Total Eclipse

“It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass. It had been like the death of someone, irrational, that sliding down the mountain pass and into the region of dread. It was like slipping into fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering.”

Throughout the essay, Dillard refers to tunnels, mines, the ocean, and other deep spaces, employing these motifs of depth and descent to represent her journey to find meaning. Here, she foreshadows her overwhelming emotional and sensory experience of witnessing the eclipse through her representation of “sliding down the mountain pass” after the avalanche is cleared, thus commencing her journey to the deeper experiences to come. The juxtaposition of “irrational” with a “region of dread” underscores the disorientation and emotional upheaval Dillard feels in the aftermath of the eclipse, about which she is writing two years later. She uses metaphors that evoke vulnerability, capturing the uncanny, dreamlike state induced by the eclipse, comparing the experience to “slipping into fever” and the unsettling sensation of falling asleep.

“Two years have passed since the total eclipse of which I write. During those years I have forgotten, I assume, a great many things I wanted to remember—but I have not forgotten that clown print or its lunatic setting in the old hotel.”

This quote establishes temporal distance, highlighting the lasting impression of the eclipse experience while simultaneously highlighting the fallibility and selectivity of human memory. The unpredictability of memory is underscored by the juxtaposition of the total eclipse with the seemingly trivial clown print. By describing the hotel as a “lunatic setting,” Dillard’s diction evokes a sense of oddity and displacement.