Lost in Totality:

Samuel Johnson

   I have a hard enough time imagining four million people, let alone four million people traveling to see a total eclipse of the sun. That was the number projected to be on the move during the eclipse of April 8, 2024, over a hundred thousand of them expected to descend on northern Vermont, where my wife and I happen to live and which happened to lie in the “path of totality” for this eclipse.

We certainly intended to see it, weather permitting, and equipped ourselves with the special glasses that would enable us to do so without damage to our eyes. But I couldn’t imagine traveling even a hundred miles to watch the event—or why it should be any more thrilling to me than, say, the sight of two bluebirds returning to their box across the road from our kitchen or the first blossoms on the lilac bush outside our bedroom window. Yet four million people seemed to think otherwise, which begs the question of what might be the matter with them, or, alternately, what might be the matter with me.

That’s a fairly constant question, when you think about it: how to evaluate the movements of the human herd, how to position yourself in relation to whatever’s trending in the world at large. It may be that the herd has sensed the location of a food source you haven’t detected; it may also be that the herd is stampeding toward disaster—hardly the case with a solar eclipse, granted, but true enough in any number of instances where a person wonders if “the problem” is with “them” or “me.” The question may be especially acute in our culture because of two pervasive and not always harmonious influences: that of democracy, with its implicit belief in the wisdom of the majority, and that of Christianity, with its founder’s warning that “broad is the way that leads to destruction.”

Of course, it’s probably wisest, as a general rule, to assume that nothing is necessarily the matter with anyone, that different people are simply drawn to different things. In my own case, big events almost never draw me from home. I have authored a few books and done “author events” that I’m happy to have people attend, though I can’t be miffed at those who don’t, and I rarely go to author events myself. It seems to me that the best any author has to offer is in her book, so what need in hunting for a parking space or catching a cold just to say you’ve met the author and she wasn’t as impressive in person as in prose?

Part of this reluctance might be lethargy; much of it is definitely a dislike of crowds. I’ve always preferred going to a place where not many people are going. Cities I don’t mind; millions of people moving to and fro about their business never feels like a crowd. Once they start massing along a parade route, however, I’m on my way out of town. If I have to look for a good spot to lay my beach blanket, I’m inclined to keep walking along the beach. In fact, the only beaches I’m likely to visit are too rocky and cold to permit any widespread lying down. Though I loved and in some cases still love some of the bands that performed at Woodstock in 1969, when I was a mere and more adventurous 16 years old, I didn’t wish I could go there then and have never wished that I’d gone there since. By the time we got to Woodstock we were half a million strong—a figure that makes me less desirous of getting back to the Garden than of getting as far from Yasgur’s farm as a full tank of gas will carry me. To say nothing of four million strong.

Some of my aversion to big events may have to do with pride, and if so, then one of the least attractive kinds of pride: the refusal to be impressed. That studied aloofness from anything that might be deemed popular. But I seldom care if my tastes are “common”: I don’t hesitate to say that I love the French Impressionists, however middlebrow that may sound, or that among so many more critically acclaimed masterpieces John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” remains one of my favorite things. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve never gotten much from Wallace Stevens or read more than a few pages of Proust. If I’m proud of anything, it’s my willingness to enjoy what more sophisticated types affect to find beneath them.

As for my stubborn insistence on maintaining Dr. Johnson’s famous distinction between a thing worth seeing and a thing worth going to see—I suppose I’m a little proud of that too. To my mind, the things most worth going to see are not “once-in-a-lifetime” spectacles but objects that can be seen at any time—the ocean, an elephant, a city that’s a thousand years old—though it might take some trouble to get there and I might not be able to get there for a while.

Going to some big, once-in-a-lifetime event may feel like going on a pilgrimage, with all the meretricious connotations of the word, but seems to me a different thing entirely. It’s the pilgrimage that’s supposed to be once in a lifetime, not the pilgrim’s destination. Were I a Muslim I’d be obliged to make my pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in my life, but I could put it off for as long as Mecca and I both stood. Probably I’d be holding out for when the mullahs allowed the faithful to make their hajj in the off season.

