"Total Eclipse"

Well, I'll give it to Dillard for writing a very...unique essay. I've read some weird stuff in my life, but nothing quite like this. This was all at once hard to get through and entrancing to read. It was a like a strange piece of experimental jazz. For some of it I imagined the lunatic ramblings of a paranoid drug-junkie. Now let me back off for a bit. This was  fine piece of literature with plenty of deep symbolism and meaning. However I became confused while reading quite often, especially in the beginning, I couldn't differentiate between reality and metaphor. Or was she just using extreme hyperbole? I guess the great literary genius leaves an audience guessing.

She presented many good philosophical topics, but an over-lying theme that intrigued me the most was her comparison of grandeur and simplicity. In her first description of the eclipse she used complex metaphors and similes and, somehow, even related the event to the creation of man and life upon the Euphrates. Wow. However in the diner the hole that the sun left was described as a Life Saver candy. It doesn't get more minimalist and simplistic than that. Another such comparison, one that was much more indirect, was between the six bald men in the hotel lobby and the hillside of people watching the eclipse. The bald men were simple: they watched sports, sat in a hotel lobby, and got drunk. It sounds like a rather sad existence to me; however, it is quite simple. The other group of people was the people on the hillside that she described being joined together in a trance while watching the eclipse. The author herself seemed to experience somewhat of an an "out-of-body-experience" and describes her entrancement and fascination with the complex workings of the eclipse. The bald men in the lobby just watched sports and got drunk while there was an apparently mind-boggling event occurring outside.

It also shows that life has an amazing way of building us up and letting us down again slowly. While reading in the beginning of the story, I felt a lot of tension and suspense building. She created ominous scenes that made me feel as if something horrible was going to occur. The eclipse did the same thing to the author. It built her up with emotion and perspective. When the event occurred, there was an all-out flurry and commotion of dismal activity. Yet when she got to the diner, she heard the joke made by the college kids about how the eclipse looked like a lifesaver. She describes being "dumbstruck on the Euphrates River, I had been dead and gone and grieving, all over the sight of something which, if you could claw your way up to the that level, you would grant looked very much like a Life Saver." Life built her up with all of this emotion, and then comically portrayed it as just some minor event comparable to a small, sugary concoction. Maybe it's all just tricks of the mind, or maybe it is the mystical workings of this strange universe of ours. That is up to the reader of this blog to decide.