21 August 2017 — The Great American Eclipse
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons (T.S. Eliot)
Today I saw a total solar eclipse. Phillip and I heard about it at a TEDx talk, where a self-proclaimed umbraphile promised us that it will be a life-changing, transcendental experience. He then also told us that a total solar eclipse will make its way across the continental US on 21 August 2017. There was no reason not to go. We thought to go camping, to make a holiday of the event, but never got round to the admin. In the end, we decided to drive with a group of friends to Glendo, Wyoming. We left Denver at 3am. I had been up until 1.30am, trying, once again, in my almost comfortingly recurring manner , to bake a bread. As always, I was mildly unsuccessful. I crawled into bed having brought forth eight solid balls of hardened, callous attempts at bread rolls from our oven and I was mostly exhausted by the prospect of having to get up an hour later.
The drive in the car was blissful. I slept on Phillip’s lap, he held my hand. I could feel his legs under my ear, his arm curving along my body. I slept and dreamt about work, life, my cat, a dentist — the usual. And then I woke up in the middle of the vast Wyoming countryside. Cars were stuck bumper to bumper trying to get into a town with a population of 200 people on all other days. The sunrise left orange marks on the horizon and a flood of foreigners, foreignness, descended upon the undisturbed yellow hills of Glendo. The landscape slowly filled up with cars, camping chairs, pickup trucks, RVs, dogs and beers and running children and many many humans, strangely congregated on the lonely Wyoming hilltops.
I took a walk with Phillip through the landscape, jumping at the sight of a spider, laughing at horses galloping away. The fields were grassy and lush in their own way, but the earth was so dry. Every step was sand. The sand seemed so devoid of substance that the grasslands surrounding us seemed unreal, a strange hallucination.
I slept again, played games of 30 seconds, willing time away.
And then, suddenly, the orange spot that I saw through my eclipse glasses had a little dent in it. It was almost imperceptible at first, but after a few minutes it was unmistakeable — a perfectly circular blackness was encroaching on the distant orange dot. I could see it eating away. I could not look at the sun, of course, and the world around me had not changed enough for me to discern imagination from reality… But when I put on the glasses and looked upward, I could see a little black dot slowly making its way across an orange one. It seemed like a sketch, an abstraction, some otherworldly classroom demonstration.
But slowly, I began to see other changes. In the far distance, the horizon became increasingly blurry, grey and lilac and endless despite the sky. My shadow was less sharp, losing its edges in the soft dead sand. A wind had picked up, rustling the dead and yet miraculously lively grass across the hills. The black dot was shifting onward. Slowly I could no longer see or even imagine the orange dot as a whole — it seemed a product of my imagination: the black dot was real, the orange was its shadow.
And as the sliver of orange grew smaller and smaller I knew I was approaching a very small pinprick in the timeline of my life that would be forever alone — forever a solitary dot in a line of malleable, impressionable, foggy, hazy dots.
I looked first toward the horizon. It was lilac, dark blue, slightly golden. It looked like this all around me — 360 degrees of sunrise melting into sunset. The fact that this burst of beginnings and endings surrounded me on all sides suddenly made the earth feel round in a way it had not been to me before. I could sense the endless space through which we we hurtling.
And then I ventured a look towards the sky. I could look without my eclipse glasses now. I knew, from the talks and my own reading, that I could expect a truly breathtaking sight. Nothing could have prepared me for what I actually saw. My breath did stop, and so did my heart. I will never again encounter that much beauty and majesty in a single moment. The moon was darker than black — it seemed less like an object and more like a hole in the universe, a gap in reality. Around it was the sun’s corona — wisps of gold and silver spilling into the night sky. A sky, suddenly, adorned with stars.
And there I was. In the middle of a yellow, dying, otherwise abandoned, field in Wyoming. In the shadow of the moon, staring audaciously at the sun. Surrounded by the entire universe. And Phillip, my love, kissed me and held me. And I cried.
I cried because there is no more appropriate response to such overwhelming beauty. I cried because there is something painful in a moment of time that really is only that — a moment. I cried because I stood there, powerless to stop the moon, hold on to its shadow, unable to look at the sun directly ever again, unable to stop or even inhabit time. A leaf in a tumultuous river. A seashell in the ocean. Endlessly small, and yet only able to occupy the negligible amount of space I call me. I cried because I was overwhelmed at the absurd reality of my subjective consciousness. And I cried because, despite all of that, I was holding Phillip’s hand, in Wyoming, under the moon’s shadow, staring at the sun.
