I know, I know. The eclipse was months ago, and this is super late. But Crumb Tray doesn’t have an editor or deadlines, so I’ve been spending my time doing other things.
I also know that The Eclipse Essay was written by Annie Dillard in 1982. In that essay, she (somewhat famously) wrote that “seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.”
I’m going to write about my experience seeing a partial eclipse, and pace Dillard, I’m going to go ahead and say that my thoughts here apply to eclipses broadly, despite having never seen a total eclipse. (I’ve also never been married.) Just bear with me.
About two hours before the 2024 eclipse, my friend called me and said: “It’s hot today. Do you feel that?”
She was calling from Long Island. I was in Connecticut where we would observe 91% partiality.
I agreed with her, even though it wasn’t particularly warm (just a few degrees above the historic average). That day, we were all paying particular attention to the weather. “The sun feels so close,” she told me.
This friend is intelligent, reads books, and, I imagine, scored well on middle school science quizzes. But her education didn’t prevent her from a, let’s say, erroneous line of thinking—in which the solar eclipse somehow involves the sun being physically closer to us. Yet my friend’s misunderstanding speaks to just how little mind some of us pay to what lies beyond the ozone layer.
After I reminded her what a solar eclipse is (if you’re like my friend, it’s when the moon passes in front of the sun), and said that we are not, in any sense, closer to the sun, I told her my eclipse plans were minimal.
Frankly, I’ve never been interested in outer space. When I was studying for the SATs, I expressed my annoyance about the quantity of space-focused reading passages to my dad, who cared less about my curiosity in the sections than my scores.
When I was touring colleges, an alumnus of one school told me he could recount a past astronomy lecture that would make me sob—the kind of thing that makes us reflect on the sheer tininess of Earth.
“I doubt it,” I replied politely.
I really don’t care that there are a bajillion galaxies a bajillion times larger than the world I know. Please overlook any pretense when I say that I care about humanity—human activity and thought. From my view, Polaris is small—but, for example, questions of ethics or artistic achievements are huge. I struggle with being interested in nature writing, in general. If Dillard had written an essay about kissing a man in the same collection as “Total Eclipse,” I’d probably read that one first.
I’ll admit that part of my eclipse apathy was motivated by the fact that I didn’t have glasses. I had heard about the eclipse for weeks but neglected to order them. I even ignored an email from my college, which had procured a limited supply to give away. I asked Google just how dangerous it was to watch the eclipse without glasses, and it replied: “Really dangerous.” Websites suggested cutting a hole into cardboard and “watching” the eclipse (really, a shadow of it) on the ground like an idiot.
I believe there’s a fraught relationship between outer space enthusiasts and the rest of society, a relationship which becomes most pronounced during an eclipse. Normally, it is one of them talking a lot about what’s happening in space and us not giving a crap about it. It’s one of them explaining what the Mars rover did or didn’t do, while we consider more important things, like whether the meme “girl dinner” is fun or harmful. And this is, perhaps, how it should be.
But once you’ve procrastinated getting eclipse glasses, the space enthusiasts emerge from behind their telescopes to say: “We’ll give you our special glasses if you hang out with us.”
My mom and I were ensnared in this predicament during the 2017 eclipse, when we were practically held hostage by these folk at the local library, who wouldn’t give us glasses until minutes before the event, so we would be forced to watch it all together.
My college planetarium repeatedly stressed via email their “limited supply” of glasses, so I had little hope I would be able to score a pair.
But, as I told my friend, I didn’t really care.
I’ll be vulnerable and say that, at the time, I was reading Heidegger’s Being and Time. One thing Heidegger says (I think), put basically, is that things or “entities” are not significant or meaningful in and of themselves. They’re significant only in how they bear on you and your aims or the project of your existence.
To put this in eclipse terms: the sun and the moon aligning was no big deal. In fact, the sun and the moon aren’t even aligned in most parts of the world. Again, the significant thing here is you. They have to be aligned with you, too, for it to be an eclipse. I’m only experiencing an eclipse because of where I’m standing.
Thinking this way, it starts to feel like an eclipse isn’t astronomically meaningful at all. An eclipse is, in the truest sense, a coincidence. I must note that Dillard’s essay arrives at a similar, if not the same, thought: “Significant as [the eclipse] was, it did not matter a whit. For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people, no significance.”
