Totality or bust. That’s the attitude of the serious eclipse aficionado.
If that means gassing up the car and driving hours and hours to the middle of nowhere to find a patch of clear sky along the “path of totality,” so be it. A partial solar eclipse, even one with the sun 99 percent obscured, won’t incite the same intensity of awe, wonder, shock or — for some — the irrepressible desire to scream.
The writer Annie Dillard, in a famous 1982 essay in the Atlantic, perceived in an eclipse a mind-blowing derangement of human existence, with intimations of the end of the world. “Seeing a partial
