Indianapolis, April 8 2024
I’m aware that C. is awake; I open my eyes and see her up on one elbow, looking at the clock. “What time is it?” I say. “5:15,” she says. “That’s not a bad time for it to be,” I say, and close my eyes and go back to sleep before the alarm rings at
6:15 a.m. to remind me to send an email, so I go into the office and do so. Then I set up on the office couch, after setting the oven alarm for 25 minutes, and meditate. My mind is chattery this morning. I picture a field with people in lawn chairs looking at the eclipse (it’s eclipse day here in Central In.). I think about morning tasks (laundry, reading, making hummus); but eventually I settle down and notice how quiet it is—there’s a distant hum of some neighbor’s heating unit, then for the last 10 minutes a single, loud songbird outside my window, which I listen to, noting the rhythm of his song. He’s got two notes, and sings them like this: 1, 1, 2; 1, 1, 2; 1, 2; 1, 2; 1, 1, 2. Slightly before the alarm goes off I know that it’s almost 25 minutes, so I get up and turn it off with about 20 seconds left. And make coffee. It’s after
7 a.m. and I can hear C. stirring in the bedroom. I take a pot of partially cooked, pre-soaked steelcut oatmeal out of the fridge and put it on a burner on 2, then floss, brush teeth, and shower. I turn on the morning news to hear the latest forecast—high, wispy cirrus clouds, so pretty good for eclipse viewing. The rest of the news is about eclipse events and the anticipated eclipse-related traffic apocalypse. I open my computer and go to my email to remind my colleagues that I’m taking the day off and to put an out-of-office message on. I see one email from a colleague in my field following up on an invitation to do a chapter for a book he’s doing. I write a quick, apologetic email saying I’ll have to think about it and thanking him for the invitation.
C. sits on the couch next to me looking at her computer. After a few minutes, she says, “Did you already eat? Is the oatmeal ready?” The oatmeal! I haven’t looked at it in a half-hour, probably. I get to the stove with seconds to spare before the moisture boils over. The goop has just begun to stick on the bottom of the pot. Disaster averted. I stir it up and put it on low, tell C. it’s ready, and run downstairs to put my laundry in the washing machine. I make myself a bowl: peanut butter, banana, oatmeal, a little brown sugar, and eat it (delicious) watching the morning news-heads talking about the eclipse.
So, it’s going to be a rather non-everyday day. The first total eclipse visible in this spot since 1205 AD. (957 AD, if you’re in Muncie). And a Monday in April on which I am not working or driving to Muncie.
Yesterday, I read a couple think pieces in the Sunday New York Times about the eclipse. An astronomer from Northern Ireland who has traveled all over the world to witness multiple total eclipses wrote that eclipses are more than just a visual experience:
The hairs stand up on the back of your neck and the adrenaline kicks in as your brain tries to make sense of what is going on. But it cannot. It has no other point of reference to compare these sensations to. A total eclipse elicits a unique, visceral, primeval feeling….
On the front page, the main story went briefly & squishily political:
For a nation pulled apart by every manner of division, the eclipse and the awe it inspires offer a moment of unity, if brief. It is a reminder of the collective experience of being alive, of the dance between spirituality and science, and the sheer astonishment at being part of the greater story of things.
A Yale astronomer threw this in:
In these really turbulent times, these experiences of collective awe are probably extremely helpful in showing us to transcend the day-to-day noise and chaos of our lives, and of nations’ lives.
She also noted how terrifying eclipses were to pre-modern people (people in ancient India believed an eclipse was a demon swallowing the sun), and couched today’s eclipse as an opportunity to celebrate “the explanatory power of science.”
So, that’s what I’m thinking about at
8:45 a.m., sitting on the living room couch, an emptied oatmeal bowl and coffee cup on the table to my left, C. at her computer to my right. Thinking also, this morning is going by quickly. And that as the eclipse is happening, I want to experience it, not think about it. But I guess it’s OK to think about it till then.
