Notes from my Knapsack 4-18-24

Notes from my Knapsack 4-18-24
Jeff Gill

Looking back at a shared experience
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Mark Twain famously said "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning."

I'd say the same about the distinction between a 99% eclipse, and totality. Licking County missed out on totality, just barely. Some estimates were literally less than one percent.

By now you've likely heard from others if you didn't go in search of it yourself: 99% coverage is not the same experience as a total eclipse. And it is not. When the disc of the Moon covers the Sun, there's a truly cosmic sense of scale that both rushes upon the viewer on the ground, and draws you up into the near infinite contrast between Earth and the intervening heavenly bodies. Add in the coruscating lights around the circumference, solar prominences momentarily visible in bright glowing reds and shimmering greens, and you are in the presence of something simply not of this Earth.

There's a comparison of sorts when you happen to see a moonrise on a clear evening, full and seemingly vast against the distant horizon, usually an unusual orange or even blood red when the thickest part of the atmosphere filters the usual silvery moonshine. The rising Moon can capture your attention in ways a full one directly overhead does not. A solar eclipse totality is similar, and yet…

My wife and I were in central Indiana for the event, at a house slowly being emptied after a death last December, part of a neighborhood we've come to know but are still strangers in. We sat on camp chairs on the back patio as totality came into view, no longer needing eclipse glasses, the traffic on a busy road behind having stopped almost entirely some minutes before. There was no one at all within sight where we sat.

Yet as the totality wrinkled its way from the last sliver of Sun to the "beads" of sunlight through lunar mountains and valleys, with darkness suddenly gripping the sky, chilling the air, and opening up stars and planets to view overhead, there was from all around us, unseen, a cheer.

We heard shouts and laughter and applause, dozens of voices from points across the road and to either side. The experience overhead we were sharing with many people invisible to us, but within earshot, a less than cosmic distance around our location.

In an earlier era, we might have gathered at the well or spring, buckets in hand, marveling at what we'd seen; maybe we'd come to the market square, the church towering across us from one side, and share our impressions and understandings. Instead, we had inside the sliding door of the patio a television on to keep us appraised of events at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and later about traffic reports crowding the interstates leaving the area.

In other words, our moment of common experience was brief, and dissipated into the more usual linkages of media analysis. We get told, no matter how politely, what we just saw or felt or understood. Maybe that's more efficient, I don't know.

What I heard in those cheers over fences and across right-of-ways, though, was a moment of communion, of connection. It felt good, it felt right. Something we needed, and need more of. Even if it's just more sunsets shared in common.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's interested in shared experiences. Tell him what you've shared with a large number of fellow humans at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.