The Sunday Letter #28: Eclipsing
I’ve been sitting at my computer for hours now, trying to think about how to frame this Sunday Letter. Am I going to write about the eclipse, I think?
I write about grief and outer space. Of course I have to write about the eclipse.
And yet here I continue to sit—allowing myself to get distracted, peeled off by other errands.
I’ve been away from this computer for a few weeks now, thanks to a combination of illness and travelling. I’m still sick—a hacking cough, a pervasive fatigue that just won’t go away.
It’s always hard to come back to writing after a stint of time doing anything but. Just like how it’s hard to come back to that exercise routine after a similar break. And so I think: what’s there to say about the eclipse that hasn’t already been said?
A total solar eclipse happens when the moon completely covers the sun, blocking out a majority of the sun’s light. More specifically: a total solar eclipse happens when the moon covers the sun at a specific distance from Earth. When the moon is closer to Earth in its rotation and happens to pass between the Earth and the Sun at the same time, we get a total solar eclipse and a few minutes of totality when the day goes dark, lost in the moon’s shadow. This year, a total solar eclipse fell on April 8, and cut a diagonal path through parts of Mexico, the US, and Canada, heading west to east. The next total solar eclipse will occur on August 12, 2026, over Greenland, Iceland, and Spain.
In an annular solar eclipse, the moon passes between the Earth and the Sun once again but does so at a point in its rotation where it is farther away from our planet. As such, it appears smaller in the sky and doesn’t completely block out the sun. In an annular solar eclipse, we don’t get totality and we do get the famed “Ring of Fire” around the Moon, as more of the sun’s corona and outer layers are visible. The next annular solar eclipse will occur on Ocober 2, 2024, over parts of the Pacific Ocean.
The next total solar eclipse over Ontario, which is where I was when I saw last week’s event, won’t happen until October 26, 2144.
Thirty years ago, when I was in Grade 5 or 6, there was a partial solar eclipse in Hamilton. I remember because we went to school and no one was supposed to look out of the windows, so of course lots of students did. We had a substitute teacher who kept yelling at people to get back from the windows and sit down in their chairs.
Don’t look out the window! she screeched. How many times do I have to say it?
Last week, my nieces had the day off of school, probably so that no teachers would be liable for injury if this exact same thing happened to them.
As far as space phenomena go, eclipses are actually fairly common. On average, 2.38 eclipses of one kind or another—total or annular—occur every year. The key, of course, is that they occur over different parts of the planet each time, thanks to the magic of orbits and gravity and the degree to which the planet is tilted when the eclipse happens. This is why the next total solar eclipse won’t appear over Hamilton for a hundred and twenty years.
Over a lifetime away from a perspective such as mine or yours. But in cosmic time? It’s a fraction of a blink, basically.
And I am reminded: all of the hopes and joys and griefs and sadnesses we carry, the tangled universes of our interior selves—all of these things are temporary, too. Miniscule blinks in a cosmic intake of breath.
How can something be both infinitely large but also infinitely small, we wonder? That’s how.
I spent the night before the eclipse at my parents’ place, with my nieces. In the morning we had pancakes for breakfast, and then made a bonfire outside and burned up all of the twigs and wood that had been waiting over the winter. I pulled the sunflower stalks out of our wildflower bed and fed them to the fire as well.
In the early afternoon, my sister and brother-in-law came out, and we set up chairs on the lawn and got our glasses ready. The day had started out cloudy and we were all half-expecting the eclipse to be a no-show, but by the middle of the afternoon there were pockets of sun in the clouds and we could see glimpses of the partially eclipsed sun through our glasses.
When my other sister drove in and joined us a little while later, the sky had darkened and the temperature had dropped. I sat and watched as a kind of unusual colour sank over everything—I had been waiting for the platinum-hued grasses of Annie Dillard’s famed essay, “Total Eclipse”, which will forever be my favourite piece of nonfiction, but the most I seemed to feel was a faint reddish tinge, as though we were all watching some distant cosmic bonfire, lit by a fire that sat a million miles away.
Then Baily’s Beads came, and suddenly totality was upon us.
I can’t see anything! my niece said, from behind us.
Take off your glasses! my sister told her.
And there we were, the group of us, surrounded by darkness and looking up at the sky. The moon was blocking the sun, and it was like twilight all around us, and the birds had gone silent. My Sitkapants was either weirded out by the eclipse or weirded out by how much family time we were having—outside, no less!—and wouldn’t leave my side.
Hold on, I heard myself saying. You get less than two minutes of this. Make sure that you remember it FOREVER.
Which is of course a perfect way to ensure that you forget things almost as soon as they’re upon you. Hold on tight, and that thing you’re holding will just become sand sliding through your fingers.