I’ve sometimes wondered what I’d have done had I lived in Palestine at the time of Jesus or in northern India at the time the Buddha taught. Rumor reaches me of a man who speaks like no other man has spoken, who changes people’s lives after a single encounter, who in the one case is reputed to heal the sick simply by a word or touch and in the other to renounce the countless miracles he is nonetheless able to perform. If either figure were to pass through my village, I would surely come to the window, I might even descend to the street. If special glasses were required to gaze safely upon his radiance, I’d equip myself with a pair. But would I strap on sandals and shoulder my pack, or saddle my donkey if I had one, and take to the road with all its dust and dangers? Would I hope to discern the odor of sanctity amid the stench of the adoring, hysterical crowds?

I’m convinced that only desperation would have drawn me to the holy man’s side, a sufferer’s sense of “one last chance,” which suggests that my homebound contentment may not necessarily be a virtue. In other words, the Christian inclination to pick the narrow pass over the broad way is not always Christian—just as the knee-jerk impulse to join the mob is not always democratic. In still other words, the main thing the matter with me may be precisely the fact that nothing is so much the matter in my life as to move me out of the zone of my bourgeois comforts. It’s my privilege as much as my preference to stay put.

These musings about going to see—or in my imaginary case, not going to see—holy figures are apt here in that I suspect more than a few eclipse tourists were searching for religious ecstasy, or rather for an acceptable substitute. They wished to have a religious experience without its being religious. That is not so hard to do, I imagine; what’s hard is expressing such a wish without sounding pathetic.

As when, for example, a person speaks in pantheistic raptures about his reverence for the Earth and his affinity for all things cosmic even as he spews carbon into the atmosphere driving to witness a rare astrophysical event. (The estimated amount of carbon emissions from eclipse-related travel in 2024 is put at 587,400 tons.) Wouldn’t a more genuine pagan piety have insisted on staying home? Then again, might the Earth receive more benefit if the travelers came home in a more “pious,” which is to say, more cosmically conscious state of mind? If there’s a simple answer that covers both those questions, you won’t find it here.

* * *

   My father worked with a man who recounted how his older brother used to torment him when they were young. As a child the man was obsessed with fire trucks, squealing with delight whenever he saw one, which he might have done more often had his brother not developed the habit of clamping a hand over the younger boy’s eyes as they sat in the backseat of the family car and shouting, “Look, there goes a fire truck!” Some of these alleged sightings were doubtless made up, but a kid has no way of knowing for sure with his eyes covered, which I suppose was part of the torment.

I’ve heard of worse abuse between siblings, but for psychological insight in the service of sadism this one ranks high. A dread of “missing out” seems to be hardwired into the human brain—and may be all the more acute in a world where so much goes whizzing by us, fire trucks and Twitter posts, where the “wingéd life” of which Blake spoke flies at supersonic speed. Advertising, too, has conditioned us to believe in the unique opportunity that will never come again. Good while supplies last. You snooze, you lose.

As the day of the eclipse drew closer, the hype intensified. People on the radio choked up speaking of their last experience of totality. Even the scientists began sounding less like data mongers than groupies before a rock concert. Something spectacular was coming our way that we dared not miss. It was our only chance at intimacy with a star.

The need to take hold of such a chance seems especially irresistible in the case of some spectacle, be it the execution of a notorious criminal or a prodigy in the sky. Twenty thousand people are estimated to have witnessed the last public execution held in the United States, the hanging of Rainey Bethea for rape in 1936. (Allegedly, he’d also robbed and murdered his victim, but in the hurry to get the black man hanged he was tried for rape alone.) Think of what the world might be if people were as zealous not to miss a chance of doing good as not to miss a good (or macabre) show. That’s not to suggest that the first impulse doesn’t exist. Following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, some 74,000 people from around the country volunteered for Red Cross training in disaster relief. That’s a lot of people, roughly the same number as will fit into the Superdome for a football game—but only a 50^th of the multitude who traveled to see the eclipse, some of them willing to pay ten times the usual charge for a room at a Nevada Super 8. Excepting the need to escape disaster oneself, only the deep-seated fear of missing out will tolerate that level of inflation. It’s almost as if, by not missing some once-in-a-lifetime event, a person can miss the once-in-a-lifetime event of his own demise.

