Traffic was our first concern. Authorities warned of gridlock, power outages, and overwhelming crowds. Indiana, Arkansas, Texas, and countless counties declared a state of emergency. Over 4 million people in the United States would be traveling to see the 2024 solar eclipse. Over 32 million people were in the path of totality. I wanted to be one of them.
We lived only 3 hours away on a good day from a campsite we had booked in the path of totality near the southern border of Lake Ontario. But we packed our car like we were driving through the apocalypse: water, blankets, headlamps, snacks, more water, more blankets, and more snacks. We woke at dawn and my wife, 5 year old, and dog set off to chase what millions of others were chasing: the mystical thrill of a once in a lifetime experience.
*
Something out of the ordinary course of nature—like a meteor, a comet, or an eclipse—is a prodigy, as the word was originally defined. A prodigy is a frightening event, an inexplicable deviation from the predictability of life, a monstrosity, a bad omen. It is more than a breach of expectations; it is a betrayal of what we thought we knew.
And yet, we still try to explain it. During an eclipse, the Incas thought a jaguar devoured the celestial beings. Andeans said it was a puma. The Vikings thought the moon had been caught in the paws of a wolf. The Vietnamese said a frog swallowed the sun. Korean lore claimed fire dogs tried to steal it.
Sometimes greed is the only explanation for loss. Sometimes anger, like the Greeks who assumed the gods were mad. The word “eclipse” comes from the Greek word for “abandonment.”
But the unifying response across all civilizations is that an eclipse is a guttural prodigy felt inside one’s bones.
*
Or so I had heard. As chatter of the upcoming eclipse became headline news, I too became hungry to know totality. Or was my stronger need to simply not miss out on it?
This is my constant dilemma. FOMO to the nth degree. How much am I driven by the anticipated delight of an experience versus the feared desolation of missing out on it? I can barely tell.
This is because, for me, time is a prodigy. The way time passes feels inexplicable, abnormal, antagonistic. It’s always felt like a betrayal, a divine displeasure, the monster hiding under my bed. I have my own myths to reckon with it; they hardly resemble truth.
I am greedy for time, desperate for more, because I’ve always only felt the bite taken out instead of the joy of what I’m left holding. When I turned 10, my sadness over leaving the single digits behind forever overtook my glee in receiving presents. On the eve of my 16th birthday, I could hardly accept that childhood was over, even as I finally achieved my dream of driving. When I turned 31, I moped that I would never make any lists chronicling young success. Every birthday carries sadness. Every weekend I mourn the things I didn’t do.
My hunger isn’t about extending my time on earth but about doing all the things, the right things, the fun things, the memorable things, the important things before some arbitrary deadline. I’m not as eager to draw out my life as I am to stretch wide its brim and shove as many memories, achievements, moments into it as possible.
Aging is daunting not because it’s getting closer to death but because it feels like it gets me farther from what I had hoped to have accomplished.
*
A prodigy, of course, is also a child whose gifts are excessively beyond their years.
Brandenn Bremmer taught himself to read when he was two. He began playing the piano at age three, graduated from high school at ten, released his first album at thirteen, and shot himself in the head when he was fourteen, while his parents were grocery shopping. “He was born an adult,” his mother said. “We just watched his body grow bigger.”
Barbara Newhall Follet taught herself to use a typewriter at age four so she could tell her stories. Eight years later in 1927 at age thirteen, she published a book with Knopf called The House Without Windows to great acclaim. Then, at age 25, she stepped out of her apartment and disappeared, never to be found.
Being trapped in a timeline that is an inexplicable deviation from the norm can have devastating effects. And yet, I envied prodigies. They were given the gift of excess time, a prodigality of opportunities, a head start in a race they seemed to be winning. They did so much in such little time.
*
Jesus, as the Christian story goes, was also a prodigy—in both senses of the word—heralded by a prodigy (the Star of Bethlehem). His coming was a rent in the universe, a violation of nature, an intrusion upon stability, a veering of history’s course. At age twelve, he was a teacher among men. In his thirties, he was turning water into wine, healing lepers and raising friends from the dead. And at 33, some believe, he accomplished the single most astounding feat in world history: He rose from the dead to redeem the world.
