Totality Is Different

I was reminded today, after seeing a Reddit thread about how often total solar eclipses actually happen, of the 2024 eclipse I watched from Mount Royal in Montréal.

I had seen a partial eclipse before, in Toronto in 2017.

It was cool. The light changed. Crescent shadows appeared on the ground. A kind soul offered me the chance to view it through his eclipse glasses. That afternoon felt a little strange. A little thin. Like someone had put a filter over the world.

But it was still the world.

It was still daytime.

It did not prepare me for totality.

Nothing can.

I had heard all the warnings. I had heard people say that a partial eclipse and a total eclipse aren’t the same thing. I had heard that totality was overwhelming. I had heard that people cried. I believed them.

But there is a difference between knowing something will happen and feeling your body react when it does.

A partial eclipse is something happening to the Sun.

A total eclipse is something happening to you.

In the minutes before totality, I shot a video looking out over Montréal. What gets me now is watching the city give in before I fully understood what was happening.

Streetlights came on.

Building lights appeared.

Headlights started to matter.

It was the middle of the afternoon, but the city started acting like it was evening. Not because anyone decided it was evening. Not because there was a schedule. The light was simply wrong enough that the machines believed the day was ending.

That was the first moment it stopped feeling cool.

It felt… wrong.

Then nature reacted.

That was the part I wasn’t fully ready for. Nighttime bugs started chirping in the middle of the afternoon. Birds got confused. The temperature dropped. The light kept draining out of the sky in this sickly, unnatural way. It was not like sunset. Sunset has a direction. Sunset has a rhythm. Sunset feels like the day closing.

This felt like the world losing power.

Then the horizon went strange.

Sunset in every direction.

Not sunset in the west. Not the normal, comforting geometry of evening. Every direction. A band of dim orange light around the whole horizon, with Montréal underneath it, darkening in the middle like the city had been placed under a bowl.

That is when some old animal part of me started paying attention.

Because your brain can know the science. It can know the Moon is passing in front of the Sun. It can know the path was calculated years in advance. It can know the whole thing is ordinary celestial mechanics.

Your body doesn’t really care.

Your body looks at the light disappearing in the middle of the afternoon, hears the insects starting up, feels the air go cold, sees the horizon turn to sunset everywhere at once, and decides that something is very, very wrong.

And then totality hits.

The Sun disappears.

It doesn’t dim.

It doesn’t fade.

Disappears.

And in its place is this perfect black circle hanging in the sky, surrounded by a bright white halo, with enormous wisps of light stretching out into the dark.

It does not look like the Moon covering the Sun.

It looks like the Sun has been removed. Like it was just plucked from the sky.

Honestly, the only comparison I can think of is that it looked like the Sun had been replaced by a black hole.

A hole in the afternoon.

A hole where daylight is supposed to come from.

A hole with fire around it.

It is immensely beautiful, but beautiful is not the right word. Beautiful feels almost too polite. It is terrifying. It is holy in the oldest and least comfortable sense of that word. It feels like seeing something you were not supposed to see.

The whole sky is wrong.

The whole city is wrong.

The animals are wrong.

You... are wrong.

And above it all is that black circle, perfectly still, like it is presiding over the end of the world.

Then the people reacted.

Some cheered.

Some cried.

Some became visibly overwhelmed, like their bodies had reached for a response before their minds could choose one.

And some of us just went silent.

That was my reaction. No clever comment. No immediate explanation. No attempt to narrate the moment while it was happening. Just silence. Because what do you even say when the Sun has vanished and the whole world is standing underneath it?

I know that sounds dramatic.

I simply don’t know how else to describe it.

For those few minutes, the explanation is not enough. The science is true, obviously. But the experience is older than the explanation. You are standing there in a modern city, surrounded by cameras and traffic lights and apartment buildings and thousands of people who all know exactly what is happening, and still some ancient part of your nervous system is screaming.

The Sun went out.

The Sun went out and the world noticed.

In that moment I fully understood why ancient cultures built rituals around eclipses. Of course they did. What else are you supposed to do with that? The Sun disappears in the middle of the day. The animals panic. The horizon turns strange. The air gets cold. The sky opens. The Sun is replaced with a black circle surrounded by fire.

Obviously someone angered something.

Obviously the world requires an answer.

And the strangest part is how absolute the boundary is. Go a kilometre outside the path of totality and the eclipse is interesting. Maybe eerie. Maybe beautiful. But it is not this.

The Sun is too bright. Even a tiny sliver of it keeps the world intact.

Inside the path, that last sliver vanishes.

And the machinery flips.

Day becomes night.

The city turns itself on.

The insects wake up.

The birds lose the plot.

The horizon burns in every direction.

And for a few minutes, daylight stops feeling like a law of nature.

It feels fragile.

It feels conditional.

It feels like something that can be taken away.