I close this file and my computer and go about morning tasks. I read about 20 pages of cultural theory for an independent study I’m leading with a grad student; put my clothes in the dryer; clean up the kitchen; put last night’s Indian food in containers in the freezer; and put chickpeas, soaked overnight, on simmer; and do a mise en place for making hummus. (I listen to Charles Mingus on headphones while I’m doing this. I’m listening to Mingus obsessively right now—the combination of structure with wildness and feeling speaks somehow to my political mood in “these really turbulent times”.) By the time that’s all done my laundry is done; I check the chickpeas (they need to get a little more tender—some skins should be floating in the water), then go to the basement for the laundry, and fold it on my bed.
Now I’m sitting here writing this; it’s
11:21, and I feel like I’ve been very productive. They should have one of these eclipses more often—I’m rarely done my Sunday tasks (being performed on Monday this week) by lunchtime, but it’s looking like I will today.
Virginia Woolf took a train to see a total eclipse in Yorkshire on June 29, 1927, and wrote about it in her diary. Like us today, she was hoping for a good view amid an iffy sky. It didn’t fully work out but the experience was quite powerful, it sounds like:
The question was whether the sun would show through a cloud or through one of those hollow places when the time came. We began to get anxious. We saw rays coming through the bottom of the clouds. Then, for a moment, we saw the sun, sweeping – it seemed to be sailing at a great pace and clear in a gap; we had out our smoked glasses; we saw it crescent, burning red; next moment it had sailed fast into the cloud again; only the red streamers came from it; then only a golden haze, such as one has often seen. The moments were passing. We thought we were cheated; we looked at the sheep; they showed no fear; the setters were racing round; everyone was standing in long lines, rather dignified, looking out. I thought how we were like very old people, in the birth of the world—druids on Stonehenge; (this idea came more vividly in the first pale light though). At the back of us were great blue spaces in the cloud. These were still blue. But now the colour was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red and black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, and very beautiful, so delicately tinted. Nothing could be seen through the cloud. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue; and rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker and darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank and sank; we kept saying this is the shadow; and we thought now it is over – this is the shadow; when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen; it was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment; and the next when as if a ball had rebounded the cloud took colour on itself again, only a sparky ethereal colour and so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down and suddenly raised up when the colours came. They came back astonishingly lightly and quickly and beautifully in the valley and over the hills—at first with a miraculous glittering and ethereality, later normally almost, but with a great sense of relief. It was like recovery. We had been much worse than we expected. We had seen the world dead. This was within the power of nature.
Certainly I’ll be able to describe it you at least as well. (Ha.)
For the next little while I finish making the hummus, clean up (it’s an easy recipe but involves multiple pots, bowls, utensils), make myself a salad for lunch and one for tomorrow’s lunch, and bring my salad into the living room, where I’m eating it and writing this at
12:31. The sky has a thin gauze of high, wispy clouds, as predicted. I asked C. a few minutes ago to check it out. She said you can see the sun perfectly right now. Well, fingers crossed.
The other piece of this pre-eclipse experience worth reporting is the pop culture and local culture effects. (Well, I mentioned the morning news and the New York Times). At Ball State, I was placed on the eclipse committee, though by the time I took my spot the major decision had already been made, at the highest levels (which is how we roll at Ball State): that we weren’t inviting people to campus for the eclipse. Campus spaces were to be for the enjoyment of the eclipse by people in the Ball State Community. We don’t have the parking &c to welcome thousands to campus. This seems, I don’t know, potentially fearful and dour, but I guess I defer to the experts (i.e. the cops) on this one. Almost every other college in the state is closed as are many of the k-12 schools. In my office, we’ve recommended that faculty not meet classes in person this afternoon and encouraged as many people as possible to work from home. The Planetarium and various other agencies had events on the weekend themed around the eclipse, but on the day of (today), nothing official, except to recommend where people should watch it from.
The main discussion point through all this is the notion that the state (and the town) will be besieged with people wanting to see the eclipse. There was a good deal of skepticism about this, as well as some impatience with the skepticism, flowing back and forth for the last few months. Well I guess today is the day that tells the tale. The weather is good, so perhaps the traffic-apocalypse party is going to take this one.
