Excerpt from Dillard’s Total Eclipse
[The paragraph below comes from Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard. The eclipse next May 20 will be annular, not total, so there will be no screaming.]
The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1,800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed—1,800 miles an hour. It was 195 miles wide. No end was in sight—you saw only an edge. It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it. Seeing it, and knowing it was coming straight for you, was like felling a slug of anesthetic shoot up your arm. If you think very fast, you may have time to think, “Soon it will hit my brain.” You can feel the deadness race up you arm; you can feel the appalling, inhuman speed of you own blood. We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit.
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G.
October 21, 2011
Our ancestors, who saw portents in these things, may have been wiser in their generation than we are in ours.
Vader
October 21, 2011
As Hugh Nibley once pointed out, science has proven admirably effective at elucidating the composition and properties of the props and lighting. They haven’t a clue what the play is about.
S.P. Bailey
October 21, 2011
That Nibley image is a hit, a very palpable hit.
Bookslinger
October 21, 2011
I just had a counterposing image in my mind: A similar speed wall of light moving across the earth at the Second Coming.
Will we “abide the day” or will we burn to ashes like a vampire at daylight.
G.
October 24, 2011
Books,
if some LDS poet doesn’t work that up into a decent poem, talent is not in us.