On Monday, August 21, 2017, we will experience a total solar eclipse in part of the United States. Some people are calling it the “Great American Eclipse.” We aren’t. We’re weary of forces — the complex white supremacist forces in our country — forcing a warped version of American greatness. So we’re looking to an event greater than us that reminds us we are all different and earthbound and small, together. We hunt for NASA-approved eclipse glasses. We google “path of totality.”
We’re also rereading Annie Dillard’s unsettling essay, “Total Eclipse.” Dillard viewed the last total eclipse in the U.S. (February, 1979) with her husband Gary and a myriad of strangers on a mountain in Washington state:
It was odd that such a well advertised public event should have no starting gun, no overture, no introductory speaker. I should have known right then that I was out of my depth.
Dillard’s essay tracks the interior and the external, the human and natural, with precision. If you know her work, the precision will not be unfamiliar. The experience shakes her, even as she writes with grace and clarity in reflection. What’s beyond Dillard’s depth in “Total Eclipse” is a sure footing about anything except that our time here is short, borrowed, and always at risk of being lost. Even sight (our potential to see and be seen) will be lost. This sense seeps into her recollection of the eclipse viewing:
That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky.
This essay is not for the weak of heart. It will be available online via The Atlantic until eclipse day. After 8/21/17 the essay will disappear; the link will be broken; you’ll have to try somewhere else.
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Read “Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard.
What to expect when you’re expecting a total eclipse.
The USPS’s “Total Eclipse of the Sun” stamp sheet (seen above) is the first to use thermochromic ink and features an image of a total solar eclipse photographed in 2016 by Fred Espenak in Libya. The image is true. The sun is gone.