Look, I know everybody's writing about the eclipse but it's important okay
Yet another totality take
However odd it may seem for the topic: CN for discussion of sexual assault, harm to minors, and the 45th president of the United States.
In 2017, I was working for a tiny video game company whose founder was recently revealed to be a sexual predator. This may seem like a sensationalized opening sentence, but honestly all I’m noticing is how very un-shocking it is, and then, how sad it makes me that it’s un-shocking.
The August total eclipse was taking place at the same time as our game release, scheduled also to coincide also with GenCon that year, in Indianapolis. The game had eclipse-related story content for the launch event, among other ill-conceived nonsense dreamed up in the mind of someone with more weird, doomed charisma than sense, or morals.
Never mind that the path of totality for that eclipse, unlike 2024’s, did not pass through Indianapolis. The city was in a zone with about 91.5% totality, which we had the opportunity to observe from the atrium at the airport, about an hour before flying back to Boston. The crescent sliver of light got very small; the body of the black moon fought valiantly. I got to borrow some eclipse glasses. It was neat.
I think a lot of people have a story, if not exactly like this, then similar, about thinking they had seen the eclipse in 2017.
I was so hypnotized seven or so years ago, deep as I was in the emotional mire of the 45th presidential administration and being unknowingly led into bankruptcy by a much smaller-scale serial rapist who knew how to flatter the talents of desperate artists, that I came almost to believe and remember that I had seen totality. I had to look it up on the internet to remember that Indianapolis wasn’t in the path. The fact is, until Monday, I had never witnessed a total eclipse of the sun.
I saw the xkcd comic above some days before, and took it to heart, recognizing that while I’d seen a couple partial eclipses in my life, I hadn’t ever had this experience that so many people, usually flush with words, are now struggling to describe. I had a dream about it two nights before I traveled to where I’d see it, a dream where I was looking at the sun and waiting for the eclipse to happen, and the moon kept moving partially over, then pulling back, then coming in again at a different angle, like one of those Sesame Street cartoons from the ‘70s scored with Philip Glass music. Naturally my dreaming brain had no frame of reference for what it would be like, though I’d seen pictures many times. It felt a little like one of those sex dreams where you’re trying to get it together with someone, but all the practicalities of privacy, time, space, and whatever else the dreaming brain decides to throw up get in the way.
Seven years on and life is different, better, for me in so many ways. This time, the eclipse, too, was going to be different.
Into the Woods
My partner and I drove from Halifax to the deep woods of New Brunswick on Saturday to spend time at our friend’s cabin, which stood on the shore of a lake about 45 minutes from the path of totality running through Fredericton. We settled in for a couple of restful nights in the utter dark and quiet of those pine woods in early April, cooking on the fire, playing games, reading, walking, chatting. Getting to know our friend better, and feeling the initial awkwardness of staying at his place fade into cozy cameraderie, joining in his family’s stories.
On Monday morning, we made up sandwiches and potato salad (from the potatoes we’d forgotten to put into the stew in time the night before), packed everything down, closed the cabin up again, and drove up to Fredericton and still further to a truly nowhere place, a town our friend had looked up as experiencing three minutes of totality in exchange for an extra 20 minutes of driving out of our way.
We parked at a Royal Canadian Legion branch — the northern version of a VFW local — a little white clapboard building in a field full of snowmelt and deer scat, with a memorial obelisk listing maybe 20 WWI vets and the entrance to an ATV trail running along the river through the pines. The sky was bright and clear, the day the first warm one in ages. A few flies were even out, but didn’t bother us much. We considered a campsite down the street — maybe 28% more picturesque, but also 100% more cars parked there — and thought better of it, enjoying the continuation of our solitude in the face of this utterly communal event.
My partner and I did some meditations, small preparations for the main event, as the moon’s disc began to obscure the sun. We’d considered what rituals we might incorporate for this, but had decided that ultimately, this thing was going to be powerful enough, and unfamiliar enough to us, that sitting ready to receive whatever it had to say was, well, enough. We said a few words and made a few gestures, and I laughed gently to myself, imagining the mad conspiracy theorists stumbling upon us walking in a circle and raising our arms around a stone obelisk in a field right before an eclipse. Bring on the new world order, I say.
We sat down with our friend and waited, facing south, passing the two sets of glasses among us periodically. The final cloud passed over the sun, blowing eastward, as the eclipse meandered toward the final crescent. I asked my companions for silence during totality, or at least for no idle talk. The hair on my neck kept feeling like it couldn’t stand any more on end as the light dimmed in that so strange way I had seen in the past. Nothing like a sunset, nor a cloud going over. This felt like someone was running a long slow fade on Earth’s light design, the light staying just as warm and yellow and omnipresent, just becoming slowly, slowly less.
And then, much as Hemingway described sliding into bankruptcy, the light left gradually, then suddenly.
Through the glasses, I saw the pale sliver of sun shrink and shrink, then looked at the ground to see the light rushing away from us over the ground, as though the wind, which had picked up and brought a chill, were blowing it across the surface of the grass. Then, the sun snapped out.
I can still barely describe what I saw and felt when the sky went dark. Some yahoos down the street predictably yelled “woo,” then went completely silent for three minutes, aside from our little group’s occasional hushed sounds of awe.
The corona shone blue-silver, the red dots (which we’d later learn were solar prominences) sparkling forth along the edge of the black. The eclipse hung there, suddenly huge, otherworldly. Another friend, a very scientific one, described it as feeling in the presence of an alien artifact. The sky was post-dusk blue, the planets attending the splendor.
I had imagined myself in this moment, wondering how it would be. I thought I would cry, but I actually laughed. I felt utterly present, suspended, with no urge to try and capture anything with my phone nor think about what I would write about it later. My heart felt lifted out of my chest, or perhaps my whole body felt lifted by it, as if the engine of me were powered by the helium that’s built, right there, 93 million miles away and now seeming close enough to touch. Black heart calling to black heart.
It was one of those rare peak experiences, which I’ve previously only had while either near something immense or while on substances, where I simultaneously felt like the smallest, most insignificant thing in a vast universe, and as though the entire world had been made, in that moment, just for me.
And then, just as suddenly, it was over. The light charged out the other side of the moon; my partner described it as the brightest thing he’d ever seen, and we thanked our eyes for their reflex of looking away in time. Along the ground, the light came rushing back again, the shutter opening and the grass coming alive with air that was light that was air. In a moment I suddenly understood the verse about darkness moving over the face of the waters; I wonder if the person who originally wrote that image down had seen a total eclipse closing and opening, over an ocean or a sea.
I felt powerfully, too, the intimate relationship between the Sun and our Earth (and our Moon, for that matter). The sense of how much the Sun makes our world possible, how its perfect placement relative to us is the main thing that allows us to exist to observe anything at all. I liked Wait But Why’s commentary, too, after seeing it: “For the first time in my life, I was looking at the Solar System.” Huge, and deeply intimate.
I don’t know how to finish this exactly. I could go back to the beginning I suppose, link it back to 2017 and the tricks of time and partiality and the charisma of dishonest men. And maybe that’s it, after all: I felt in the presence of an immense truth, a force so huge that no human power could twist it, an assurance from the heavens that all will continue as it has, on their scale and timeline, no matter how badly we botch it down here. And maybe the glimpse of this, captured for a minute or three by millions of us, all at once, might shake something loose, might make us see that we’re what’s killing us. And that we can stop it.