The Mind-Blowing Power of Totality: A Captivating Journey into the Solar Eclipse Phenomenon

Totality or bust. That’s the attitude of the serious eclipse aficionado.

If that means gassing up the car and driving hours and hours to the middle of nowhere to find a patch of clear sky along the “path of totality,” so be it. A partial solar eclipse, even one with the sun 99 percent obscured, won’t incite the same intensity of awe, wonder, shock or — for some — the irrepressible desire to scream.

The writer Annie Dillard, in a famous 1982 essay in the Atlantic, perceived in an eclipse a mind-blowing derangement of human existence, with intimations of the end of the world. “Seeing a partial

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