The Eclipse Remembered

I have never seen a total eclipse of the sun and never hope to see one. Not that I never wished to, but not all my wishes have come true.

This is not a complaint. A great many wonders have become true experiences, though I never had a bucket list. My life has just been full of great surprises, including many I would never have thought to ask for.  Anyway, as I approach my 95^th birthday, realism has replaced about 99% of fantasy. I cannot expect the universe to line up especially for me and briefly block out the sun again in a place accessible to me by car in an appropriate length of time. The heavenly bodies have a schedule they keep, and I do not expect to be here for the next show on August 23, 2044.

One thing that makes this a mere statement of fact rather than a profound disappointment is another experience that came to me through a book.

I did read about a total eclipse. I read an account so sensitive, so visceral and honest and intimate that I sometimes think I was there, that I remember it all. At the same time I know that had I been there, I would not have seen so much, or seeing would not have been able to find words. I read and reread this account more than once several more times through the years and shared it with a book club.

Every time I have read it I experienced it, from my head to my toes. Every time I read it I flinched with a kind of fear at the moment when the lid came down on the box I live in and there was no more light. Each time I decided and stated that I could not have experienced it more fully, had I been with the author there in the hills near Seattle.

Such is the power of words from the mind of a gifted teller of tales, in this case Annie Dillard. Her essay about the total eclipse is from my favorite of her books, a book of essays, Teaching a Stone to Talk.

If you haven’t seen a total eclipse of the sun, get the book quickly.

At this point in my bold advice, I realize that most of us saw the recent event, if at all, as a partial eclipse, and this by itself means that we did not see what Dillard saw: the moon eating the sun, the sun completely gone, the earth deserted. In the dark.

If you were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time under a cloudless sky and did see the total eclipse, write your own account of the experience, quickly, before the details fade. Then get the book anyway. 

Read the account, the first story in Teaching a Stone to Talk. It will increase your appreciation of your own experience, an historic event that you shared with thousands of people. It will help you to understand and find words for what left you speechless. (Dillard once said, “Everything for which we have no words is lost.”)

Of course Amazon will let you read part of it, but this will be like smelling my Grandma’s cornbread without ever getting a bite. Be good to yourself. Order the book. Or at least go to the library, find it and bring it home.

(While you are doing this, you might use the chance to get whichever Frances Fuller book you have not read. In Borrowed Houses or Helping Yourself Grow Old. You could consider this my reward for reminding you of Annie Dillard.)