4/9 It is getting darker in the middle of the day, first hardly noticeable, then faster and faster. There is no apparent reason for it, since without the special glasses, you wouldn’t even realize that it is the sun itself getting progressively hidden. Even with the glasses, it is unclear that this pacman-like munching away at the sun has any significance for the daylight around you. – It is not just getting darker, but also increasingly strange, since the position of the light source has not changed. It is not near the horizon, casting long shadows, and its color does not change, it is not evening light, but muted daylight. – In the last few seconds before totality, as you check whether you can now take off the glasses, because there’s only such a tiny orb of sun left, you realize that you can’t, because that tiniest of tiny orbs still floods you with a kind of molten metal of light.

Totality happening is then like a switch. Not just the sun getting switched off, the corona getting switched on, the sky getting switched to night mode and the planets getting switched on, it is actually like reality getting switched inside out. – The clarity of this thing in the sky alone is surprising. My vision isn’t the clearest, I see stars a little fuzzed out, I squint when making things out in the distance, but this thing in the sky defies all of that, it is of otherworldly clarity and definition.

You may be naive enough to try, but you will not be able to take a picture of it, and neither of your surroundings. They all turn out wrong – wrong lighting, wrong focus, don’t capture anything of those minutes at all.

The end of totality is once again confounding, because the sunlight shoots out through the tiniest orb with completely overwhelming intensity. This is just like, again, a molten kind of superconducting metal hitting your eyes instantly and you better be quick putting the glasses back on. 

All of this seems, of course, so remarkable because we are not used to it. Imagine someone who had never seen the usual 24-hour cycle of day and night, how overwhelming and how much of an endless wonder that would be. Makes you wonder if and how it might be possible to unlock, to gain access to the qualities of the things around us that are hidden by their commonality.

It is a natural reaction to call this beautiful, the thing in the sky is indeed a marvel to watch, you don’t want to take your eyes off of it. It’s intricate, filigrane, radiating, and apparently governing the entire world, a kind of inverted kingdom with bizarre rules yet to be proclaimed.

Bizarre is a good word. Apart from, and entwined with all its beauty, the thing also looked like a weird anemone to me, waving its tentacles mockingly, a monstrance, and even a fratze staring from the sky like a medieval jester. J says the moment reminded her of the strangeness when somebody has just died.

So you wonder why you’re one of those – certainly in the minority among people – who actively seek out such events and try to experience them, as often as possible. Is it the sheer craving for the rush, like parachute jumping, roller coasting or good sex, amplified here by the rarity and the amount of effort and a lot of luck required to actually get it? All of these are, obviously, examples of our desire to tug at our confines, and move beyond them.