Books That Saved My Life

Just finished reading Annie Dillard’s essay “Total Eclipse” about watching a full eclipse of the sun in Washington (the next of which I assumed would happen after I was dead). It surprised the hell out of me. I’ve never read Dillard, always thought of her as somewhat of a sentimental naturalist writer of the sort my parents were always suggesting I read (as a kid in Boulder, CO I spent most of my time inside rather than out doing the various outside things for which Boulder is famous). Maybe it was the title “Teaching a Stone to Talk” that put me off my lunch, I mean, what teenager would be caught dead reading something with that title, might as well carry around your copy of “Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret” and get the whole messy business over with. Anyway, so I read the Dillard and was magicked. I carried my “Next American Essays” tome up the subway stairs still grasping for those last words, not wanting to wait ’till I was home to finish it. It had me wandering around in a daze, noticing the sunset light on the side of the ever-under-construction condominiums at the corner of Montague and Atlantic, made me stand like an idiot in below-freezing weather and stare up at how the light climbed the fire escape:

“This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. How could anything moving so fast not crash, not veer from its orbit amok like a car out of control on a turn?” -Dillard, etc…

Then I come home and read this:

“I can’t help but feel the greatness of God,” she said, as fellow onlookers applauded and then fell silent. “Anyone who passed up this opportunity, really missed out.”

The next total eclipse will be July 22, 2009, and will be visible in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, China and some Japanese islands.
See you in Myanmar.