As the enormous barn door rumbled shut on a hilltop vineyard in Yakima, Washington I found myself suddenly standing in darkness and like Proust's nibble of a madeleine in À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, I was instantly transported back to a short story I'd read more than 40 years ago.
"Eclipse" is from a collection of short stories by Annie Dillard in her intriguing book “Teaching a Stone to Talk”, in which she describes a journey to a hilltop in Yakima, WA to watch the total solar eclipse in November of 1979. Like most of her writing it is at once mystical and scientific, refusing to be held to one purpose, and as one editor notes, "as lyrical as a lily and as blunt as a two-by-four."
Like anything we try to believe or convey to others when asked to describe what cannot possibly be understood, to comprehend what is beyond our ability to grasp, the story unfolds like a long-form prayer; a description of events that is nearly hallucinogenic since there is nothing within our own world that can possibly convey the experience. It is a startling revelation, a brief glimpse into the truth that this universe is beyond our comprehension, and a realization that such moments, apocalyptic though they may seem, are nothing special in the broader context of human life on earth. It’s a realization that for the most part we live our lives apart from the world, cloistered from the enormous forces that determine our existence.
Trudging up the Yakima hillside bundled in a down parka, wrapped in a woolen scarf, and sweating from the climb in the near-freezing cold, Annie Dillard compares the scores of assorted pilgrims to the assembly of ancient peoples gathered to bear witness to a communal ceremony, “It looked as though we had all gathered on hilltops to pray for the world on its last day”, Annie writes, “It looked as though we had all crawled out of spaceships and were preparing to assault the valley below. It looked as though we were scattered on hilltops at dawn to sacrifice virgins, make rain, set stone stelae in a ring."
Except that those ancient peoples had no idea that the certainty with which they led their lives was about to change forever, had no time to gather on hilltops, and for a few eternal moments attempted to come to terms with the possibility that the sun, and the light, may be gone forever. Although an eclipse occurs somewhere in the world about every 18 months, it occurs in the same place only about once every 400 years.
“A partial eclipse is very interesting”, Annie tells us, “It bears almost no relation to a total eclipse. Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it … what you see in an eclipse is entirely different from what you know. It is especially different for those of us whose grasp of astronomy is so frail that, given a flashlight, a grapefruit, two oranges, and fifteen years, we still could not figure out which way to set the clocks for Daylight Saving Time.”
“It began with no ado”, Annie writes, “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.”
Annie looked around, “Now the sky to the west deepened to indigo, a color never seen. A dark sky usually loses color. This was a saturated, deep indigo, up in the air. Stuck up into that unworldly sky was the cone of Mount Adams, and the alpenglow was upon it. The alpenglow is that red light of sunset which holds out on snowy mountaintops long after the valleys and tablelands are dimmed. “Look at Mount Adams,” I said, and that was the last sane moment I remember.”
As if trying to come to terms with the disorientation of a fever-dream, she continues, “I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print. This color has never been seen on earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills’ grasses were finespun metal which the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day.”
“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. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world.”
"But something else was happening at that same instant, and it was this, I believe, that made us scream."
"The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1,800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed—1,800 miles an hour. It was 195 miles wide. No end was in sight—you saw only the edge. It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it."
"This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. How could anything moving so fast not crash, not veer from its orbit amok like a car out of control on a turn?"
Annie Dillard’s story continues in mesmerizing detail and astonishing insights, “More fearsome things can occur. More moving photographs than those of the sun’s corona can appear in magazines. But I pray you will never see anything more awful in the sky.”
“Eclipse” is a short story, perhaps 20 pages, but if you read it, it will change your relationship with nature, and with this world, and it will make you clear your calendar of anything that might interfere with experiencing the next full solar eclipse sweeping across the United States and Mexico on April 8, 2024.
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Bill Sheehan
Yakima, Washington - October, 2023