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son… (Galatians 4:4)
When Galatians says Jesus came in the fullness of time, the word “fullness” is “pleroma,” which means a filling so full that it's spilling out, like a faucet pouring into a filled glass of water. It’s a net full of fish (Matthew 13:48), a house filled with wind (Acts 2:2), a heart filled with gladness (Acts 2:28).
Time is a thing that can be filled. It’s not a line drawn horizontally through history, notches across someone’s lifetime, or hands rotating around a circle. It’s a cup brimming with ice cold water, an after-dinner belly, a child’s heart on Christmas morning.
Time isn’t the thing that measures our lives but is what catches them. There goes another breath into time, another birthday cake, swim in the ocean, Sunday morning, egg sandwich, cup of coffee, bike ride, fingernail clipping, phone call, gallon of milk, pigeon feather stuck between the panes. Our lives are an endless stream into time. Time is an endless stream into us.
Unfortunately, I forget this. I think of time as a thief that whisks away the moments I’m clambering to capture. I give too much thought to what I didn’t get.
*
The warnings issued across the country for what would be the most watched solar eclipse in history must have worked, because we didn’t encounter a lick of traffic. With no ado, we arrived and settled into our campsite, setting up a tent, indulging in Cheetos, PBJ sandwiches, lemonade, and a brief game of Go Fish while we waited.
The biggest concern, above and beyond the traffic, was clouds. Would there or wouldn't there be clouds? The forecast would not give us an answer. And as we made a fire and peed behind an oak tree, the clouds came and went with stubborn indecision.
Finally, it was time. If I hadn’t constantly been watching my clock (ever fastened still to time), the moon’s hunger would have been unnoticeable at first. My wife poured us a glass of wine in our child’s smoothie cup as we leaned back into the plastic teal adirondack chairs, donned our glasses, and looked up over the leafless dogwood bushes and tree orchard. We saw the first bite. Then we saw nothing. The clouds had made up their mind and barged in.
My ache for perfection instantly gnawed at me. Everything up until then had been perfect, but when it mattered most, I feared that of all the thousands of square miles we could have chosen to watch the eclipse from, we had chosen wrong. We had made a terrible mistake. We should have gone to Rochester, we should have gone further east, we should have driven to Vermont, we should have just stayed home! But there we were at a small campsite in the middle of nowhere New York trying to watch an eclipse through thick clouds and swarms of gnats.
*
I have an intense need to optimize everything, whether it's a daytrip to swim in the river, a packing list for getting sleep on an airplane, the time of arrival for a concert, or even just a dinner outside, the order for cleaning the house, the method for making coffee or grilled cheeses. I try to account for every detail between each decision and tweak this way and that in order to create the most memorable, most effective, most efficient thing. This makes me very good at my job, very annoying to my wife, and very bad at rolling with the punches. And the punches always come.
Tangled up in my FOMO is regret. I ward off regret through optimization. My expectation for optimization is perfection. And inevitably, the result each time is disappointment. This disappointment leads me to regret the loss of time, time that could have been better optimized. It’s a vicious cycle. Daily, I let “woulda, shoulda, coulda’s” eat away at me, and as they do, I fall into deep self-blame which prevents me from seeing how full my bucket of time is. I only see what is lacking in it. I only see the shadow.
“What could have been becomes the enemy of what is true in our life,” Robert L. Leahy writes in If Only…: Finding Freedom From Regret.
*
Another thing about the story of God sending his son in the fullness of time is that when that happened, time lost all comprehension. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end, Jesus says in Revelation. According to the Bible, Jesus was all of time condensed into a single being. He shattered the notion of linearity. He surpassed time by collapsing it.
Christians like to extend their concept of time into eternity, but I think that’s nonsense. Literally. He puts eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from beginning to end, Solomon says in Ecclesiastes. What if the idea of eternity was created to confound our notion of time, to dismiss the linearity of beginnings to ends, to make a joke of it, because it is laughable. Eternity is a decoy.
