Sacrifice Your Irony on the Blood Altar of the Eclipse

Pat Light
Pat Light
Aug 25, 2017 · 4 min read

Way down southwest, over the state line, past Knoxville, we found a little city park and a flat spot for the van. We sat and we watched. For six hours, under the shade of a vinyl awning, in between the spreading green-lush trees, we watched America set up camp. They put up chairs and pulled out coolers. They settled in to look up, wondering, to look up with side-cocked heads at the clear and brilliant sky.

🌎 Lenoir City, Tennessee; 📷 Pat Light

America came and talked to us: Pennsylvania crouched down to ruffle Loki’s ears and tell us about the long drive down I-81 South, about what night-darkness in the middle of a 90-degree Tennessee afternoon might feel like. Maryland stopped and waved a camera at us, long-lensed, and told us about years of studying astronomy, about marking a 2017 calendar and counting down the days. West Virginia trudged around the lakeshore in a sleeveless t-shirt and came by to chortle at “that big old dog,” to reminisce about a half-remembered partial eclipse from grade school.

Illinois was a traveling nurse with a son in Canada who works as a glassblower. Tennessee drove by in his police cruiser. Tipped his hat and grinned.

Nothing of America was snide or dismissive. Nothing of America mocked paper-edged glasses or grown adults taking selfies with the sky. Nobody shot a pitying glance at people with cardboard boxes on their heads. America was unironically, enthusiastically present. We all showed up to watch the moon cover up the sun, and every single one of us hummed with excitement. We forgot to wrap ourselves in detachment and sarcasm and cynicism.

🌎 Sun Valley, Idaho; 📷 Natalie Dutrow

Across the country, rendered on blooping little screens, the same story played out: Blurry camera phone pictures of a crescent sun through eclipse glasses racked up the same social media buzz as weddings and births; science teachers delighted in new ways to produce pinhole projections. Even the cutesy tongue-in-cheek doomsaying carried, against its baser instincts, a certain respect and wonder. We were shiny and bright with the honesty of it all.


Cool American irony is a wretched, vile thing. It covers your experiences and your effort and your love in a stifle-thick layer of artifice. It turns truth into a guessing game, passion into a feeble and unfunny joke. It’s exhausting to produce, exhausting to parse, exhausting to push through. It’s a lie.

Sacrifice it on the blood altar of the eclipse.

🌎 Columbia, SC; 📷 John Ingalls

Sacrifice it after a great first date, when you’re supposed to wait three days to look mature and uninterested and busy. Sacrifice it after you get a compliment, when you’re supposed to demur and self-deprecate. Sacrifice it after you see beauty, when you’re supposed to crack wise.

Kill it at the cost of your friendships with shallow and bitter people. Paint your face red with the embarrassment of oversharing. Sharpen your interests until they sing like a knife-edge. Sacrifice your ironic detachment everywhere you find it. Slaughter it with ritual, with glee — with bright and shining eyes. Claw your way out of your stupid silly irony-thick skin and be the engaged, sincere, convicted person you’ve always wanted to be too cool to be.


Sincerity is uncomfortable, and conviction takes effort. That’s the point: the discomfort and the effort. Irony distances us from the tiring and humbling work of communicating honestly, protects us from the barb of the critic and the derision of the cynic. Caring is a desperately hard and vulnerable thing to do.

But I know you can do it. I know you can do it because I watched you do it, there of a clear day in Lenoir City, there in the white-ringed shadow of the moon. I watched you, wrinkled or fresh-faced, drawling or prim, step out of the combative smooth-talking cultural moment we’ve buried ourselves in and actually care about a thing, loudly and honestly.

You were the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.

)

Pat Light

Written by

Pat Light

Pat is a climber, writer, and unstoppable god-king. He lives in a van with his dog.

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