The next morning, it is as though these scattered representatives of the end times have become a swarming mass, as people climb the hills to view the coming apocalypse:

Then the eclipse happens, and Dillard describes an utterly overwhelming sense of everything gone wrong:

It is as if Dillard and her husband have joined the ranks of the dead:

She describes, as the final sliver of sun is eclipsed, a scream that breaks out involuntarily among the witnesses, at the sight of something so overwhelming it ‘obliterated meaning itself’:

I’ve no political point to make in recommending this essay. But nor is it exactly a respite from politics. Rather, this is a piece about the primordial abyss that lies deep beneath the push and pull of everyday human quarrels, even the frightening and chaotic sort. It’s about what it feels like to stare into that abyss, and how perhaps, it’s sometimes less an act of cowardice than wisdom to turn our gazes from it again afterwards, and return (if we can) to the human realm again.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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