Now is all we have.
*
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
Beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
- Walt Whitman
*
On Barbara Newhall Follet’s fifth birthday, she received a brown rocking horse and was devastated that the horse wasn’t white. So, she wrote about it in a short story.
“Oh,” said Mrs. Spinning-Wheel, “I could wait forever if I knew that Mr. Horse was going to be white sometime.” As it happened, Mr. Horse was a dark brown.
“Well,” said Mr. Rabbit, “I don’t think that you could wait quite forever.”
Like a five year old, I still want to cling to the idea of forever, if it holds a promise of a changed, preferred reality at the end. I look out to what could be better instead of appreciating what’s in front of me. I struggle to buy into Whitman’s notion that there “will never be any more perfection than there is now.” Perfection feels like it's still always ahead of me, getting swept away from my grasp in the river of time.
*
When Alissa Quart was interviewing Brandenn Bremmer in 2004 for her book Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child, he said “America is a society that demands perfection.” Quart then writes “It was interesting that I had asked him about giftedness, but the word perfection was foremost in his mind.”
Perfection shoves out other notions in order to take top billing in my anxieties as well. I misconstrue perfection for worth, value, goodness. If something isn’t perfect, it doesn't have those things. If an experience falls short of my optimization, it’s a failure.
Perfectionism, like totality, is all or nothing. Perfection leaves no room for error. When it comes to an eclipse, 99% coverage is nothing like 100%. “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane,” Annie Dilliard writes in her essay “Total Eclipse.”
This is why millions of people traveled countless miles to be in the path of totality. “A total eclipse elicits a unique, visceral, primeval feeling that cannot be evoked by a photograph or a video or a newspaper article, and that can be experienced only within the path of totality,” Ryan Milligan, a solar physicist, wrote in the New York Times.
Perfectionism is just as stark. This is why, when I got a 99% on a spelling test back in high school, I was upset. It was not 100%. It was not perfect. I might as well have failed. This is why I too often allow a perfect Summer’s day swimming in the Delaware River to be ruined by taking the wrong route back home. It’s a pathology of existential totality: I need everything to be perfect or nothing is good. The gift of a beautiful day exists only on the feeble foundation of perfection. It’s all or nothing.
My perfectionism has morphed over the years. It started traditionally in high school as a personal demand that everything I produced be flawless, and this drove my ambition to someday be great. But I knew that day was still on the horizon. Now that I’m well past this horizon, my ambition has been dimmed by reality. Still, I feel a twinge of what prodigies often feel in excess: “the poisonous memory of themselves as promising,” to use Andrew Solomon’s words. Time represents this growing delta between the perfection I once sought and where I stand today.
*
Things take the time they take. Don’t
worry.
How many roads did Saint Augustine follow
before he became Saint Augustine?
- Mary Oliver
*
As we sipped our wine, eclipse glasses on the armrests, waiting for the sky to clear, I was still optimistic that we would at least get a peephole of clearance. And for a brief second, we got one more glimpse of the sun’s growing absence before the clouds definitively stomped in. After that, as the earth dimmed, it was hard to know if it was from the increasing cloud coverage, now accompanied by a rain forecast, or from the moon’s encroachment. Still, we held out hope, knowing it was all going to come down to the 3 minutes and 30 seconds of totality.
*
“I don’t think people should be treated in a different way [just] because they are different,” Bremmer told Alissa Quart. But we do treat prodigies differently.
“The child prodigy is the polite version of the carny freak. Gawking at the dog-faced boy in the sideshow is exploitative, but gawking at the six-year-old concert pianist on the Today Show is somehow okay…” the critic Janice Nimura wrote. The problem with gawking at the morning show talent isn’t the attention we give them, but the attention we withhold from everyone else as a result. The face of any child emits immeasurable beauty that should stop us in our tracks with slack-jawed awe.
