I saw the total eclipse yesterday. When I got home, I immediately started writing about it, to try to make sense of what I had just seen. I needed several cliches, Immanuel Kant, and Wallace Stevens to do so. The resulting essay is now published at Commonweal. An excerpt:
You need those special glasses. This is true.
It’s also true that “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him,” as Annie Dillard writes in her essay, “Total Eclipse.” “Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it.” I had seen two partial eclipses of 70 percent or so in recent years. They impressed me at the time. But they were trifles compared to what I saw on April 8.