Long ago, when I first decided I wanted to see a total solar eclipse, I planned to do so in romantic solitude. Is all remade? From a bay tree, struck into existence a moment ago, a songbird, a white-spectacled bulbul, called a greeting to the new dawn. I’m not a person of faith, but even so, the sun’s reappearance as the moon drew away seemed like the first line of Genesis retold. It leapt and burned, unthinkably fierce and bright, something absurdly like a word. From the lower edge of the blank, black disk of the dead sun burst a perfect point of brilliance. I stared up at the hole in the sky and then at the figures around me, and became gripped by the conviction that my life was over that I was kneeling in the underworld in the company of all the shades of the dead. Your mind can’t grasp any of it: not the dark, nor the sunset clouds on the horizon, nor the stars just that extraordinary wrongness, up there, that pulls the eyes toward it. Totality - that point of a solar eclipse when the sun is entirely covered by the moon - is incomprehensible. I fell to my knees, feeling tiny and huge, and as lonely as I’ve ever been, but also astonishingly close to the crowds around me. My heart jumped up to my throat, and my eyes grew hot with tears. In March 2006, I stood on a crowded beach in Turkey and waited until, at the allotted time, with a chorus of screams and cheers and whistles and applause, the sun slid away, and impossibly, impossibly, we saw above us a stretch of black sky and in the middle of it a hole, blacker than anything I’d ever seen, fringed with a ring of soft white fire.
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