I think there was something remarkable in millions of Americans eagerly going to great lengths to experience totality. People, for a brief moment, were outside on hilltops, campsites, parking lots, city stoops, where they were talking, being kind to each other, communally delighting in this shared experience of nature. There is nothing wrong with the enthusiasm they shared to experience the eclipse together, but what if we shared that collective awe more frequently? Sunsets, bird migrations, thunderstorms, and so many more miracles are daily within our reach.
The problem with my understanding of time is that I give too much attention to certain moments—birthdays, anniversaries, firsts, lasts; or worse, I over-mourn all the missed ones—and fail to recognize the prodigiousness of every moment. I forget to look at the now as I’m distracted by all the lost drops of water pouring out of the cup and down the drain.
*
Look back on Time, with kindly eyes—
He doubtless did his best—
How softly sinks that trembling sun
In Human Nature’s West—
- Emily Dickinson
*
Soon, a growing eeriness could be felt, and it was undeniably more than cloudiness. Totality was imminent. And then, as if the earth had been jolted off its axis, as if the sky had dropped like a curtain, as if the landscape had been flattened by a stamp, as if all the color in the leaves, the grass, the bushes retreated to the horizon’s wings, totality hit. It could be felt just as much as seen. We looked up and still couldn’t see anything, but it didn’t matter anymore.
My 5 year old instantly lost his mind in a visceral reverence for what was happening. “Totaaaalitttyyyyy!” he screamed running around! “This is so exciting!” he exclaimed as he rolled in the grass. Then in an instant the corona could just barely be seen. “Look! You can see the ring!” I shouted to my kid. “I see it! Wow! Wow! Wow! Woooooweeee!”
Then the corona was also lost to the clouds. “That was amazing!” my child whispered.
We stood in the otherworldly darkness for another minute or two. My child noticed before I did that the gnats had fled. “It’s so dark the mosquitos can’t handle it. I don’t see a single mosquito!”
And then, the trance lifted. The earth became round again. The color ran back. The gnats swarmed. We released our breath. The clouds remained.
*
Another way to translate “pleroma” is as totality. And in that moment, standing on the blanketed earth under the lidded sun, we all experienced pleroma which is to say totality which is to say fullness which is to say contentedness.
It wasn’t a perfect experience of the eclipse. Or was it? The clouds that day challenged my notion of all or nothing. Even in a moment of a black or white binary, they added a shade of gray. Even when we couldn’t see anything, we still experienced the mystical thrill of a once in a lifetime experience.
And we were satisfied.
*
Once in a lifetime. There it is again. A singular inflection point rising above the others. And indeed, it was a once in a lifetime experience. It was spectacular. But so is everything.
*
How beautiful and perfect are the animals!
How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it!
What is called good is perfect, and what is called bad is just as perfect,
The vegetables and minerals are all perfect, and the imponderable fluids are perfect;
Slowly and surely they have pass’d on to this, and slowly and surely they yet pass on.
I swear I think now that everything without exception has an eternal Soul!
- Walt Whitman
*
Everything is perfect. Everything is once in a lifetime. Everything is a prodigy. It’s not that if everything is special, nothing is special. It’s that if everything is special, everything is special.
As my cup of time overflows with more time, it is true that each singular drop that is drained will never return to me, but that does not mean I’ve lost anything, for new ones are forever flowing in, making all things new, and also all things equal, like the stream under the faucet where the water’s change is so constant that it would be ridiculous to favor some drops more than others.
Behind every blunt binary is a dimension of nuance that collapses our assumptions, flattens hierarchies, condenses continuums. Time is eternal because time is now. Time is always flowing, so there is nothing to miss. There is no beginning or end, no getting ahead or falling behind, no moment that can supersede another. “It is good to live in this age—there never was any better,/ This minute that comes to me over the past decillions, there is no better than it and now,” Whitman says in his poem “The Eternal Present.”
There was nothing wrong in wanting to take the extra effort to experience the total eclipse but my miscalculation was that if I missed it, if the clouds ruined it, I would have lacked something. In seeking totality, I flirted with a trap of absolutes. But there is no all or nothing. The bite of the moon does not in fact take anything away. Nor do clouds. There is simply, completely, everything in between, all at once.
Fall 2024 Issue of Litt Magazine