In the days leading up to the solar eclipse, I carried around Blindness by José Saramago. Whenever anyone asked me about it, I detailed the novel’s premise surrounding an unexplained epidemic of blindness. “It’s contagious,” I said. “A milky white blindness that strikes after exposure to another blind person.”
Someone asked me how this blindness is transferred—by touch? By bodily fluids? And I had to say no, the blindness seems to spread by mere proximity, or when a blind person places her unseeing gaze on another.
“Let’s say I’m already blind,” I explained. “Just by standing here having this conversation with me, you’re infected. It might take hours or even days before it catches up to you, but eventually, you’ll go blind, too.”
For some reason I always explained the novel like that, by making the blindness a personal threat to the other person. By making myself the destroyer of sight.
*
The night before the eclipse, my husband and I checked into a hotel in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Every room of every nearby hotel was booked, the parking lots overflowing with cars bearing out-of-state plates. That night we drank mint juleps with bourbon we’d bought in Louisville and used fabric paint to make our own eclipse shirts. In our car waited a cooler, a pinhole viewer, two folding chairs, sunscreen, snacks, and gallons of water.
We woke early to drive the short distance to Cross Plains, Tennessee, where we pulled into an already busy park just after 7:00 a.m. It was hot and then hotter. We toiled away the hours by walking into the tiny town. The pharmacy served sundaes and malts, the gas station offered free parking, and the bank hung a sign reading, “We will be closed from noon until 2:00 p.m.” On our walk back, we stopped to chat with a man and woman preparing to sell hamburgers and hot dogs in their front yard.
“How long have you lived in Cross Plains?” I asked the man.
“Nearly my entire life,” he told me. “I say ‘nearly’ because I’m not dead yet.”
We wandered back to the park and picked up our eclipse glasses, which were included in our admission for a special concert surrounding the eclipse that’s been in works since 2007. The temperature continued to soar. We dragged our chairs into the shade and drank Gatorade. The occasional drone and then a police helicopter drifted above us. Cars continued streaming into the park, filling all the spaces and edging into the grass.
I pulled out my laptop and opened my novel draft. I settled on the goal of fixing a single transition within a single scene. That would be enough for this day.
Overhead, the sun blazed on.
*
In Saramago’s novel, the blindness epidemic, also known as the white evil, is without cause or explanation. It is merciless, and it strikes absolutely everyone save one woman who mysteriously retains her sight. That stroke of good fortune comes at a cost: this woman must perpetually wonder if and when she’ll descend into milky white oblivion along with everyone else.
As society breaks down around her and her companions, she says, “I am not a queen, no, I am simply the one who was born to see this horror.”
The sentence doesn’t really end there. Like so many sentences in Blindness, it goes on, breathless and persistent, pushing against the cloudy void.
*
In Cross Plains, the moon began edging in front of the sun, making a bright crescent. I pressed the special glasses against my face. I kept worrying I would accidentally look up with my bare eyes and then find myself unable to look away. I felt drawn to danger, to the call of the void.
My thoughts turned to ancient civilizations. I imagined how people living back then would experience a total eclipse. What a mystery it must have seemed, what a horror. A miracle, a message, an omen.
We grew closer to totality. The temperature started to drop. Shadows sharpened. The light took on a strange quality, sometimes looking green, sometimes tinged mustard. Unease prickled through my body. I understood the eclipse, why and how it was happening, and yet some instinctual part of me railed against it. The sun was not meant to go down in the middle of the day. The stars were not meant to come out in early afternoon.
As I tilted my head to view those stars before totality, I accidentally caught a full flash of the sun with my unprotected eyes. I quickly looked down again, but it was too late. I had done exactly what I’d feared: looked straight into the blinding glare and allowed a stab of sunlight to enter my eye.
*
At one point, the characters in Blindness come across a writer who has persisted in his craft despite being blind, despite the world falling all around him.
“The blind too can write,” he says, and he explains how he presses a ballpoint pen against a soft surface and then feels the indentations on the page.
There in Tennessee, after the sun flashed in my eye, I thought of my own novel. For a few seconds, I indulged in the terror of imagining myself blind. Life would go on, and surely I’d find a way to continue writing. I could press hard enough to make indentations. I could feel my way in the dark.
*
At the moment of totality, the crowd in the park gasped.
“Look, look,” my husband said, and I looked up to see the moon’s black face staring at me, the sun’s corona astounding and bright.
I couldn’t believe we were in totality, I simply couldn’t. Everything was too brilliant, too spectacular. Blinding. I felt a catch in my throat and my hands started to shake. I stared straight at the eclipse all while believing I was looking directly at the sun.
