The sun and moon performed their most extraordinary dance on April 8, the moon blocking the sun for a full four minutes to deliver a total solar eclipse across a middle swathe of the United States.
It’s easy to forget the third dancer in this heavenly embrace. Earth and her children played an essential role that day as we paid homage to the sky with our amazement and awe. We were the third in that lineup in the heavens, without which it would have meant nothing. “No people, no significance,” Annie Dillard wrote in her highly regarded 1982 essay, “Total Eclipse.”
Today is Earth Day, and I’m remembering Earth in her cosmic dance with the other heavenly bodies. Her image is imprinted on me, on all of us, by the breathtaking 1968 photo taken by the American astronauts on Apollo 8, our blue planet in the blackness of space, which inspired the first Earth Day in 1970. This time around our beloved blue globe waltzed with the other spheres and gave us a great show.
My experience of the eclipse was mixed and a bit accidental. I did not travel expressly to see it, as many people did. The sky was cloudy, and we never saw the terrifying shadow of the moon racing toward us, a phenomenon that reportedly can cause people to scream in horror, a primal reaction well outside the realm of scientific thought or self-control.
I was in fact fully grounded by my circumstances, tethered to the daily concerns of earthly life, the little one down for a nap just in time to meet the celestial schedule, an excited husband on the other end of the line wanting a report in the midst of the totality, an uncomfortable bucket chair clutching my old bones into a coil difficult to unwind, bodily life at its finest.
And then there was the fear, warnings heard since childhood ringing in my ears. Don’t look directly at the sun during an eclipse or you’ll go blind!
So I was relieved to be able to feel the magic by seeing this animation made by my cousin John Krantz, who journeyed to Indianapolis especially to photograph the eclipse. Using a Nikon D5500, John took hundreds of images, bringing his practiced familiarity to bear on the task: lenses, apertures, ISOs, filters, tripods. Even more necessary was his skill and intense dedication. I have this camera myself, but nowhere near his expertise.
I love this animation, the sun so alive, so strange and sudden. We are not quite sure we have seen its blazing corona at all from behind the moon, but the camera has seen it and we can stop-motion a frame on our computers.. Even the small jerkiness of the progression is endearing. It reminds me of the old silent movies, the excitement of seeing things in motion never before seen this way. And it reminds me how art helps us see what we’re not sure we’ve seen.
In this day and age, it is impossible for any experience not to be mediated to some extent, interpreted and explained. But I do like to apprehend the meaning of things through art. And I have always looked to literature to help me understand my life.
There are as many legends about eclipses are there are cultures around the world. But for the more modern literature I turn to Maria Popova at her newsletter The Marginalian. A collector of profound prose and a devout lover of all things celestial, Maria is a reliable and generous guide. For the eclipse events, she has assembled an impressive lineup of articles over the years, beginning with trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell, who opened doors to scientific study for women, and wrote extensively about the 1869 and 1878 eclipses. Mabel Loomis Todd, who was Emily Dickinson’s editor, wrote a book in 1894 with details of the 1887 eclipse, wherein I found the reason why a patch of blue sky to see the ring of fire could still not produce the classic darkening, because “clouds outside of the totality path — brilliantly illuminated by the Sun — reflect and diffuse their light throughout the shadow.”
In the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf wrote of feeling the presence of druids and Stonehenge, and “a vast obeisance; something kneeling down” (1927), in her diary. Helen McDonald’s essay “Eclipse,” published in her book Vesper Flights, considered the “unselfing” an eclipse can bring (1999), observing that she was “still clinging to that sophomoric intuition that a revelation would only come” if she was completely alone, and glad she was not. These are feelings I often have too.
Perhaps the most famous piece of writing about a solar eclipse is the iconic 1982 essay by Annie Dillard about the 1979 eclipse. Two years later she wrote a stunning and ultimately hilarious account, full of images of stone stele and ancient river valleys, the imagined legions of the dead on the hillside, and finally eating breakfast afterward in a roadside diner: “It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg.” This last essay is often quoted but hard to find in its entirety online. It first appeared in her essay collections Teaching a Stone to Talk and later in The Abundance. The Atlantic published it for the 2017 eclipse, but it is now behind their paywall.
A postscript to the essay by Annie Dillard is this other essay by Nick Neely. It’s always a pleasure to read an intelligent commentary on a piece that so many have analyzed already.
As for my personal experience of the eclipse, by turns I feared that my immersion in a modern scientific world view had robbed me of my wonder, or that I had read too much ahead of time and had ridiculous expectations. Reading through the writings of others put those thoughts to rest. There were merely too many clouds for this eclipse to register as the transcendent experience of a lifetime. For those of us taught as children to look to the heavens for the source of our being, granted by an old man with a long beard and a bad temper, a solar eclipse carries with it the weight of antiquity and mystery.
I am enriched by reading about what I saw, and reassured that the heavens affect us deeply, and rightly so, even when clouds get in the way.
Two songs for a soundtrack to this post, if you like:
“Both Sides Now,” Joni Mitchell, 1969 because “clouds got in the way,” and
“Moon Shadow” by Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islam, 1970, because how sweet is that?
All photos in this post taken by John Krantz with the exception of my iPhone photo in second place, with thanks to my cousin for letting me share them with you.
