On Eclipses, Intimacy, and Virginia Woolf
First, ok, hello. Here I am on parental leave from my teaching job, with lots of time to think and not much time to write. Subscribe if you want very short and infrequent posts about poetry, work, beauty, literature, etc. from someone who finds herself unexpectedly blissed out on suburban mom life, or something like that.
Also thanks for your patience as I figure out this Substack thing—is there a way to make a kind of pay-what-you-will option?
Anyway. There’s a solar eclipse today, and Cleveland lies directly in the path of totality. The buildup has been nuts. For weeks, the powers-that-be here have been treating this event like a very bad and very predictable snowstorm. The warnings are actually quite dire. By all accounts the city is going to be swamped with would-be eclipse viewers, so I’m not planning on driving anywhere. I went to Trader Joe’s yesterday sort of expecting it to be out of bread and milk, and I stocked up on wine and tulips, just in case.
I don’t know, though. I feel a little grumpy about the fuss. Julian turned three months old yesterday. I have all the awe I can handle—the world’s basically upside down already, the days nights and the nights days, and it’s beautiful and strange. I don’t need half the east coast flocking in to get in the way. I don’t like the disruption of holidays, really—a few times now I’ve landed in Paris on the night of the fête de la musique and been annoyed that there’s a totally artificial festival atmosphere upsetting what should be just a normal quiet night.
Also it’s not the first time I’ve seen this. Weirdly—maybe it’s some kind of omen about my life choices—it’s the second time we’ve been living in the path of totality. In 2017, we bought our glasses and watched the shadows sliver away and night fall in the middle of the day from the top of the hill above our house in Greenville, South Carolina. Last time it happened I was curious, at least, about my own emotional reaction. On the whole it was anti-climactic, although it was weird to see the sun disappear in the middle of a summer day and hear the evening birds and bugs start up. For weeks afterwards I felt shaky and unstable, like some part of me didn’t quite believe in or trust the usual diurnal rhythms anymore.
Both times there’s been an eclipse, I’ve gone back—as I do for lots of things—to Virginia Woolf’s diaries. On June 28, 1927, Woolf traveled with her Vita Sackville West, her nephew Quentin Bell, and both women’s husbands (Leonard Woolf and Harold Nicolson) from Kings Cross in London to Yorkshire, near Richmond, to see a total solar eclipse. The party left at 10pm and traveled through the night, by train then by bus, arriving in Richmond at 3:30 in the morning to see the sun disappear and reappear just around sunrise. They were, in Woolf’s account, absolutely not alone, and I guess it’s a little reassuring that mass travel for an eclipse is nothing new. Woolf recounts “a long line of motor omnibuses and motors, all burning pale yellow lights,” all full of people eager to see the sun disappear and reappear as it would not do again, she notes, until 1999. When they get to the viewing site, Woolf observes that people have already staked out their places, huddled and stamping to keep warm in the early summer fields in the cold pre-dawn.
But then—my favorite part of Woolf’s description of the eclipse is not actually her description of the eclipse itself, although it’s a gorgeous description, but her description of the intense intimacy of the journey to see the eclipse:
Before it got dark we kept looking at the sky; soft fleecy; but there was one star, over Alexandra Park. Look, Vita, that’s Alexandra Park, said Harold. The Nicolsons got sleepy: H. curled up with his head on V.’s knee. She looked like Sappho by Leighton, asleep; so we plunged through the midlands; made a very long stay at York. Then at 3 we got out our sandwiches and I came in from the W.C. to find Harold being rubbed clean of cream. Then he broke the china sandwich box. Here L. laughed without restraint. Then we had another doze, or the N.’s did.
Woolf does intimate scenes like this so well. Both women’s marriages were, in their way, happy ones (my postpartum reading was Hermione Lee’s magnificent Woolf biography, which I’ve just finished). The overnight journey, animated by the novelty of the event, is also charged with the energy of desire and friendship, the carriage a delicate fragile moving artifact made out of these complex and balanced relationships, at once totally mundane and somehow miraculous—which is, after all, what the best friendships are sometimes like. When the world goes dead and dark, after that, there’s a sense that the whole party’s gone through something together, and then there’s the return journey (“it was hot and we were messy. The carriage was full of things”). The eclipse isn’t just the eclipse. It’s the sense of assembly and watching, together. It’s the gentle giddiness of grown adults tumbled against each other by celestial occasion, going to ridiculous lengths to see something happening in the sky.
Or anyway, that’s what it’s like here. Yesterday Jeff came through on his way to Jocelyn’s eclipse-themed birthday party in Kent. Walt made egg sandwiches and we took the stroller out to see the pink magnolias, still in bloom, and then we stood over the little creek and watched the fish below us. The sun had finally reappeared, and we sat in the backyard talking while a hawk circled overhead. Jocelyn and her boyfriend will come tomorrow, party-weary, and tell us about the festivities. Lee Ann wrote to say she was driving from New York and are we around. Natasha and Alex will be in town with their daughter, who I haven’t seen since her infancy, and everybody wants to meet the baby, who’s just old enough to smile at a face. This afternoon we’ll all spill out into the elementary school soccer field across the street and sit on blankets together and wear our stupid-looking glasses while it gets dark and then it gets light and we can see each other again.
Lindsay, what a beautiful image for someone too far away to witness the eclipse. Thank you.
Kim Stafford...met you in Assisi when my wife and I were teaching a writing class years ago.