Eclipse fever has waned now. It's full experience, I fear, got smothered by other headline-grabbing news by our grabber-in-chief. So let's revisit the experience, as described by two people who saw it in the path of total exclipse.
Tariq Malik, a 16 year veteran reporter covering space exploration, was asked by Space.com to describe his experience in the moment of "totality." He was observing the eclipse from Carbondale, Illinois; and he said that, in all his years of space reporting, he had never felt anything like this.
"I feel small. I fell like the universe. And connected to everything in between."Writer Helen MacDonald described her previous experience of eclipse totality for a New York Times Magazine special eclipse section, August, 6, 2017.
"March 6, 2016. I stood on a crowded beach in Turkey and waited until, at the allotted time, with a chorus of screams and cheers and whistles and applause, the sun slid away; and impossibly, impossibly, we saw above us a stretch of black sky and in the middle of it a hole, blacker than anything I'd ever seen, fringed with a ring of soft, white fire. My heart jumped up to my throat, and my face grew hot with tears. I fell to my knees, feeling tiny and huge, and as lonely as I've ever been, but also astonishingly close to the crowds around me.
"Totality--that point of a solar eclipse where the sun is entirely covered by the moon--is incomprehensible. Your mind can't grasp any of it, not the dark, nor the sunset clouds on the horizon, nor the stars, just that extraordinary wrongness, up there, that pulls the eyes toward it. I stared up at the hole in the sky and then at the figures around me, and became gripped by the conviction that my life was over, that I was kneeling in the underworld in the company of all the shades of the dead. It was bitterly cold. A loose wind blew through the darkness.
"But then . . . from the lower edge of the blank, black disk of the dead sun burst a perfect point of brilliance. It leapt and burned, unthinkably fierce and bright, something absurdly like a word. I'm not a person of faith, but even so, the sun's reappearance as the moon drew away seemed like the first line of Genesis retold." ["Let there be light."]photo by bbc.com
"Is it all set to rights, now? I thought. Is all remade? From a bay tree, stuck into existence a moment ago, a songbird, a white spectacled bulbul, called a greeting to the new dawn."
* * * * *
I'm struck by how both of them had what sounds like others' descriptions of "cosmic" feelings: the simultaneous awareness of how tiny we are in the scope of the universe, but how -- as part of that universe -- we encompass the vastness, all boundaries erased in the exhilarating expansiveness of time and space.
Ralph
Ralph
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