Happy Eclipse Day to those who are traveling and those who already live in the path! In my ongoing readthrough of Annie Dillard and Marilynne Robinson, I haven’t caught up to the point in her career where she writes her classic essay on the total eclipse of 1979 — I’m still firmly in the “juvenilia and influences” phase, where I’m having a great time, frankly — but to let the coincidence pass without mention would be dereliction of duty. The essay is easily findable online, in quasi-legal ways, but if you want to do it right, it’s in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), one of the best essay collections written in the past century or so, and also in The Abundance (2016), her best-of. A good answering text is the Relentless Picnic episode “No World,” which considers Dillard alongside Al Reinert’s space-program documentary For All Mankind (1989), David Icke, hollow earth theorists, and least of all, Elon Musk.
Do not stare directly at the sun.
It began with no ado. 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. Without pause or preamble, silent as orbits, a piece of the sun went away. We looked at it through welders’ goggles. A piece of the sun was missing; in its place we saw empty sky.
I had somehow forgotten about this essay until seeing your post! Teaching a Stone to Talk is so damn good, too…there was a five or six year period after I first read it where I kept buying used copies and would press them earnestly into the hands of anyone who ever mentioned the act of reading to me.