the path of totality

anticipating the eclipse

Solar Eclipse, Howard Russell Butler, 1918

On this day in 648 BC, parts of Greece experienced a total solar eclipse. The moon moved between sun and earth, gods made night of day, and the poets wrote, After this, men can believe anything, expect anything.

I have been living steeped in expectation. 

I have never seen a total eclipse, but for years now, when I have thought of my future, I have thought of this: the narrow strip on the earth's surface where the total eclipse can be observed—the path of totality. 

I have been just outside this path and seen a partial eclipse: Pregnant and astonished on a hillside in 2017, I felt the graveyard hush, a melancholy graying of the world. But Annie Dillard says "Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him," and I believe her.  

A few years ago, someone I love asked what experiences I'd like to have, and I wrote it down like a mantra: totality. I can’t say exactly why I want this. Maybe I want the stars themselves. Maybe transcendence. Maybe I just want the whole of something. 

I searched for when the next total solar eclipse would cross North America, where I live. I wrote April 8, 2024 in green ink on an index card and pinned it to the cork board above my writing desk. This was years ago. I began painting eclipses and birds in flight—bluebirds crossing black circles and starlings speckled with tiny eclipses on their winter plumage.  

I collected eclipses like a bowerbird—ancient descriptions, daguerreotypes, poetry, paintings. I turned to Shakespeare and Hamlet's sky, sick almost to doomsday with eclipse. I kept lines in my heart from the Book of Matthew about night coming over the land. I compiled and categorized, with great love, records of fear and wonder and awe. Years passed. 

A few weeks ago, I laid down my head and drifted, dreaming only for a moment. I woke with vivid images of herons, pomegranates, and the eclipsed sun. The date on the cork board above my writing desk—April 8, 2024—is now days away.

Sketch of Eclipse with Herons and Pomegranates, Lindsey Trout Hughes, 2024

As the date approaches, I’ve been thinking about something I witnessed a few winters ago. I watched starlings fill an apple tree, pick clean the fleshy fruit, and leave hollow skins clinging to the branches. A gibbous moon behind them in the sky, the birds slipped right into the apple skins, iridescent life climbing whole into husks. One starling disappeared completely into a ruby hull. 

Starlings are not a native species here in New York. In 1890, an amateur ornithologist imported and released them in Central Park, motivated by a desire to introduce to America every bird mentioned in the plays of William Shakespeare. Sturnus vulgaris, common starling, little star. 

This winter, I walked to the apple tree to see if I'd witness it again—the birds climbing into the round skins of the fruit, the moon low in the sky. But the apples were gone entirely, and the birds, too. Not a single starling on a single branch. Absence shapes how we see. At night, I dream of trees full of feathers and little stars. I dream of naming what I love before it disappears.

Total Eclipse of the Sun, Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, 1882

I have been anticipating absence. I have been thinking about eclipses and starlings, living bathed in anticipation, my skin humming, and I haven’t known how to find balance—how to carry future fullness, past disappearances, and presence with whatever is.  

What helps is this: A passage from

Pádraig Ó Tuama

’s In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World that I have been reading aloud daily: 

"To greet sorrow today does not mean that sorrow will be there tomorrow. Happiness comes too, and grief, and tiredness, disappointment, surprise and energy. Chaos and fulfillment will be named as well as delight and despair. This is the truth of being here, wherever here is today. It may not be permanent but it is here. I will probably leave here, and I will probably return. To deny here is to harrow the heart. Hello to here."

Today I will go north, the furthest north I have ever been, to place myself in the path of totality. There are articles, books, and eyewitness accounts about what those of us in totality can expect, but I know better.

All of this gathering—I have become a meadow of the unknown, preparing for bewilderment, and everything is nearly in bloom. Ornithologists at Cornell are readying themselves to study the effects of the eclipse on birds. Will the starlings return to their roosts? Will there be a dawn chorus as the sun reemerges? Now, greeting here means greeting uncertainty. 

Today, I'll go north. On Monday, tree leaves will become pinhole cameras, and the shadows they cast will become unfamiliar. We will live, briefly, in a strange and crescent-dappled world. I will be at the edge of a lake in the Adirondack Mountains. I will be with those who have gathered in the past to look at the sky. I will be with those beside me and the ones to come. Together, we will wait. The moon will become a haloed saint, and we will watch the sky slip from its fixtures, a theatrical backdrop giving way, perhaps, to something more true.