Not to get squishily political myself, but I do want to report that several people said to me in the last few days how appropriate it is that we’re having an eclipse right now because everything is so weird. You can look at my last diary for discussion of the political mood on campus. One of my closest colleagues, not referencing anything in particular except the sourly odd moods everyone is in, said last week, “This is a weird time. I don’t know if it’s this eclipse or what.” She added that her daughter, a psychiatric nurse, has had a really difficult time very recently with patients.
Well, I’m going to go for now with celebrating the explanatory power of science. And Ginny Woolf’s bit about the power of nature. For portents we could go, most famously, to Shakespeare. This is Gloucester, in Lear, tying the political discord in Lear’s court to the heavens:
These late eclipses in the sun and moon
portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of
nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds
itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools,
friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies;
on countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and
the bond cracked twixt son and father.
Important to note, though, that Edmund (the bastard, literally and figuratively), overhearing Gloucester, calls his thoughts
the excellent foppery of the world, that
when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of
our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters
the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains
on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves,
thieves, and treacherers by spherical predominance;
drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced
obedience of planetary influence; and all that we
are evil in, by a divine thrusting on.
Interesting that it’s the scheming, treasonous Edmund who voices the realistic, non-superstitious view.
We’re going to Butler University—about a mile and a half from my house—to hang out outside their observatory, where they’ve got a program and some filtered telescopes set up. We’re leaving in 35 minutes, it’s
12:52– and I’m getting a slight running-late anxiety right now. I spend a few minutes reading about sports, then fill a backpack with my (paper) diary and binoculars and sunscreen, grab two collapsible lawn chairs, and we load up the car and head over to Butler. Before we’re halfway there, we see that there are groups of people heading in our direction. We park a couple blocks from campus and haul out stuff to the quad. The weather looks really good—high wispy clouds as the forecast called for, but the sun is completely visible.
[The next bit I transcribed from my paper diary, punctuated by quick and not very artful or accurate—but nonetheless evocative—drawings of the sun as the moon took its route]
2:05 – about 15% of the sun gone, moon creeping in from the southeast corner. We’re set up on the quad, at the bottom of the hill in front of the observatory. Lots of people, some dogs, crying babies. Butler’s limestone and concrete, the consistent hum of chatter, people still filtering in, an old couple setting down a blanket next to us. I’m slathered in sunscreen. The sun feels hot. Some early insects have hatched. Planes pass to the south, descending to the airport. There’s a little drone buzzing around. A dad barks at his kids to stay together. People overdressed and underdressed for the weather.
2:14. Some of the trees are budding, a few blooming, some fully wintry still. A trio—mom, dad, and college-age daughter, using a black umbrella as a parasol. Old guy next to me, with his wife, is talking about how we got heavy metals on earth. “It couldn’t have happened without the sun’s fission…maybe there were other suns that became our sun.” A couple mockingbirds or jays fly over the quad.
2:20:30. Almost a third of the son covered. Is it really a little cooler already? Or has my skin just adapted to sitting in the sun?
2:28. About 28 people are in line across the little ring road waiting for a peek through the filtered telescope, one a very fit fellow in a very loud, green and purple Hawaiian shirt. The old guy to my left is fiddling with his Iphone, with eclipse glasses affixed over the lens, and a tripod where he’s trying to position it. His wife, with a little shade-roof over her retractable chair, is facing away from the sun, eating popcorn and reading a novel. C. is taking 10 minute-breaks between peeks at the sun and texting and receiving photos.
2.42 If you look steadily for a bit, you get the illusion of the sun’s edges collapsing in on itself. There’s a bright ring on the edge of the moon. It has cooled decidedly—a degree or two at least in the last few minutes. The light is changing. Uncommon light.
2.47.30. [I stop writing notes and just make drawings until 3.18—2 minutes before totality.
…
So, full disclosure, reader: I was kind of so blown away by the totality that I didn’t come back to this diary on April 8, except to write a little bit from 4:04-4:19 back in my yard.
