Annie Dillard saw an eclipse and it broke her mind. Before reading this piece I could have described to you the mechanics of an eclipse, it would have been science based and void of any possible neurosis inducing language. If I had not read this piece in its entirety, I would have accused Annie Dillard of melodrama and would have missed the rich inner worlds of a momentary mental breakdown. I would have never understood that as, "A piece of the sun was missing; in its place we saw empty sky."(pg.286) so was the eclipsing of the world she knew, the world that flew away from her as fast as the eclipse hit.
Dillard takes us with her, she sets the scene and tone of what we were going to get slammed with poetically, "This was the Yakima valley...It extended south into the horizon, a distant dream of a valley, a Shangri-la."(pg.286) I can almost feel the cold wind whipping around, her writing directing me to this almost mythical gathering, "It looked as though we were scattered on hilltops at dawn to sacrifice virgins, make rain, set stone stelae in rings. There was no place out of the wind. The straw grasses banged our legs."(pg.286) Her view of this setting is intimate and internal, she feels her position on the mountain - the wind and the silent reverence. It left me with an slight eeriness - something otherworldly was about to take place.
"From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching...It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk...The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed."(pg. 288) My body physically reacted to this part of the story, I could feel her dread. Watching this event recalled a primitive memory, a past life watching an extraordinary event with no sense of science; only the realization that you are small watching a very big thing happen - a black disk moving over the sun. The lid of her rational, perceiving mind closed at the inability to connect this real event, it looked like nothing any of us could have ever read. It amazed me how she was able to place me so tangibly close to the terror of this natural occurrence with just a few words, "The hatch in the brain slammed."
With all of this, Annie Dillard, saved the wallop, for a later paragraph but allowed herself the moment to take in the unnatural sight of a world without the light of the sun; it was as simple as the sentence, "We got the light wrong."(pg. 288) You at once understood what it was like to stand in a world in where something as simple as lighting was wrong, it messed up the natural order of coloring our minds need to resemble order and rightness-silver, she described, the world was colored like
dead silver like a , "...photographer's platinum print."(pg. 287) But her mind could not reconcile or leave alone the ghastly world in which the eclipse left them in, she looks at her partner, "The sight of him, familiar and wrong, was something I was remembering from centuries hence, from the other side of death: yes, that is the was he used to look, when we were living." (pg.288) and here is the best sentence, "When it was our generation's turn to be alive." This for me was chilling, in all of its prophetic foresight - maybe this is the shadow world we will all turn into after death. Absolutely devastating. I am with her shadow among shadows walking in another dimension of existence where color and light are non-existent. In the light of our eclipsed non-existent life.
This next piece is what convinced me of Annie Dillard's existential mind brake, "What I saw, what I seemed to be standing in, was all the wrecked light that the memories of the dead could shed upon the living world. We had all died in our boots on the hilltops of Yakima, and we were alone in eternity."(pg. 290) Walloped, I stared at that sentence and was convinced Annie Dillard opened the curtain and chilled me with the stark truth of what lurked on the other side. The cold inevitability of lifelessness.
Her genius in this story is how she crystallizes the moment between the extraordinary and ordinary, disclosing to us a very human trait - our brains map towards its most simplest route - the obvious. "When the sun appeared as a blinding bead on the ring's side, the eclipse was over...We were born and bored at a stroke." (pg. 293) A perfect way to end a crazy ride, it ended and we went home.
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