Oppressive Overshadowing

In Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, the chapter “Total Eclipse” used exceptionally memorable imagery to capture a once-in-a-lifetime experience: a total solar eclipse. Dillard’s vivid descriptions of the eclipse paint a very solemn and apocalyptic image in my mind.

To our eyes, light scattering off surfaces gives them their color. When the moon is between the sun and us, it blocks the infrared rays from reaching the Earth’s surface, giving the entire area a cold, dark look. “The sun was going, and the world was wrong…This color had never been seen on earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte…The darkness of night mixed with the colors of day.”  The earth going dark is familiar in the gradual form of twilight descending. It is unnatural to be a bright morning and then “abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky”

For many, darkness is synonymous with evil and desolation. From Dillard’s word paintings, the image of these tendrils of shadow is “eerie as hell.” They are floating across the brightly lit Earth, coating everything in their path with midnight. “It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it.” No one can escape its clutches.

“It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,

Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt,

It lies behind stars and under hills,

And empty holes it fills,

It comes first and follows after,

Ends life, kills laughter.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit