This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I have said that I heard screams. I have since read that screaming with hysteria is a common reaction

even to expected total eclipses.

Annie Dillard is one of our great nature writers and years ago she wrote a brilliant essay called Total Eclipse.

She read an excerpt from that piece when she joined us on the program in 2016.

And with people from Texas to Maine lining up to watch Monday's Total Eclipse, it's worth hearing again.

Here's Annie Dillard.

People on all the hillsides, including I think myself, screamed when the black body of the moon detached from the sky and

rolled over the sun. But something else was happening at that same instant, and it was this, I believe, that made us scream.

The second before the sun went out, we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was

upon us like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the

monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon.

I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1800 miles an hour.

Language can give no sense of this sort of speed.

Seeing it and knowing it was coming straight for you

was like feeling a slug of anesthetic shoot up your arm.

If you think very fast, you may have time to think, soon it will hit my brain.

You can feel the appalling inhuman speed of your own blood.

We saw the wall of shadow coming and screamed as it hit.

It was as though an enormous loping God in the sky had reached down and slapped the Earth's face. Nice. Annie Dillard reading from Total Eclipse, the essay was included in her last collection,

The Abundance. I've always thought that 90% of our readers read the cartoons first and the other 10% are probably lying.

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