In the Path of Totality with Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, and Margaret Wise Brown

A brief literary confection in view of today's eclipse

The moon appears to be converging with the sun, and today’s eclipse is converging with a revision of my memoir chapter in which another eclipse sends my children haywire. Here are some related, midweek tidbits from more of my favorite authors regarding eclipses and other heavenly phenomena . . . because I never could keep to a publishing schedule.

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Margaret Wise Brown was apparently born under the eaves of not one atmospheric phenomenon, but two: the total lunar eclipse of May 24, 1910, and the Northern Lights dancing visibly above her birthplace of Brooklyn, New York. As an adult, she would write deliciously off-center children’s books that often find their grounding in the cycles of day and night, earth and sky:

“The important thing 
about the sky is that it is always 
there. It is true that it is blue, 
and high, and full of clouds,
and made of air.
But the important thing about 
the sky is that it is always there.”

~ The Important Book 

Indeed, the sky is always there, but what happens on a day like today when the heavens turn silver and the sun goes away? In her essay “Total Eclipse,” Annie Dillard gives an account of standing in the midst of the February 26, 1979, solar eclipse. She and her husband had traveled several hours inland from the west coast to climb a hill in the path of totality:

“It began with no ado. It was odd that such a well-advertised public event should have no starting gun, no overture, no introductory speaker. I should’ve known right then that I was out of my depth. Without pause or preamble, silent as orbits, a piece of the sun went away. We looked at it through welders’ goggles. A piece of the sun was missing; in its place we saw empty sky.”

The last time my family experienced an eclipse like the one we will this afternoon was in 2017, and my very young children did not like it. They preferred to sit safely inside, watching the event on livestream video instead of live in the sky above us. Dillard taps into what my child might have been feeling:

I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print. This color has never been seen on earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills grasses were finespun, metal which the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grass, filmed in the Middle Ages.  I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day. 

I like to think of Annie Dillard and Margaret Wise Brown as literary companions, two women from different eras and genres carrying on the same conversation about honest seeing, as interpreted by their quirky, lyrical minds. “The mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God,” Dillard says elsewhere. Mary Oliver joins the conversation, adding her trademark astonishment at the world to complete the triad. In her essay “Upstream,” Oliver describes her wide-ranging, nature-drenched childhood, saying,

“I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.”

And,

“I walk, all day, across the heaven-verging field.”

Margaret Wise Brown claimed even more: she preferred the liminal times, day on the verge of night and night stealing past the edge of day. The man to whom she was engaged when she died recalls her saying,

Evening is like morning to me, full of change and renewal and excitement . . .

Now it is not evening, but 1pm on the day of 2024’s solar eclipse, and I am holed up in the back corner of my favorite bookstore/cafe, no windows in view. I’m avoiding the light like crazy because I’m in the direct path of a migraine, but a sudden cry arises amid the college students at a neighboring table; a friend has come blustering through the bookstore: “It’s happening, it’s happening!” The cafe tables are empty in seconds as everyone rushes outside.

“It’s getting dark; the sun looks so cool!” is all I need to hear before rushing outside myself, and the light is dim and strange, and a cool breeze is blowing. Birds are sounding what seem like warning cries, but I’m not bothered. By the time I get home, joined minutes later by my children, midafternoon has changed to evening. My now-older girls are gazing through dark glasses and peering into homemade boxes with holes pricked through aluminum foil. They are running around the yard with a particular wildness, with a wild joy, and I don’t need my sunglasses to hold off the migraine.

In this moment, afternoon is like evening to us, and we all feel the change and renewal and excitement of a world gone momentarily wrong.

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