Dear readers,
My friend, the fabulous Catherine Newman, writes a hilarious Substack newsletter called Crone Sandwich, in which she always gives her paid subscribers three things. So here are mine; the first one is for everyone.
1. “Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard
One of my grad school writing friends sent me Annie Dillard’s essay, published in The Atlantic in 1982. Reading it makes me simultaneously terrified to travel to the path of totality tomorrow to experience this total eclipse, and also that I have no choice but to go. So Tom and I are leaving in the morning and driving north. We hope to make it to the campus of VCFA—where I graduated in 2022—to view the experience along with throngs of others.
Anyway, here are two short excepts from the magnificent essay, which I suggest reading in its totality, no pun intended":
The sky’s blue was deepening, but there was no darkness. The sun was a wide crescent, like a segment of tangerine. The wind freshened and blew steadily over the hill. The eastern hill across the highway grew dusky and sharp. The towns and orchards in the valley to the south were dissolving into the blue light. Only the thin river held a trickle of sun.
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 that 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.
and then…
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 at 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. Seeing it, and knowing it was coming straight for you, was like feeling a slug of anesthetic shoot up your arm. If you think very fast, you may have time to think, “Soon it will hit my brain.” You can feel the deadness race up your arm; you can feel the appalling, inhuman speed of your own blood. We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Symbols & Cymbals: Letter from Nerissa to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.