My wife, son, and I went to Burlington, VT to see the eclipse on Monday. I’d wanted to see a total eclipse for decades (and I had this particular one in mind for thirty years, ever since my teenage self discovered it would be geographically close to where I might be living in 2024).
I expected to be awed but I was somewhat unprepared for the actual event. Having seen annuar eclipses before, I expected a more dramatic version of that, with more darkness and perhaps a glimpse of the corona through my eclipse glasses.
What I somehow did not process until the moment came: that I could safely remove the glasses for three minutes during totality and see the corona with my naked eye. I watched the moon darken the sun, and through my glasses I could see nothing at that point… so I took them off to look around the landscape, and that was when I noticed the glow in the sky. And I looked, and it was genuinely startling. That gorgeous silver-white corona around the black sphere, in a dark sky with an orange horizon: no photo I’ve seen captures the in-person effect of that silver-white light.
It’s like trying to take a photo of the full moon, and the photo always kind of sucks and does it no justice. The eclipse and its corona were like that. There was an otherworldly sense of, “I can’t believe I’m actually seeing this in the sky right now. This is real.”
The other remarkable detail (among many, but still) was the seagull reaction. We were watching from the edge of Lake Champlain, and during totality, dozens of seagulls freaked the hell out. They flew in chaotic masses, crying out in alarm over the water. The day after, I pictured the gulls forming a new proto-religion based on their experience, and every time one of them flew overhead and cried out, I imagined they were shrieking, “Repent! Repent!”
I won’t get into any deep discussion of the spiritual impact of the eclipse, except to say that even knowing the basic science, and knowing the event wasn’t some kind of cartoon magic from a higher power, it was a moment when any rationalism v. belief argument felt more wrongheaded than ever. There’s no full explanation for what happened in my brain during those three minutes. And anyone insisting that science can definitively explain my subconscious’s reaction to that event is as literal-minded as any fundamentalist, and as naive as those seagulls.
In other words, it was a moment of knowing I really don’t understand the full nature of anything, and I was totally OK with being overwhelmed by my own naiveté.