In my preference for the human and terrestrial, I decided that we shouldn’t direct our focus to what’s happening up there. What matters is down here—in Connecticut. It would get colder and darker as we got closer to partiality. Supposedly, birds, who don’t read the news, would chirp as if to say: “What the hell is going on?”1
Heidegger suggests that our actions should reflect what we determine to be significant. As a weather event impacting humanity, the eclipse was significant, sort of. So I ironically chose to skip that afternoon’s philosophy lecture to experience the eclipse sans glasses—without looking up.
I decided to go for a run and stop by the planetarium to observe all the nerdy hubbub. And, on the off chance, they had extra glasses, maybe grab a pair…because: why not?
About four minutes into my run, I passed my philosophy professor who waved at me, as I sprinted in the opposite direction of class. But I shrugged off the awkwardness from that encounter and arrived at the planetarium minutes later.
“Fuck,” I thought, as I saw the massive line of students. But immediately, a boy about half my height entered my field of vision, shouting: “Extra glasses! Anyone want these extra glasses?”
“ME!” I yelled and held my hand out, swiftly abandoning my whole “I’m not looking up” philosophy. I giggled smugly to myself as I passed a line of glasses-less students who had been waiting. I wondered if this was kismet or just a coincidence.
Glasses in-hand, I ran to East Rock (elevation: 366 feet), the highest point in southern Connecticut I could access. If you’re wondering why I intuited that this ascent would bestow on me any viewing advantage (the moon is 1.26 billion feet from the earth), I would refer you to my earlier discussion of how we can be really stupid about space.
There were clouds, but they weren’t obscuring my view of the in-progress eclipse. Occasionally throughout my run, I would balance the glasses on my nose and look up. The sun was an orange dot, and I could recognize the moon slowly biting a chunk out of the dot.
About halfway up East Rock, my brother called me to ask if I was eclipse-ing.
“Yeah,” I told him, “and I can totally feel it getting colder.”
“Damn,” he said. He was in San Francisco, i.e., a part of America that was completely missing out on today’s event.
When I reached the summit, I saw all sorts of people—young, old, families, individuals—who had the same idea as I. But about fifteen minutes before our expected 91% partiality, clouds began to obstruct our view, causing my neighboring eclipse watchers to grumble. Earlier that day, I had heard that cloud cover had completely screwed over eclipse watchers in Texas, many of whom had travelled to see it.
I must say that the eclipse, as an entertainment spectacle, has some flaws. It’s both too fast and too slow. If it were dark and cold for, say, a full day, that day would feel inherently special on account of the eclipse’s weather. Or if the sky suddenly got dark and cold for, like, five seconds before becoming bright again, that would be kind of cool, too.
Even people who experience totality do a lot of waiting around, as it gets gradually darker and darker. And then it gets really dark for about four minutes, which seems almost too long. If anyone read this damn Substack, I’d expect a chorus of, “But you haven’t seen totality!” “You had to be there!” from all the ardent eclipse defenders (who tend to protest too much, methinks). To these people, I will say that you all took many videos and posted them online, so in many ways, I feel like I can judge it fairly.
It may seem ridiculous to criticize a natural phenomenon for pacing issues, but isn’t our primary relationship to the eclipse one of audience and entertainment? In Ancient China, it was thought that the eclipse was the sun being eaten by a dragon. The Inca believed the eclipse was a sign that their sun god was pissed. But most of us don’t assign any such mythology to the event. We know what it is. It’s one thing moving in front of another, and we choose to take the afternoon to watch it. Because we hope it will be fun.
Just minutes before the point of 91% partiality in New Haven, the clouds suddenly cleared. That felt like kismet. I put on my glasses and looked upward. At this point, the sun was merely an orange crescent.
Only then did it occur to me that, though the sun and moon are millions of miles apart, from our perspective, they are about the same size in the sky. This is the best evidence I’ve seen for the existence of God.
Shortly after the eclipse, a picture of a Martian eclipse made the rounds online, which, thanks to Mars’s small and awkwardly shaped moon, Phobos, looks kind of like a poorly drawn eyeball. Is it just happenstance that humans are the beneficiary of a rather perfect event, as far as eclipses go? Or is this the design of some divine architect?
