon’s shadow would cover almost 99% of the Earth. Again and again, I read that the difference between 99% and 100% was incomparable. Each site I consulted commanded: if you’re able to see the full eclipse, do.
Dillard uses the analogy, “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.” I struggle with the analogy. Partial eclipse :
kiss :: total eclipse : marriage. I get tripped up on what I perceive to be her assertion that marriage and totality are equivalent. I’m not fluent in the language of marriage. I listen to married family members, friends, and public personalities talk about it. I can only make out some of the words: sacrifice, intimacy, commitment. I recognize these words, but I still dream in the tongue of the single woman.
Dillard’s analogy echoes what these native speakers often say, “Marriage changes everything.” I interpret the phrase to have something to do with the blending of property and debt, the obligation to have holiday dinners with in-laws, and the horror that accompanies the inability to leave without hiring lawyers and filling out paperwork. One married friend taught me this phrase, “Marriage doesn’t equal security.” As soon as she said it, I realized my folly. That I’d been misunderstanding and misusing a word for decades. Couples divorced. Cheated. Fell out of love. Questioned their devotion. Until then, I’d presumed marriage brushed away doubt.
I interpreted Dillard’s choice of words as a claim that marriage overpowers doubt. But that’s not how to read the analogy. The key is to focus on the distance between a kiss and marriage. If a kiss is the promise of crocuses and ragtime, marriage is oak and quartz crystals. Durability. Proximity. At least this is how it appears from my vantage point as a nonnative speaker. Ultimately, the notion of this unfathomable distance got me in my car late morning, April 8th, 2024. Despite the clouds. Despite my hazy plan.
Before the eclipse, high clouds blanketed the sky. Driving west on 80, up and down the Appalachian foothills, I tried to determine if the clouds were moving east quickly enough for the sky to clear or if they were the kind that would evaporate as the sun heated the atmosphere. Construction signs in the breakdown lane broadcast a message: Solar eclipse today. Be prepared. Turn on your headlights. Do not pull over.
Around Falls Creek, my phone rang. It was Debbie, the friend of a friend. She’d spent the night at a cabin in Cook Forest with her friend Michelle. They were taking the back roads to Ashtabula, Ohio. It looked like there’d be less cloud cover further south. We didn’t settle on an exact location but agreed to reroute.
When I crossed into Ohio, the land flattened, and the sky cleared. I’d decided to take the back roads, too, since I had time. Driving through cornfields brought back memories of summer trips in the family station wagon to visit my dad’s mom in Michigan. Stop signs at intersections in the middle of cornfields. No people in sight, just silos and farmhouses as evidence of their existence.
The fields gave way to bare trees, motels, and a Circle K. Stoplights at busy intersections. When I’d typed Lake Erie, Ashtabula, Ohio, into my navigation app, it directed me to Walnut Beach Park. As I approached, I saw a steady line of people walking down the sidewalk and decided not to risk trying for a spot in the parking lot. I pulled over, grabbed my camping chair from the trunk, and joined the crowd as they headed toward the lake. The sound of beating drums filled the air. People wore T-shirts embossed with images of the dark circle and bright outline we hoped to see. Strangers struck up impromptu conversations. It felt like a Dead Show. There was a similar electric joy and sense of community. We were the people who “got it.” But like the parking lot of a Dead Show—I’d only been to one—I was an interloper here. Late to the game, a casual listener. There to say I’d done it more than to hear the drum solo in “Space.”
I crossed the lot and made my way to the sandy beach. I arrived before Debbie and Michelle, so I scouted a spot and set up my chair between a family with a boy about twelve years old and a couple who looked to be in their sixties or seventies. A young woman spread out a blanket in front of me. She was on her own as I’d planned to be. The Moon’s shadow was just starting to cover the Earth. I put on my eclipse glasses and looked at the Sun. A small black dot stood out against the orange glow. I got up and walked through the crowd toward the lake. Fathers and sons sat behind tripods, cradling telescopes pointed at the Sun.
