But the Sun is Eclipsed by the Moon
A tale of the Great American Eclipse, Pink Floyd, and the meaning of life
I had learned years before that a total solar eclipse would be visible from my parents’ house in South Carolina, and there was never any question that I would be there. I remembered the excitement that even a partial eclipse had brought me in elementary school: the eager crafting of a cereal-box pinhole viewer, the crescent shadows thrown onto the sidewalk by the leaves, the irresistible temptation to brazenly expose my retinas to the sun’s full power. I also remembered, though, the dissatisfaction with the tiny image produced by my viewer and with the apparently-unchanged brightness of the sun when I did let myself peek, for an instant, before squeezing my eyes shut, hoping I’d still be able to see when I opened them.
I untangled myself from Rye’s drowsy toddler limbs and looked at the clock. The time had come to pull out the eclipse glasses and queue up the Pink Floyd.
So it was that I found myself in my childhood bedroom, putting my two-and-a-half-year-old son Rye down for his afternoon nap and hoping he’d wake up in time to catch the show. As I lay there with him, I tried to check my expectations, which had been building at this point for five years. I had always known how this was going to go down: the moon was going to cover up the sun for a minute or three. It was going to get dark and like a bug or two would come out and then it would be over. This was not going to be the terrifying or mystical experience it would have been for ancient people who didn’t have ways of calculating eclipses or, even if they did, traveling a thousand miles in a day to see them. That, it seemed, was a major advantage of being a modern people with modern science. If this ended up being some kind of embarrassing letdown, at least I could say I was there.
I untangled myself from Rye’s drowsy toddler limbs and looked at the clock. The time had come to pull out the eclipse glasses and queue up the Pink Floyd.
My brother discovered Pink Floyd when he was 5 and I was 7. We hardly knew any other music at the time — we didn’t even know who the Beatles were! So Pink Floyd became the soundtrack of my childhood. The thought of playing Dark Side of the Moon during our eclipse experience was almost a silly in-joke, a little wordplay on the “Eclipse” track. It wasn’t intended as an integral part of the day.
But from the first heartbeats of “Speak to Me,” it became clear that this record was made for this occasion. Forget The Wizard of Oz — this was solar eclipse music.
My first glimpse up at the sun through the glasses revealed an orange circle with a bite taken out of it. Without the glasses on, everything looked remarkably normal and bright. I tried to pace myself, but there was something so compelling about putting on the glasses and turning skyward to reveal the mystery of what was happening that I’d find myself gazing for long moments until my then four-year-old, Clover, begged to have a turn.
I held the glasses tight around her head and she, too, stared transfixed at this orange shape. I had explained to her plenty of times in advance what was going to happen, what she could expect, but I wasn’t sure if she understood we were looking at the sun with the shadow of the moon starting to cover it. It didn’t look much like any other image or experience of the sun she had ever had. But she didn’t ask, she just looked, and looked, soaking in some kind of quiet something between her and the sun, and went back to making a mobile with my mom.
Before long, the shadows on the ground revealed the crescent sun overhead, even as everything else still looked and felt like the sweltering August afternoon it was. We all marveled in watching the patterns dapple our skin, then sheets of paper. We tried the effects of different trees (magnolia leaves made the best shadows).
Were things dimmer? I couldn’t say. But it was time for Dark Side of the Moon.
Rye woke up and I made him a sandwich. We were all dancing around, looking up through our glasses. “Money” came on and I sang to Rye along with the bassline “one-TWO-and-three-four-five-six-seven-one-TWO-and-three” just like my father had done with me. I held the glasses tight around his head, too, and let him have a look. All of us were staring up as often as possible now, our faces upturned, our eyes silver-obscured, our mouths half-open.
The light had turned eerie. There was a sense of wrongness to the color, the yellow darkness like the pre-tornado gloom I once saw during my summer in Indiana. We had expected twilight, but this phase of strange light did not feel like a relaxing evening. Everything had become flat and unreal. Insects began to cry from the trees.
Bright enough to take a picture, yet nobody’s camera could focus. The sensors could no longer compute the light conditions well enough. It was the same with us: we understood what was happening, but the inputs didn’t match up. Brain and eyes couldn’t parse. Goosebumps came in waves and the entire horizon began to glow, the sun setting everywhere at once.