As I stared at the orange crescent, I noticed it looked like a musical fermata. That’s when I remembered that the poet Paul Celan used the word “corona” a lot, which, in his poetry, may refer to a crown as well as a musical pause.2 “Corona” is, of course, also the word for the halo that’s visible around the moon during an eclipse.
I put in my earbuds and listened to Celan’s 1948 poem “Corona” about his affair with the poet Ingeborg Bachmann and stared at the crescent. In 1947, Celan fled Romania and arrived in Vienna, where he met Bachmann. The encounter between Bachmann, the daughter of a Nazi, and Celan, a Holocaust survivor, is its own kind of strange coincidence.
“We shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk: / time returns to the shell,” Celan’s poem goes. Did this fermata/corona in the sky not look something like the shell of a nut, which, in time, would become whole again?
My poetic pondering was interrupted by a young family near me. Their daughter, five-years-old, I’d say, was drawing something in the dirt with a stick as her parents tried to take in the eclipse.
“Honey,” the dad said, motioning to his daughter. “How about you take a look at this?” The daughter continued to play with her stick.
“The next time this happens isn’t for twenty years,” the dad explained.
Boom. That’s it. That’s why we care.
In the lead up to the eclipse, there was so much talk about how rare this event was. Yes, we just had a total solar eclipse in 2017, but they’re actually pretty unusual. The next one that’s visible in the contiguous 48 will be in 2044. Among the eclipse watchers who got shut out by the clouds were some older folks who will likely never get to see it. That idea’s enough to make me verklempt.
But none of that makes this couple’s attempt to explain the importance of the eclipse to their child any less hilarious. She’s five! She doesn’t know what twenty years is! She doesn’t know what it means to wait twenty years for something. I don’t know what it means to wait twenty years for something.
Still, her dad’s plea made me imagine her at twenty-five, three years older than I am now. In the course of that time, she will (likely) learn to read, get her first pimple, experience her first love, learn to drive, experience her first heartbreak, earn her first paycheck, pay rent…and then, eclipse. That’s so much activity and so much time.
And that’s when Paul Celan’s poem, particularly the last few lines, grabbed my attention: “It is time that the stone took the trouble to bloom / that unrest’s heart started to beat. / It’s time for it to be time. / It is time.”
The significance of the eclipse, of the sun and moon aligning for a small stretch of the earth, is mysterious to some and perhaps nonexistent to others. But the eclipse, for me, attests to the significance of time, broadly.
It doesn’t make those four minutes meaningful per se. Rather, it reminds us that the things in our universe haven’t been in their current positions until now and will not be there for much longer. Like in Heidegger’s work, the examination of entities begets an examination of time.
The eclipse is like when a sports coach or theater teacher, on the day of the final game or performance, tells their groups that this is the last time this particular group of people will be together. You might say this minimizes or makes banal an event of great physical scale, on the order of millions of miles. But I think this interpretation is accurate, meaningful, and human, even if it does bring the eclipse down to earth.
Yeah, the eclipse reminds us that time is transitory. So can a Robert Frost poem or a Pink Floyd song.
But more vividly than those things, the eclipse may illustrate how time is so visible in space and meaningful because of things in space (both outer and regular). It shows us what time looks like: a string of coincidences.
And it may prompt us to think beyond the sun and the moon, to consider other things, or all things and their positions in our universe. And we may (mentally) hit pause and behold these things in our world before they turn away or pass by—birds on branches about to take flight, a cloud about to clear, a printer before it starts acting weird for what feels like the hundredth time.
And this feeling may make us humans examine how we might interact with those things and how we might spend the next moment. As cars whizz and microbes swim, will we look up, draw in the dirt, or kiss a man?
I think there’s something interesting about the fact that birds, who fall between humans and outer space in the universe and on the ranking of my interests, are so attuned to the weather that they freak out even during a partial eclipse. If I hadn’t heard about the eclipse, I’m not sure I would have noticed the change in weather, and I definitely wouldn’t if I were inside, which I am most of the time. It seems to me that throughout the course of human history, the realms of humanity and nature have been in a slow divorce, like two celestial bodies moving apart—until climate change snaps us back together.
I know my last article in this “venue” also cites Celan. I’m familiar with the work of, like, four poets, and I must use them for everything they can give me.