I watched Monday’s total solar eclipse with Virginia Woolf. Well, not really. But because I had read her description of the 1927 solar eclipse — and because I had written about it — her words were circling my head as I watched Monday, making me feel as though she was with me.
The total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024, as captured completely unprofessionally by Blogging Woolf in Akron, Ohio.
I did not watch the eclipse high on a “boggy, heathery” rural moor, “walking out to what seemed the highest point looking over Richmond” in Bardon Fell, North Yorkshire, with “[v]ales and moor stretched, slope after slope, round us,” as Woolf did (Diary 3, 142).
Instead, I watched it while sitting in a folding lawn chair set up on a concrete driveway in an Akron, Ohio, development, with the carefully manicured lawns of ranch and colonial homes built 30 years ago stretched along a crescent in front of us.
And while we waited, watching the moon’s slow movement across the sun, I read Woolf’s words aloud to my companion. Her words overwhelmed us with their power. They also prepared us — somewhat — for the awe we were to feel.
But could anything truly prepare us for the sight of the moon slowly sliding along overhead, blotting out the sun in a blue sky lightly whitewashed with clouds? Could anything, even Woolf’s poetic words, prepare us for three minutes of total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024 — an incredible luxury when I consider that Woolf only had 24 seconds on June 29, 1927?
To steal Woolf’s words, “Now I must sketch out the Eclipse” I saw Monday (142):
The sky went dark. The birds went silent. The street lights came on. The solar lights in the garden shone. The wind kicked up. The air grew cold. And for three minutes, we sat. We sat unmoving. We sat unable to look away from this perfect vision in the sky, as we breathed out the simplest of words in a vain attempt to share our wonder.
Everyone around me is talking about the power of that three minutes — of the energy they felt, the peace they experienced, the indescribable spiritual “something” that sank into their hearts, into their souls. None of us seems to know quite how to describe it. I understand that.
And that makes me all the more grateful to Woolf for trying — and succeeding — so beautifully.
The sky with a light whitewash of clouds as the April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse begins in Akron, Ohio.
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