Though I knew it was rare to be within driving distance of a total solar eclipse, I presumed any planet with a satellite has the necessary conditions for an eclipse to take place. But later, when I read about the science of an eclipse on NASA’s website, I learned that eclipses are part of a “cosmic coincidence.” The alliteration suggests that scientists understand the poetry of eclipses. The reason for this coincidence—distance. The website explained, “Even though the Sun is about 400 times bigger than the Moon, it is also about 400 times farther away. This makes the Sun and the Moon appear almost exactly the same size in our sky.”
Soon Debbie and Michelle arrived. We chatted and watched the crowd, the lake, the sky. Michelle hoped to see Baily’s beads. She’d done more research than I had and told me that because of the craters and mountains on the moon, the ring of light would appear as an imperfect circle for a few seconds during totality. The light dimmed as the Moon’s shadow covered more and more of the Earth. Because the Sun stayed high in the sky the light was distinct from the light of dusk. A grayish hue, not the deep blue that precedes nightfall. “Look at the lake,” Debbie said. Near the horizon, the sky glowed orange.
The buzz of so many people gathered in anticipation darted through the air. The group of college-aged kids continued to drum. Children cartwheeled and bothered their parents by peppering them with questions about how much longer it would take. I recalled the illuminated crescents that danced on the grass during the partial eclipse I’d witnessed thirty years before and wondered if, like Dillard, I would feel changed by what I was about to see. And I was.
Psychologist William James catalogued mystical experiences the way a biologist catalogues the species of moths in the Amazon Rain Forest. In a series of lectures that make up the text The Varieties of Religious Experience, James transcribes occurrences that transcend and elude hard science. A pattern emerges. He identifies four features that are common to mystical experiences, one of which is ineffability. James admits that the most useful classification hinges on a kind of lack. They “[defy] expression…no adequate report of [their] contents can be given in words.” But we try.
When at last the shadow obscured the Sun, when we took our glasses off, when all that was left of the orb of light was the glimmer of the corona, I was dunked into the crackle and rumble of existence.
The planet we are on orbits a burning ball of helium and hydrogen. A sphere of rock and regolith circles us. When we three line up, Sun, Moon, Earth, a total eclipse occurs. I’d seen the Sun in the sky above me most days throughout my life. As a child, my own shadow entranced me. Sometimes it appeared short and squat, at other times elongated. My parents told me this was the result of the position of the Sun, the angle at which its light reached my body. I knew the basic science to explain what I saw. But that’s not what I saw.
What I saw was punctuated by a pause. The Earth’s rotation seemed to slow and halt. The young kids who’d been cartwheeling now sat still on their parents’ blankets in the sand. The drumming stopped. Our heads all tilted up to the sky. We gasped and ahh-ed.
It was like the rest in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. The music begins, and you’re immersed in vibration. Horsehair bows meet metal strings. Breath travels and echoes through tubes and chambers. The beginnings of melody emerge. Then, at the end of the 16th measure, all the instruments: oboe, flute, and bassoon, cello, viola, and violin, trombone, and timpani, hold a note. When the pattern of notes begins again, they hurtle at an alarming speed and hint at all the melodies that follow and recur for the next hour or so. In that rest, written as a thirty-second note in the original score, there’s an inhalation. A thin suspension. Sound without melody. Some conductors stretch the rest out to give the audience a wisp of silence. We wait for sound to return. We expect the return, even if we don’t know the exact shape it will take. If you had never heard the 9th before, you would not know the explosion of that return. Totality was this suspension and explosion.
It was not the bedlam that I read about—the panic of the ancients. It was the harmony that occurs when two things that are different and distinct are placed together, and, in this placement, something with more tone and timbre, something more than the sum of both parts exists.