The sun setting in the middle of the sky.
I caught the sun, unfiltered, out of the corner of my eye. It still seemed blinding. Bright enough to take a picture, yet nobody’s camera could focus. The sensors could no longer compute the light conditions well enough. It was the same with us: we understood what was happening, but the inputs didn’t match up. Brain and eyes couldn’t parse. Goosebumps came in waves and the entire horizon began to glow, the sun setting everywhere at once.
The sun setting in the middle of the sky.
“Any Colour You Like” started playing and I told my dad we should skip it.
All that you touch
And all that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
The air felt suddenly cool, like walking into a valley, and the solar lights in my parents’ garden flicked on. We laughed about this, a strange moment of normalcy in a scene that was rapidly feeling as far from normal as any of us had ever experienced, our laughter somehow an acknowledgement that things were going just as the script had said things would unfold. But knowing was not the same as feeling and these feelings were not part of the program. We knew what was happening but the world was ending. The dam was breaking open.
And all that you love
And all that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
We scanned the yard for rabbits. We saw bats circling, confused. A dark feeling rushed over us, the moon’s shadow turning a gigantic page that we ourselves were written on. We watched as the false night descended, the page turned, the orange sliver disappeared.
And all that you give
And all that you deal
And all that you buy
Beg, borrow or steal
Totality. We could see only blackness through the glasses so we threw them off and wept as we beheld each other bathed in corona-light. My mom and I clutched each other and yelled, sounds and tears welling from ancient places within. We could hear our reactions echoed in the shouting roar of a stadium full of schoolkids and parents, away in the distance.
There could be no preparation for this. The moon passed over the sun and it was dark for a minute or three. And we looked right into the eye of God.
And all you create
And all you destroy
And all that you do
And all that you say
The corona was writhing, the sun behind the shadow alive, and the shadow moving. A sky of blackness awash with power restrained.
Did you know that gravity works differently during a solar eclipse? Pendulums swing with unexplained anomalies; atomic clocks, the standards for international timekeeping and navigation systems, can no longer be trusted. There was a hole in the sky and we were all being sucked into it.
And all that you eat
And everyone you meet
And all that you slight
And everyone you fight
Was it making a sound? I can imagine a background drone, a tone that reminds me of that moment, but “Eclipse” was playing, the lyrics stripping the small pettiness of my life down to its core. The corona danced with the guitar.
The false night, the eerie light had rippled goosebumps over me, but the sight of the sun obscured — vanished, torn out of the sky! — that rippled my soul.
And all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that’s to come
We had timed the music perfectly. “Eclipse,” the album’s conclusion, was just a little shorter than the length of totality. It had begun a few moments before it was safe to take off our glasses, and ended just before we sensed our time standing between worlds was ending.
I was ready. I had faced this glimpse through the veil, through the door into the raw seething power of our own star. I feared and loved it. The sun prevailed, the first rays triumphant from behind that moving shadow, the diamond-ring sparkle causing another eruption of cheers from the stadium.
I clamped my hands over my children’s eyes, still wide and upturned, and they burst into tears. We returned fully back to Earth, to the yard where I grew up, on an August afternoon, the sun as hot and bright as ever, two kids wailing in confusion because their mother had just hit them in the face.
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon
We didn’t return to the glasses; we didn’t need to watch the moon slink away. We sat dazed, in silence. Only the magnolia shadows told the end of the drama playing out overhead.
In the years leading up to the eclipse, I wrestled with whether the event could be a mystical experience — how should I prepare, could I even have those types of feelings at all? At the very least, I thought it would be worth bringing my children to, to bathe them in the light of the sun’s corona the way Richard Dawkins once described bringing his young daughter outside in the middle of the night, hoping that just a photon or two from Halley’s Comet would reach her in a kind of space communion.
Having experiences is easy, sometimes requiring nothing more than showing up. Now, my focus on preparation seems silly, like it did when I refused childbirth classes, sensing that they would only muddle with words something I was simply going to have to experience to understand. We showed up for the eclipse, took our electromagnetic communion, aligned ourselves with the sun and the moon. It’s what has come after that has required the real wrestling: how to map the invisible changes in me, how to integrate the epiphanies. There’s no simple answer for this, and also no ending.