I wonder if it was lust that moved Peeping Tom to spy on Lady Godiva so much as not wanting to miss what he could never see again: the sight of his queen riding naked through the streets. The irony is that he failed to see her, not only because he was struck blind at the instant of his transgression, but also because he was blind from the start. Had he been able to truly see her disrobed loveliness for what it was—an act of altruistic humiliation performed to relieve tax-burdened people like himself—would he have been able to peep? Maybe. Maybe he came to voyeurism through a cultivated refusal to see. We dread missing the unrepeatable event because we are missing such events every day of our lives, many of them taking place quite literally in our own backyards. Even before donning our dark glasses, we have already damaged our eyes.

* * *

   Not long before the day of the eclipse, my wife, Kathy, and I drove over the ridge that separates our town from one farther south and attended the memorial service for a man we had come to know in the last years of his life, after dementia had taken away most of his ability to speak. He was “the friend of a friend,” and our friend had asked if we might visit him in the nursing home where his distraught daughter, overwhelmed by the challenges of trying to care for him at home, had felt constrained to place him. So we visited him now and again, taking him for rides and bringing him to our house. The visits became more spotty once Covid hit and ran in successive waves through the facility. Still, we were regarded as among his most faithful visitors, a rather low bar for faithfulness if you ask me, perhaps too low to justify our attendance at the memorial service. But we worried our bereaved friend would find herself desolately alone there, so we went mainly for her sake. The service, which would not be religious, was to be held in the town hall. We drove slowly into town so as not to miss the building; there were not likely to be enough parked cars to identify the place.

Though we arrived early, we had to park a good ways down the road. The hall was packed. Every minute brought new arrivals, many from the local community though others had traveled hundreds of miles. One by one for over an hour people came to the microphone to offer tearful tributes for what had been a wholesome, happy life lived close to the land and on the deceased’s own terms. The affection of those who knew him much longer than we had, and the admiration he’d inspired, were palpable. We were not surprised. We’d always sensed he was an exceptional man. The dementia that took his speech and eventually his physical function could not dampen his sensitive spirit, the way his eyes lit up whenever we showed him our gardens or read him a haiku.

But the number of those who came to the event did surprise us. I felt a little guilty thinking what I did, then a little less so after the service was over, when Kathy voiced the same question that was on my mind: “How many of these people came to visit B— even once during the years he was in the nursing home?” It couldn’t have been many. We always called ahead of time so as not to interrupt another visitor; except for our friend, there was seldom a conflict. As I recall, we never met another visitor coming as we were going or going just as we arrived. It was standing room only at the hall.

Having presided at funerals for a number of years, I shouldn’t have been struck by the contrast. I had seen some version of it many times. You can fill every pew in a large church for the funeral of someone who spent her final years in dismal isolation. And yet, to the person abandoned and then eulogized, what would have meant more, a few short visits when alive or a program of glowing tributes when dead? The answer seems obvious, but it’s the Final Event that always packs them in. It almost never works the other way around, few at the funeral but scores of visitors in the months before the death.

It’s not hard to see why. For one thing, the event is final, unrepeatable; there is not likely to be another. That old fear of missing the fire truck comes into play. For another, there are witnesses at a funeral; one’s non-attendance will be noticed and possibly remarked upon in ways that one’s absence from a nursing home will not. So one shows up, pays his respects, sheds his tears, and possibly gives a performance, all sincere enough if still a bit odd. It was naïve of us to worry we’d be the only ones at the service—just as it is naïve to think that by cultivating a wide circle of friends and acquaintances you will never have to face decrepitude and death alone. Even having a passel of kids is no guarantee.