More than shadow and light. More than substance and nothingness. More than myth and skepticism. More than chaos and silverware. More than trust and slugs. More than wonder and yawns. More than doubt and callouses. More than darkness and thistle. More than silence and spider plants.
“There’s Jupiter,” Michelle said, pointing to a prick of light beneath the onyx circle. We had been staring silently for several seconds. We didn’t want words to interfere with the first moments of totality.
Gazing at the luminescent hoop, it was obvious that neither Moon nor Sun was as far away as they normally appear. The spheres in our solar system ripe fruit, ready to be plucked off a tree or plummet into the placid waters of Lake Erie. This collapsing of distance clarified our solar system’s small size. A blip in the infinite expanse that holds supernovas and comets, black holes and exoplanets, dwarf stars and asteroid belts. There was no denying that our planet and satellite were specks. What then could be said of us sitting on the sand?
I brought my gaze down for a moment and looked to Debbie on my left, Michelle on my right. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” I said, aware that the words were a farce. Was this the best I could do? In the moment, it was.
“It is,” said Michelle. “I was afraid. Afraid I wouldn’t feel what I felt during the last eclipse. But I do.”
Time paused. The Sun was close. Somehow, the temporal and spatial warp brought certainty. We were seen by Something. Something that had a hand in the hot, hot helium, the elliptical orbits. It was there, behind the curtain of the sky, in the sky, hovering just beyond the crowd sitting on the shore of a lake that was once a glacier, in a town that had been a northern terminus of the Underground Railroad. It had seen that glacier. It had seen the sullied history of the country. Now It was seeing us and letting Itself be seen. This is what I felt.
I don’t know what Michelle felt. Though when our eyes met, hers, like mine, brimmed with tears. Debbie and the other families and groups were exclaiming gleefully. James writes that the mystical experience exists for the person who “has the transport” and that they are “incommunicable.” How many of us on the shores of Lake Erie were undergoing a sort of transport? Jolted into a field of abstract and expansive love.
Even if, in the moment, I had found the language to express the feeling of pause and explosion, distance collapsing, the sense of divine presence instead of the phrase I uttered—It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen—and even if Michelle had responded “That’s exactly how I feel,” I still wouldn’t know.
Just like I read “Total Eclipse” but can’t know what it was like for Dillard when “the sky snapped over the Sun like a lens cover.” Just like you can read what the ancient Chinese and Greeks believed and did during total eclipses, and not know. We are told they felt terror. That they equated the disappearance of the Sun with a dragon or an angry God. That eclipses ushered in mayhem. Okay. But it seems unlikely that something so stunning would only elicit panic and distrust, descent and ignorance.
I’d known Michelle for about an hour. Long enough to learn she had seen the last eclipse in Tennessee with her adult child. She liked camping. She was divorced. I didn’t know what she did for work or if she was retired. I didn’t know whether she’d travelled outside the US or whether she believed in a God, and, if so, which one.
I knew a little about Debbie. She had terminal cancer and would die on May 2nd of the following year. She liked tubing in the creek across the street from her house in Coburn, Pennsylvania. She baked homemade cakes for people who had been hamstrung by alcohol but had found a way to live without it. Her children and grandchildren visited her at the end of summer, and they enjoyed the annual Labor Day Weekend bonfire at Poe Lake.
Besides these two nearly-strangers, a crowd of other strangers was experiencing something. We were joined by a desire to witness something rare. That day, I learned there’s a word for people who seek out total eclipses. Umbraphiles. Shadow lovers.
Poet Dorianne Laux speculates that thousands of years ago, when the Earth and Moon were several hundred feet closer to one another, our ancestors witnessed
“solar eclipses when the Moon covered the Sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.”
I try to imagine this. A black sphere that lacks the glowing outline. A gaping circle with no boundary probably looked like it could spread across the entire sky.
