Eclipse: to block out, obscure, or conceal

My daughter and her husband took their kids on a two hour drive to Midland to see The Ring of Fire Eclipse on Saturday, October 14, 2023. I hadn’t paid attention to this solar eclipse, even though the path for viewing was nearby.

But then I started thinking about my mom, Carly Simon, and Annie Dillard.

Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard wrote an essay titled, “Total Eclipse,”[1] which was published in The Atlantic in 1982 and later included in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk. Her experience took place on February 26, 1979 when she and her husband drove from the Washington coast to central Washington. Early the next morning among countless others, she said “It looked as though we had all gathered on hilltops to pray for the world on its last day.”

She noted the wind and cold, the parkas and knit caps, the efforts made by other “rugged individualists” to be where the last total solar eclipse of the [twentieth] century would take place. When the sky turned navy blue, she describes what she saw as if everyone and everything were on film, “an art photographer’s platinum print.”

[It was like looking] down the wrong end of a telescope … from the other side of death … down a chute of time … From all the hills came screams … All at once this disk of sky slid overt 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 … In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. For the hole where the sun belongs is very small … I saw a circular piece of that sky appear, suddenly detached, blackened, and backlighted; from nowhere it came and overlapped the sun. It did not look like the moon. It was enormous and black. If I had not read that it was the moon, I could have seen the sight a hundred times and never once thought of the moon … If, I had not read that it was the moon, if, like most of the world’s people throughout time, I had simply glanced up and seen this thing, then I [could have] like Emperor Louis of Bavaria in 840, simply died on the spot.

. . . You have seen photographs of the sun taken during a total eclipse . . . Lenses enlarge the sight, omit its context, and make of it a pretty sensible picture, like something on a Christmas card. I assure you, if you send any shepherds a Christmas card on which is printed a three-by-five photograph of the angel of the Lord, the glory of the Lord, and the multitude of the heavenly host, they will not be sore afraid.

Annie Dillard, The Abundance, Narrative Essays Old and New

I chuckled to read how Annie Dillard compared a partial eclipse to a total eclipse. She wrote, “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.”

Carly Simon

I’m not the only person who thinks of Carly Simon in relation to an eclipse. In her song, “You’re So Vain,” in one verse she wrote,

“Well I hear you went up to Saratoga
And your horse naturally won
Then you flew your lear jet up to Nova Scotia
To see the total eclipse of the sun …”

After decades of concealing the identity of who flew to see a total eclipse, she eventually admitted that this verse referred to actor Warren Beatty. I always thought it was Mick Jagger, even though I knew Mick Jagger did backup vocals on the song.

Who says you can’t be friends with a narcissist?

My Mom

Well, it’s a long story but any and every eclipse (solar or lunar) makes me think of my mom. Many moons ago, she called early one morning to tell me that she believed she was going to die soon because there had been an eclipse when both my younger sister and my dad died.

But my mom didn’t die then or in relation to any eclipse, yet she wanted me to know some things before she did die and the eclipse led her to shed light on a secret she’d kept hidden my whole life. Was she sore afraid?

What Makes Me Sore Afraid?

Annie Dillard described her experience as the sun clobbering us and then roaring away, “as though an enormous, loping god in the sky had reached down and slapped the earth’s face.”

In the book of Revelation, the writer gives graphic pictures of both the sun and the moon, how in the End Times, the earth will indeed be slapped. [3]

Annie Dillard’s essay reminded me of Moses who when he asked God if he could see God’s glory, God said, “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” Instead, God hid Moses in the cleft of a rock, covered him with his hand while his backside passed by. [2]

Then I thought about my own mountaintop experiences, the kind any of us may have had when we felt God’s presence, a sensation so real and personal. Yet like an eclipse, a memory that cannot be held, fleeting, as the splendor and glory of the LORD is blinding.

Annie Dillard said, “One turns at last even from glory itself with a sigh of relief. From the depths of mystery, and even the heights of splendor, we bounce back and hurry for the latitudes of home.”

Turning away, we think about our next meal. That’s life.

[1] Google Annie Dillard’s “Total Eclipse” to read entire essay in The Atlantic

[2] Exodus 33:21–23

[3] The fourth angel sounded his trumpet, and a third of the sun was struck, a third of the moon, and a third of the stars, so that a third of them turned dark. A third of the day was without light, and also a third of the night.Revelation 8:12

Except the Reddit image, pictures taken by my son-in-law and my son