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image credit: University of Michigan
Looking back on it, I cannot believe I almost missed it. I would’ve been kicking myself for the next 20 years.
I mindlessly scrolled through the New York Times on my phone during the first weekend of spring break, skimming a few articles about the eclipse, and noted that we were just a three-hour drive from the zone of totality. I didn’t understand, or care to understand, the significance of this event. But despite my disinterest, my mom declared that we’d be idiots if we missed it. So, we rented a car and started driving south.
The longer we drove, the more the tension and excitement built. We compared the New York Times cloud cover map with our GPS location. I gave updates with our eclipse glasses on how much of the sun was currently obscured. Every half an hour or so, my dad would shout out how close we were to the zone of totality: 90%, then 95%, then 99%, then greater than 99.5%, but still not enough. By the time we crossed that final line to 100%, we were grinning with anticipation.
I’d also been doing my English reading in the car: Easy Beauty, an incredibly insightful memoir by Chloé Cooper Jones that I was obligated to dislike because I knew I’d be writing an essay on it later. In one chapter, she quotes a line from Kant about the idea of the sublime, that feeling of awe and terror at the sight of greatness:
“Thunderclouds piling up in the sky and moving about accompanied by lightning and thunderclaps, volcanoes with all their destructive power, hurricanes with all the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean heaved up, the high waterfall of a mighty river… Compared to the might of any of these, our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place. And we like to call these objects sublime because they raise the soul’s fortitude above its usual middle range and allow us to discover in ourselves an ability to resist…which gives us the courage to believe that we could be a match for nature’s seeming omnipotence.”
It struck me that a solar eclipse should be a perfect expression of the sublime; imagine seeing the sun die in front of your eyes. For most of human history, that would be utterly terrifying. But now, eclipses have become something else. What was once taken as a sign of wrath from the gods has now become something we can experience without fear. We know exactly what causes it, exactly when it will happen, and that the world will keep turning afterward. Under these conditions, it’s transformed into an example of the triumph of human genius, of science, and our understanding of nature. At that moment it appeared to be the definition of sublime: to see nature at its most awe-inspiring, its most powerful, and then walk away from it unscathed.
I wanted to experience the eclipse like that. I wanted to be alone. I didn’t want to go to a watch party, although we saw several on our drive down. I wanted to imagine that I was seeing it without context, without knowing that it was going to be over in just a few minutes. I wanted to contemplate what it would be like to truly feel like the world was ending. I’d heard that animals behaved weirdly during it, so I requested that we find somewhere quiet, where I could hear the birds stop singing.
In some ways, I got that. In all the ways that mattered, I got something more.
We found a patch of blue to watch it through and drove out into the middle of a cornfield.
In the minutes before totality, it began to go dark. Not like it does at sunset; there was no golden undertone fading to deep blue. Instead, it was like all the color was slowly being leached from the world. The air got colder. Shadows sharpened. And then the moon covered the sun and everything changed.
It never became quiet. The birds didn’t stop chirping. Stars, which I later learned were actually Jupiter and Venus, appeared next to the sun’s halo. Color returned to the world in the form of a sunset that covered the entire horizon.
Most of all, I wasn’t alone. Whoops of jubilation and disbelief rose through the air from the farms around me. Even here, in the middle of a deserted cornfield, I couldn’t avoid the celebrations of others at our immense luck in being able to witness this moment. And I realized that I didn’t want to. Instead, I celebrated with them. I’d never seen them, and they’d never seen me, but for that one moment, we were all united by the experience of looking at the same thing and finding it beautiful.
I’m not a science person. I don’t understand how we know when eclipses happen. I know there’s a lot of math involved, and I’m grateful for the people, past and present, who created the resources that made this experience possible. Most of all, I’m grateful for the haphazard community it created. An eclipse has no interest in the people under its path, and yet it cannot help but create connections between them through one singular shared moment.
I’m aware that I’m assigning a broader meaning to a personal experience, and I know that there’s a danger in pouring symbolism and significance into an event. Sometimes, a cool thing to see is just a cool thing to see. But for me, it was that feeling of random community that made it matter. I told my mom, as we sat in gridlock on the drive down, that as annoying as it was to be stuck in traffic for an extra hour, it was also exciting. There were so many people, just like us, who were determined to see it. When I opened the New York Times after it was over, I scrolled through the pictures and watched the reaction videos, smiling as people in Malatzen and Cincinnati put on glasses and peered up at the sky.
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