As much as the shadow, it’s the corona that draws people to the path of totality. For its stunning beauty, and maybe because it provides reassurance. The corona, pulsing and shimmering, demarcates the Sun’s location in the sky. It’s evidence that the Sun hasn’t disappeared. Before people understood the science of the eclipse, it seemed possible the creeping blackness might be permanent. Some believed our actions had the power to bring the Sun back. They banged drums and pots, recited magical chants. Some warring clans even stopped fighting to encourage the Sun and Moon to do the same.
***
If I felt certain—100%, totally, not 99—that something infinite and omnipresent allowed us to view it during those moments when the Earth lay cloaked in shadow, in the subsequent months, I lost my grasp on this belief.
In part, the dip was brought on by the 2024 election and the continued aftermath. It was harder for me to believe in a divine force when, once again, tens of millions of people who grew up in the same country and time as I chose to place a petty, seething simpleton, an assaulter, a con, in office. How could this happen in a world or universe with a loving Power at its center and in the ether?
As I grappled with this, I started reading my dad’s copy of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man, Immoral Society. Of all the books in our house, only a few had belonged to my dad. He was dyslexic before anyone understood what it was to have a brain that saw letters differently. His teachers thought he was too dumb for college. But he applied, at the prompting of a guidance counselor, and majored in engineering. After graduating, he moved from Michigan to Seattle to work at Boeing. He often told my mom, sister, and me how he only saw the Sun twice in his first year there. A combination of the cloudy weather and long workdays blocked out the light. I’d kept the Niebuhr book and a few by Paul Tillich through many moves, and now, looking for something to read in the mornings, I took the Scribner’s Library edition of Moral Man off the bottom shelf of my hallway bookcase.
Written in the interwar era, before Hitler rose to power, Niebuhr understands the precariousness of the time we live in. A time of nations. A time when religion ceases to be the lens through which we make meaning. He is clear about the shortcomings of this lens. I found the book oddly comforting. What made me think the country I lived in was impervious to a backward slide into tyranny? Other countries had suffered this fate. While this helped me to believe that, in time, our country or humanity could weather this contraction, this erosion of rights, this consolidation of power, it did nothing to sway me from an acknowledgment that there might not be any god. That what I felt on the shores of Lake Erie had a phenomenological explanation.
I could doubt that the eclipse was evidence of a Higher Power, but there was no dispute as to the magnitude of the experience. Two years later, when I meet people who live within the path of totality, I ask them, “Did you see the eclipse?” I want them to tell me about where they were, what they saw, how they felt. Usually, they say, “I did. It was amazing.” And I say, “It was.” Our language no better than the first phrases I uttered that day.
My thoughts often turn to the subject of distance. Distance as space that can be calculated with rulers and mile markers, and distance as an abstract force that is felt, not measured. There’s a scholar, Michael Cobb, who writes about an “aesthetics of distance.” I have trouble making sense of the phrase without a concrete image. Cobb provides several: the unfolding vista during a hike at Capitol Reef National Park, Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings. Specifically, those in which she uses a technique of “combin[ing] two very different points of view into a single painting whose spaces are both close and distant.” O’Keeffe herself uses the phrase “faraway nearby” to describe the felt sense of distance. It’s the title of one of her paintings, and she writes of her attempt to “find the feeling of infinity on the horizon line or just over the next hill.” Cobb points to particular paintings: My Last Door, a black door hovers in the expanse of a white adobe wall; Untitled, Red and Yellow Cliffs, billowing canyons crowd the surrounding flatlands; The Beyond, horizontal banners and lines of blue, grey, white, and black stretch across a canvas. In each, what is far away presses toward the viewer.
My concept of a deity has been marred by the idea of distance. I grew up with iconography and stories of a sky god. A god with a form. An out-there god who kept His distance. This distance is different than the distance and the emotion evoked by a vista or a star-filled sky. For me, it implied a barrier, even a withholding. We, humans, had to earn the attention or affection of that up-above-god. If we were good, that god would dole out some kind of reward. I’ve never felt good enough for that god.