“It can’t be total,” I said, and I looked away. I pushed the eclipse glasses to my face, but through them I saw nothing.
“Look,” my husband insisted. All around me, people were staring full-faced at the eclipse. I looked again, and my chest cracked, and I was not myself.
We’d brought binoculars so we could get a closer look at the corona, but I left mine on the ground. To take the time to pick them up or adjust the eyepiece would be a waste, plus I couldn’t bear to have something between me and what was happening in the sky. The beauty was indescribable, it was so glorious I was shaking, and still I didn’t fully believe it was safe.
I am blinding myself right now, I thought as I stared. I won’t know it until later, but I am making myself go blind.
*
In Blindness, the sighted woman entertains her companions by reading aloud to them.
Saramago describes her reading as “that long thread of sound that can last into infinity, because the books of this world, all together, are, as they say the universe is, infinite.”
*
We had more than two minutes of totality, but if you ask me now, it lasted mere seconds. It flashed by, and the moon kept moving, and then we had to look away for real and the sky got bright and hot again.
In my memory, the eclipse was massive. The moon filled a huge portion of sky, the corona spreading out and out and out, all of it filling my field of vision. I admitted this to my husband, telling him that when I tried to recall the eclipse, it was impossibly large, looming. He said yes, that’s how we experience the things we focus on.
What I focused on in the coming hours was this: that I somehow, inexplicably, harmed my eyesight while viewing the eclipse. Maybe our protective glasses weren’t the right kind. Maybe my accidental glance at the sun did more harm than I thought. Maybe I’d been right when I first assumed the eclipse wasn’t yet total.
Maybe I’d end up just like the characters in Saramago’s novel, unknowingly destined to wake up blind.
*
When I started reading Blindness, I was taken in by the rhythms and structure, the development of tension. I read with a writer’s eye. How did Saramago do it? What techniques might I make use of in my own novel?
But soon I stopped reading as a writer. Soon, I cared only about the characters. It became increasingly important to me that they found a cure for their blindness, that they’d one day be again able to see.
As I approached the novel’s final pages, I had no idea how it would turn out. In my imagination, the characters in the book remained blind and also regained their sight, both things somehow true at the same time.
*
It can take up to a day for eye damage to manifest after looking at the sun. While I understood intellectually that I had no reason to worry, I couldn’t help it. I’m a writer; imagining disaster is what I do. And so for hours after the eclipse, I carried around blindness.
I carried it with me when we left the park and drove south to Nashville. I carried it with me when we checked into a hotel, and when I looked in the mirror to see an odd sunburn pattern across the bridge of my nose. Despite the sunblock, my hat, and my persistence in finding shade, I’d suffered a burn. All my precautions couldn’t save me from damage.
My left eye, the one that had caught the full force of the sun earlier, felt a little strange. Was I seeing spots? I held my hand over first my right eye, then my left. I blinked hard. I rubbed my eyelids.
I was waiting for it.
*
One morning, the sighted woman in Blindness is reluctant to open her eyes after waking because she fears that doing so will reveal at last that she is blind. Saramago writes:
Through closed eyelids, when she woke up at various times during the night, she had perceived the dim light of the lamps that barely illuminated the ward, but now she seemed to notice a difference, another luminous presence, it could be the effect of the first glimmer of dawn, it could be that milky sea already drowning her eyes. She told herself that she would count up to ten and then open her eyelids, she said it twice, counted twice, failed to open them twice.
I opened my eyes. I closed them. I walked to the mirror again and looked. There was the sunburned patch on my nose. There were my eyes, looking glassy and bright. Hiding something beneath the surface.
*
Later that evening, our bartender shared her experience of seeing totality. She’d watched in her backyard and was still giddy, still high from the sight.
“That eclipse,” she declared, “has the power to change your politics or your religion.”
Minutes and hours ticked by. I drank beer and listened to music and looked at everything hard. By the time we returned to the hotel, I wasn’t worried about my vision. Instead, I went to bed hoping I’d dream about the eclipse so I could relive it. Already it felt unreal, a fiction I’d made up.
I fell asleep. I did not dream of the eclipse, or the corona, or the stars the came out midday, or the sunset around the whole globe of the world, or the shadow bands that raced across the pavement just after totality. Instead I slept in blackness. I slept blind.
And when I woke in the morning, I did not hesitate. It happened as sure as the turning of our planet, as certain as the moon orbiting the earth orbiting the sun: I opened my eyes, and I could see.