Last Friday’s total solar eclipse, as seen from northwestern China. AP Photo/Xinhua, Han Chuanhao. Via.

But I pray you will never see anything more awful in the sky. Annie Dillard, in her essay “Total Eclipse”, writes about witnessing an eclipse in Washington’s Yakima valley in 1979. In her description the experience is apocalyptic and ghastly. As it begins, she sees colors change strangely: the sky opposite the sun turns a bizarre saturated indigo; the landscape and the people around her turn a chilly platinum hue. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. As it nears totality, things get bad:

From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the earth rolled down.

She later writes that most terrifying part, the thing she believes makes her and the other watchers on the hillsides really start screaming, is a second sight that occurs at the moment of totality:

The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1,800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed — 1,800 miles an hour. It was 195 miles wide. No end was in sight — you saw only the edge. It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it. Seeing it, and knowing it was coming straight for you, was like feeling a slug of anaesthetic shoot up your arm … We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit.

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?

As the eclipse ends:

We blinked in the light. It was as though an enormous, loping god in the sky had reached down and slapped the earth’s face.