Cobb presents distance as secular, but no less powerful. In its impersonality and formlessness, distance does not demand anything. It feels more accepting than a surveiller, a supreme tallier of good and bad deeds. Instead of masking the presence of something more, something bigger, distance’s own innate bigness suggests that whatever is out there is not only out there.
Months after the eclipse, I sweep my entryway and listen to a back episode of Marc Maron’s podcast. He’s interviewing the comedian Lewis Black, who says in his raspy smoker’s voice, “The problem with God, to me, as a concept, [is] that it’s smaller than what’s going on out there.” I imagine Black waving his hand to signify the space in the studio and beyond. Yes, I think. That’s my problem with it, too.
In their earliest usages, total and totality describe objects we believed could exist in a state of completion. Totality is, in part, a concept that allows us to measure. Our “totall body,” the “totall globe.” Maybe matter can be measured this way, but it was also applied to abstract nouns. “There are two kinds of degrees of [faith]….Totall… and Partial.”
We still speak as though emotions and ideas can be total. Total disgust of privatized healthcare. Total love of the cat curled up by the radiator. Totally inexplicable. On its own, it communicates full agreement. Totally.
If emotions can be total, what of our relationships? Dillard divorced the husband who sat next to her on a hillside in Washington while the light transformed the landscape into a tintype.
What’s more, is it accurate to describe natural phenomena as existing in totality? Does the corona betray the falsity of an absolute?
Perhaps it makes no difference whether such a thing as totality exists in nature or our psyches. What matters is that we’ve identified totality as real. Settled on a word for the concept. One count finds a version of total in thirty-two languages from Dutch to Swahili, Māori to Hebrew.
We need the possibility of a completely filled-in circle. Charcoaled one layer on top of the next until no evidence of the page underneath remains. Opacity. We want an undisputed answer. A steel foundation that won’t collapse during an earthquake. A metronomic love.
Maybe, like my initial misreading of Dillard’s analogy, I have totality wrong. The definition that links it with wholeness and entirety doesn’t sufficiently capture what totality is. Instead, it’s that mysterious harmony. Ash and granite. Paper cuts and head massages. Clean sheets and rusted hubcaps.
Several hours passed before I felt ready to talk about the eclipse. I called the man I’m seeing, then my mom. Recounting the details—the drive, the cloudy sky that cleared in time, the crowd, the lakeside shore, Debbie and Michelle, the shadow, I come back to the same inadequate phrase. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
Dillard and her then-husband stopped for breakfast at a roadside restaurant after the eclipse. A college boy, a stranger, asks them, “Did you see the little white ring? It looked like a Life Saver. It looked like a Life Saver up in the sky?”
Dillard, who had been unable to articulate what had happened, who had “no access to such a word,” felt “it was good to be back among people so clever; to have access to all the world’s words.” Eventually, she, too, finds words. She harvests her strings of nouns, a harmony of abstract and concrete, to describe what it is like to transition from the awe of totality to the diner with its fried eggs and clattering silverware.
For the next few days, I keep drawing on the feeble phrase. The superlative. The most beautiful. I say it to my friends and to the students in my creative writing class who write about the mystery of soil and entropy, the shadow of hometowns and one-sided love.
Dillard, the websites I consulted were right. The difference between 99% and totality is greater than 1%. Looking at the image of a partially covered Sun on a piece of paper at one end of a shoebox or peering at the crescent through dark glasses is like reading an essay on the use of slant rhyme. Looking up to the sky with bare eyes for three minutes and forty-five seconds while the Earth remains covered in shadow is “room” and “storm.” It’s the difference between existing as the marionette Pinocchio and existing as a real boy.
In those three minutes and forty-five seconds, and for some months after, I believed without any doubt in a Creator that is loving but inscrutable. One that, on meeting our gaze, seemed to match my feeling of apprehension. For how else can we be seen?