I’m sorry that our departed acquaintance had to miss the eclipse, lover of science and nature that he was, though he might have missed it had he lived. Toward the end he probably wouldn’t have understood what was going on. It would have taken an effort to get him to look up at the sky or keep from pulling the dark glasses off his face if he did. In better times, though, he surely would have enjoyed it. Even after his dementia had made it hard for him to summon words, and even on an “ordinary” summer day, he would often open his arms joyously to a sky full of cumulous clouds. As a young man he’d ridden his bicycle back and forth across the continental United States, twice; but would he, if domiciled outside the path of totality, have traveled any distance to be within it? Does a man who would embrace the clouds need to see an eclipse?

* * *

   On the day before it happened, Kathy and I climbed to the top of the hayfield behind our house to stand where we planned to be sitting when the event took place. We needed to check the position of the sun. It was embarrassing to realize that neither of us was exactly sure of where it would be at this time of year and at that hour. You can lose track of the face of the sky as easily as you can any other familiar face. You see it everyday until you fail to see it. If the coming eclipse gave us nothing else, it refreshed our celestial bearings. It reminded us to pay closer attention to what is over our heads

Though we could also have seen the eclipse from our yard, the view from the crest of the hill afforded a better vista, including the wooded ridge beyond our house and the still-snow-capped peaks of New Hampshire’s White Mountains in the distance. We have always felt fortunate to have the advantage of that hayfield, though we don’t own it. Except if the grass is high or just after it’s been manured, we’re free to walk it whenever we feel like a brisk uphill climb. We often go snowshoeing there in winter. When our daughter was small, it was a good place to go sledding or fly kites. It’s one of those outdoor enclosures, like a well-appointed backyard or a neighborhood park, that evoke the word “lucky” every time you set foot there. That we could see something as grand as a solar eclipse almost literally in our backyard made us feel especially so.

The flipside of feeling lucky is feeling smug, a common temptation for those of us who live “close to nature.” Ditto for the self-employed or retired, the solvent, and the healthy—people like my wife and me. Those who speak of these conditions as “good for the soul” generally know little about the soul. They forget or else never knew the day-to-day tasks of the majority of their fellow human beings, what it’s like to drive to work and notice virtually nothing along the way, to rush home to start dinner, get the baby out of her car-seat and snowsuit, answer the phone that’s ringing the moment you walk through the door. These contingencies are no less good for the soul, though the poor soul sighs more often—and misses more detail—under their constraint. One of the clerks down at the post office told me he wasn’t sure he would get to see the eclipse, since he was scheduled to work when it happened, and the town center, surrounded by higher hills, might not afford him an unobstructed view.

So, yes, I would not bother to travel into the path of totality, but have I any right to look down on any sequestered drudge who would? If I’d just as soon see a bluebird as a total eclipse, do I remember that I never saw a bluebird until I started working for myself? Even after decades of working from home, I’m still not sure where the sun is at 3:30 on an April afternoon.

* * *

   We were the only ones on the hill when we walked to our spot just as the moon was taking its first small bite. I’d placed two lawn chairs there earlier in the day. We thought our nearest neighbors might join us, but they were probably at their jobs. We did hear some voices in the far distance, people also watching from home.

Conditions were perfect, a clear sky with a few embraceable clouds and temperatures in the fifties. We’d brought jackets in anticipation of the chill predicted when the eclipse reached totality. We carried water, and of course we brought our eclipse glasses, which blacked out every detail but the disappearing sun. We gazed upward with our glasses on, then removed the glasses to look at the rest of the landscape and the sky. Nothing we saw for most of the hour was any more remarkable than what we’d see on any other day, even less so with the glasses. The most remarkable thing was that we had taken time off from our list-driven schedules just to sit there and wait. We were being totally unproductive, the two of us, which is sometimes more moving than being mesmerized. We were at the place, in other words, where one doesn’t need to be mesmerized. I can get annoyed at people who talk during movies, a reason I seldom go to movies, but it was pleasant to watch and talk at the same time. We ought to take our lawn chairs there on other days, I thought; we ought to spend more time sitting and waiting for nature to reveal its slow progress, slower than the plot of any foreign film but never dull.

