I:
We returned yesterday evening—my wife, my son, my dog, and myself—from Noblesville, Indiana, roughly two hours to our south, whither we had gone the night before so that we could watch the solar eclipse from a vantage in the path of totality. It was, as scarcely needs saying, a glorious and uncanny sight. We found a pleasant grassy slope where we could station ourselves among the flowering pear trees, watch the procession of the moon across the face of the sun through lenses of black polymer infused with carbon, and then witness three and a half minutes of perfect solar occlusion. It is an indescribable phenomenon, needless to say, though I have tried to describe it in the past. I think the feature of the experience I had most thoroughly forgotten was the sheer suddenness with which the darkness fell and the temperature dropped by several degrees. So long as even the thinnest crescent of the unobscured sun was still visible, the day was reasonably bright and warm, even if the light was subtly acquiring strange and strangely elusive hues; but when only a pale white corona remained around the black disc of the moon, it was as if late twilight had come, though twilight of an altogether unearthly color. The birds all at once fell silent, with the exception of one rebel cardinal somewhere among the pear-blossoms; the sky was a soft glassy blue through which a scattering of stars could be seen; the air had acquired a slight but distinct chill. And, as had happened before, I felt a peculiar serenity come over me, and even a kind of elation—I think because, for those few minutes, I felt as if I had slipped over into some other, more mysteriously beautiful, somehow timeless world. One thing about the experience, however, was new: the sight of the sun swallowed up in the absolute, impenetrable darkness of the moon’s silhouette brought to my mind the final lines of the first chapter of the Daodejing, which speak of the one source of all things as an abyss of mystery that is also a gateway into the essence of things.
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