I traveled to Boston the week before the eclipse, both to celebrate Jess’s 42nd birthday with her family and to do some research at the Hayden Planetarium. As it happened, I managed to squeeze in a presentation to a class at MIT while I was in town. (I never in a million years would have thought I’d get to talk about fairy tales and disabiliy at MIT, of all places, but here we are!)
I also got to visit with some friends who live in the city proper (and in the suburbs just outside of it) in addition to my time with Jess’s family, so all in all it was a wonderful trip.
At the planetarium, I saw the documentary “Deep Sky”, about the making and launching of the JWST. I cried, which was okay because a number of the scientists interviewed for the film also cried in the course of it.
It’s just so enormous, isn’t it. What we can do, what we can be, what we can reach for and uncover if we work hard enough. This big, beautiful universe in which we find ourselves. This big, beautiful planet on which we find ourselves. We look up to the sky and wonder is anyone else out there when what I think we sometimes forget is that there’s already so much life right here. So many species and people and beloved fluffy dogs, so many children and elders and flowers and trees. So much. So. Much.
We are surrounded by wonder every day, even as we work and struggle and grieve and hack our way through research trips with niggling coughs and runny noses.
I don’t think I actually took the totality phot that sits at the top of this entry. I thought I did, initially, but when I look back through my photos it looks like it came from my sister—we all exchanged photos in a flurry after the eclipse was over.
One minute you’re sitting there, in the daytime dark, and the next minute the “diamond ring effect” is once more on full display and that’s it, that’s your cue to put your eclipse glasses back on.
That moment, though. That moment when the dark disk of the moon splintered away into brilliance, that diamond peeking out from the bottom right-hand of the disk, pulling the light back into the day.
I can’t describe it except to say that when the light broke through, that diamond glare of something pulling the world as we knew it back into place, it was as though something unimaginable had happened. And it happened so quickly that even as I saw it, even as I heard myself say wow, oh wow, and heard my sister a few chairs away echoing, COOL!, I felt myself spinning away into the future, grasping for it, watching the diamond blink away as more of the sun came into view, and then we were seconds out from it, already, and the diamond was gone and the partially eclipsed sun was back and I wondered if any of it had been real.
Sometimes my friendship with Jess feels like that. Something so perfect and otherworldly and impossible I second-guess myself, wonder if all of it was a dream.
Did I really have that? I ask myself. Even for a little while? Was it real? Was I ever really that lucky?
And of course the answer is yes: yes, you did have that. You still have that—and so does she.
Eclipses are at once impossible and extraordinary and also entirely normal. Regular. Routine. There are 2.8 eclipses a year, on average, which means that in the 230 million years it takes for the Sun to orbit around the centre of the Milky Way, there will be over 640 million eclipses.
We, in our impossibly small little lives, are the blips of light that come and go and disappear.
After totality, the partially eclipsed sun felt like a letdown. (In her essay, Dillard also notices this—when the light comes back, everyone begins to gather their things and head back their cars, even though the partially eclipsed sun was what brought Dillard and her fellow watchers out early on that mountainside in the first place.) My nieces headed back inside shortly after this, as did everyone else, electing to watch TV videos of totality in other parts of the country instead.
I stayed outside until it ended anyway, almost an hour later, watching the eclipsed part of the sun get smaller and smaller. It was so strange to me that this something which had been so spectacular only a few minutes before now felt ordinary, like any other sun we might see on any given day. Everything was different and everything was the same.
Somewhere in my head I was already calculating what I would need to travel to the 2044 eclipse in Vancouver.
Twenty-two whole years from now. What other universes might happen between now and then?
Eventually the moon became a sliver against the sun and then no sliver at all, careening along on its usual orbit around the planet, eclipsed in turn by the sun’s bright light. I went back inside and we ate dinner. I told my nieces we would travel to the eclipse in 2044 together.
Eclipse trip! they shouted. Who knows if they’ll remember twenty-two years from now.
(They will. I’ll remind them. I’ll be that insufferably uncool auntie who sends them an eclipse countdown every year.)
Then eventually everyone left altogether; back to home and bed and school and work and the ups and downs of our regular lives.
And the sun shone on, and the moon continued its journey through the sky, and everything was normal and extraordinary, just as it has always been every day we’ve been spinning through space.
Currently Reading: Bad Cree, by Jessica Johns
Currently Watching: The Regime (Kate Winslet is fantastic, not that that’s a surprise)
Currently Eating: Bon Appétit’s Butter Chicken, except without chicken and with halloumi instead. 15/10! Definitely recommend!
Currently Listening: Total Eclipse of the Heart, by Bonnie Tyler (I mean, what else)
Very enjoyable! Thanks, Amanda!