4/10 Just for the record, I feel deeply ashamed about what I wrote yesterday and the only reason I’m putting it out there is because that’s the rule for this blog. I wanted to show it to a few fellow eclipse watchers, wanted to copy it to Threads, but can’t get myself to, it is just too embarassing. You’d think I’d be beyond that by now. – And so I did copy it to Threads, based on the experience that when I am most convinced I am making a fool of myself, that is when often something actually good happens. And if I’m wrong, what does that even matter.

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.

4/8 A solar eclipse must be one of the things where seeing a picture of it and seeing the actual thing has the furthest possible distance. We made it, we did it, we drove four hours almost all the way to New Hampshire and had clear skies. A multitude of thoughts which I will have to try and organize tomorrow.

4/7 The models are now showing clouds rolling in from the west tomorrow, so all we need to do is get as far east as we can. Two and a half hours of driving should be enough to get us to Newport, VT, outrunning all the clouds. I’m only worried about the small roads that lead there, and whether a state of emergency will be declared, causing all those roads to be closed.

4/6 J drives me through Plattsburgh, and it is almost calming to recognize the actual structure of a city in it, which wasn’t the case last time, when I only saw two or three roads. And by actual structure of a city I mean: Duckburg. That mysterious structure which I saw in Walt Disney as a child, and now remember. In America I see that which is typical, but I still have almost no sense for the atypical, in Europe it is the other way round.

4/5 Adirondacks, Plattsburgh. Three and a half hours, we drive into a room made of unstructured clouds in which it is wet and cold, it snowed just a few days ago. It is the tiniest of areas on the maps, and the certainty with which the models predict it to be clear and warm on Monday throws the mind into some disbelief.

4/4 From today onward I have more weather models on my phone than the average newspaper article is based on. Plattsburgh looking better and better for Monday, the models are converging. Apart from that, insane amounts of work, and exhaustion.

4/3 Two difficult customer situations at the same time. Sort of my nightmare. Plus little sleep.

4/2 Difficult customer engagement, but solved it pretty well. Newburgh in the evening. Writing group. At half of our meetings we don’t talk about writing at all, but tonight, for example, plate tectonics.

4/1 A flat impenetrable layer of clouds, blueish-grey, lies over the Hudson southward, and in front of my window it has a sharp edge where it borders on nothing but clear evening sky, with the edges of the clouds illuminated in ocre light. This edge of the cloud ceiling forms a wide curve, which makes it even more obvious that there’s some kind of cold or warm front separating the one area from the other. And it moves south slowly, or in other words, the sky clears. I think how this, for me, gigantic bay of a cloud beach must be a tiny detail when seen from an airplane or perhaps a satellite, and then how structures like this must be forming, on slightly different space and time scales, every moment in the river below, and the kitchen sink to my right.