When the landscape began to darken, to take on the look of dusk, that was indeed remarkable, as was the rising chill. As someone who regularly works outdoors after dinner, especially in the summer to avoid the heat, I can’t say that I found “like dusk” any more stirring than dusk itself, though I also can’t say I was unimpressed by seeing the phenomenon at greater speed and at an unusual hour. I still don’t think I would have traveled to see it, but I might walk to see it if it happened as regularly as once a month.

With totality we were at last able to remove our glasses and look directly at the corona for a few minutes. I saw why totality was the prize, but not in the way I’d been led to expect. If asked to put what I saw in words, I would say that I was given a glimpse of the shameless modesty of nature. After hearing the broadcast reports of people spontaneously shouting or weeping at the sight, of having their lives changed forever, of sensing the ground moving up toward the sky, the sight of that small white circle was like the faintest blush. It put me in mind of when Thomas Merton asked Joan Baez to take off her socks because it had been so long since the monk had seen a woman’s bare feet. The corona was how I pictured the smile on her face when she obliged him, she thinking to herself “It’s only my feet” and he thinking “It’s only her feet—yet how different the world looks beside them!”

The same sense of modest revelation attended the walk Kathy and I took around the field and out to the road just as the sun was regaining its roundness. That sense of ordinary life returning—of never having left, really, only pretending to have left, like a peek-a-boo parent pretending to disappear—was nothing like the post-partum blues that can follow a “life-changing” event. If anything, I felt a mild exhilaration, both to have experienced the eclipse and to have it over and done with. We had seen the prodigy and now could go back to seeing everything else, including what was for dinner and the problematic junk of the now-useless glasses.

* * *

   A coda to the big event came in the form of two cars, each with two lost passengers, that pulled beside us as we walked back toward home, first one and in another few minutes the other, to ask directions. Both were from out of state; both parties had come to see the eclipse. One wanted to get back to the nearest town; the other wanted to drive to a town on the other side of Vermont. Apparently their journeys to the path of totality had led them out of the reach of their GPS signal and thus to another totality: that of being totally lost. How difficult it is for those of us who came of age with paper maps to comprehend the disorientation of younger people when their phones give out. I offered to run back to our house—we were not far away from it—to pull a road map from our car but immediately realized that I might as well have offered to kill them supper with a flint-tipped spear. So I did my best to send them to places where they would have signal and as straight a path as possible to their stated destinations.

It’s easy to disparage the digitally dependent, easier than disparaging the spectacle hounds, but sometimes we find praises hidden under the stones of our disparagement. In an age when nearly every experience is digitally mediated, of faceless chat rooms and bodiless cyber-sex, these four lost souls and their four million fellow travelers had been willing to leave their wired silos to see something real. In a society where there is no common agreement on the meanings of liberty and justice, right and wrong, or female and male, where even a global pandemic can be politicized into a matter of partisan opinion, they had sought some form of communion with their fellow human beings. As the woman who works the counter at the butcher shop would say to me later in the week: “We were all one on Monday. We all got along.”

Seen in that light, wasn’t there something quietly heroic about traveling to see the eclipse, a heroism as modest as the light of that pale white crown in the darkened firmament, as a woman’s bare feet on a monastery lawn? Are we ever more ordinary than in our need to share with others in some extraordinary event, and isn’t ordinariness what authentic heroism seeks to restore and defend? I gave my analog directions and thought of Odysseus traveling home from all his adventures, of the immortal poetry he would leave in his wake. I thought, too, of the men who perished needlessly because of their captain’s insistence on seeing a Cyclops up close, and of all the others, Penelope’s doomed suitors included, who might have lived longer had he just stayed home.