WORDS OF AWE FOR AN ECLIPSE
By Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent

WASHINGTON -- After reading so much news of the solar eclipse earlier this month, I longed to experience it. Alas, as an old handbook puts it, "To witness a total eclipse of the Sun is a privilege that comes to but few people."

What I read didn't seem to give me a truly significant picture of what transpired in the brief period that the moon moved between the Earth and the sun and cast a shadow across Europe.

The commentary that accompanied most of what I read or heard reported on television was banal at best. I sensed something far more powerful was at work than was reported.

I had once viewed a partial eclipse of the sun from a Northeastern U.S. beach, but that day was badly overcast and it seemed simply as if a dark cloud had passed overhead to obscure the dawn. Most of us who rose earlier to trudge to that shore were under-awed.

Last week I watched one lengthy television report on the Discovery Channel. My teenaged son exclaimed when the program began, "Let's not watch this!"

"Wait, wait," I encouraged, pulling the remote from his hands.

They were calling August 1999's eclipse the "last eclipse of the millennium." The August 11th eclipse cut a swath of shadow across the heart of Europe, which made it one of the most accessible eclipses to human observers in history.

My 13-year-old and his 10-year-old brother were soon engrossed by the documentary, and before long they were telling me everything they had learned in school about eclipses. Eclipses have that effect on people; they are intriguing and spellbinding.

From the TV program my boys learned many people spend thousands of dollars to chase the sun around the world just to experience the one- to three-minute mystery of darkness in the middle of the day. There were expensive excursions and sea-going cruises booked especially for people who wanted to be in the zone of totality on August 11.

The words of Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" rang in my ears as we watched: "You flew your Learjet up to Nova Scotia to see the total eclipse of the sun. . . ."

What attracts humans to these rare three-minute episodes?

Lacking both Learjet and thousands of dollars, my chasing of the eclipse of the sun must come from television, newspapers -- and literature.

Yes, literature.

They're still a bit young to appreciate it, but one day I will encourage my sons to read Annie Dillard's classic essay, "Total Eclipse."

Ostensibly a piece about a phenomenon of nature, this roughly 5000-word piece in which the wonder of mystery and the triumph of the irrational are being probed is the true topic of Dillard's personal account of her travels with her husband to view a 1979 total eclipse of the sun.

Consider Dillard's description of the peak moment:

". . . the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer's platinum print. This color has never been seen on earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. . . . The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills' grasses were finespun metal which the wind laid down."

I looked in vain for such descriptions in the newspapers the day after last week's eclipse.

I found instead some variation of television's cliché sound-bites:

"It was neat."

"It was weird."

"It was awesome."

Eclipses have intrigued writers from the beginning of civilization, largely because of the fears they invoke. The ancient Chinese thought the sun was being devoured by a dragon and fired arrows into the sky to drive the demon away.

Many older cultures believed the eclipse to be a warning of a natural disaster such as an earthquake or a devastating storm. Ironically, the August 17, 1999, earthquake that devastated parts of Turkey and killed thousands occurred just a few days after the August 11th eclipse of the sun, and the shadow of totality had passed through Turkey.

Whether one chooses to call it superstition or correlation, eclipses can stir the soul.

Another famous author, Virginia Wolff, wrote of an "astonishing moment" that was an eclipse in 1927 and captured that stirring:

"There was no color. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment; and the next when as if a ball had rebounded, the cloud took color on itself again; and so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down and suddenly raised up when the colors came."

Science has improved our knowledge of eclipses, but it and our journalistic banalities have robbed us of some of the awe and mystery. Then, again, this month's contiguous events in Turkey may stir our obeisance once more.

On reflection, Y2K seems a trivial disturbance in the mix of the universe.

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Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net