What I remember: the anticipation as that glowing, golden, arced bar at the top-left of the sun got smaller and smaller. The crowd oohing and aahing as it approached. Then, right when the light went out, gasps, and C. shouting: “Look!” That I won’t ever forget. And, as soon as I took off my glasses and saw it, my eyes filling with tears and my lips quivering. It felt ecstatic, like the highest peaks of drug-enhanced concert-going, but without the drugged effect—lighter, purer, clearer. My chest and body hummed, but (these impressions did not come in any kind of order, as writing them down suggests) for a time too I felt, not exactly out of body, but out of place. I was holding hands with C., who was to my left, when totality started, but I lost touch with that and lost touch with the awareness of where I was and that I was in a crowd. Then that first intensity subsided, and thought returned, and I thought to take a moment look around. I noted the sharp shard of light at the bottom of the sun and mentioned it to C. I noticed that two bright stars had come out—one below the sun to the right and one above it to the left. The air felt very cool, and the sky on the horizon had turned rose. It wasn’t as dark as I was expecting. In my memory, the moon’s shadow and the sky around the sun is a very dark green, tending to black but green. (I don’t know if this is real—it was a strong impression. I’m also a bit color blind). I looked around at people, trying to see how they were reacting, but couldn’t register anything. I wanted it to last. Then that first very bright ray of light from the bottom of the sun, and everyone quickly moving to put their glasses back on, and the dawn-like light. I was surprised at how quickly it got light again, but enjoyed looking around in the strange light, remembering that that was the most impressive feature of the partial eclipse in 2017.
Especially at the start of totality, of course, none of this came in words—words/thought only came back after what felt like a minute of awed gaping. And C. and I said—what—to each other? What could we say? Something like “amazing, incredible, beautiful, tremendous.”
After totality came what I guess you would say was literally anticlimax. People lined up to look through the telescope again. Kids and dogs ran around. Lots of people started leaving. C asked whether I wanted to stay or whether we should go home.
About 20 minutes or so after totality, we packed up and left, and I sat in the backyard and watched the last 40 minutes or so, moving my chair a few times to see around the tree branches and jotting down little drawings of the shifting view of the sun. Among the final stages: the sun as martini olive, the sun as round head with little-bitty toupee. At 4.09 I wrote, in my paper diary:
Watching the last bits back in the yard, with everyday life continuing around me. John next door is futzing in his garage. A couple yards to the south contractors are working.
I only finished this diary almost two weeks later. I can report that, once the eclipse was completely over, I came inside and went into the office and watched parts of the NASA live stream. Some BSU colleagues were working telescopes at the speedway in Indy, so I watched that bit of the stream and got to see “Credit: Ball State U” in the lower-right corner. I enjoyed flipping through the stream and watching images of totality from different locales, and hearing the super-nerded-out astronomers all over the country who were hosting the live stream, so excited. From which I also learned that that shard of bright light the bottom of the sun is known as a “Bailey’s Bead” and is caused by the jagged topography of the moon letting bits of light through.
For the rest of the day a feeling of pleasant vacancy—of my mind being cleared by the experience—persisted, along with a little regret that it was over and that ordinary life was starting again. I almost resisted the urge to ride my bike because it’s such a routine, such a mark of everyday life re-asserting itself, so quickly, but exercise is a (good) habit so after 5 o’clock I rode my bike downtown on the Monon trail, enjoying the continued beautiful weather. Because the weather was so good the trail was crowded, and I had to be careful & mindful navigating between stroller-pushers, dog-walkers, noise-cancelling headphone wearers, oblivious to the sounds around them, etc.
In the evening, everyday life reasserted itself with a vengeance: we at leftover lentil/carmelized onion/gruyere casserole and watched Jeopardy and a couple sitcoms, and I was in bed early for the usual 5 a.m. wakeup on Wednesday.
I’m as thoroughgoing an agnostic—on the atheist end of the spectrum—as you’ll find, so this isn’t a serious thought, exactly: but the thought did occur to me, multiple times in the hours after the eclipse: I wonder if it will do us any good.