I wish I could witness the total eclipse on August 21, but I'll have to make do with a partial experience in my home city. It doesn't help that Annie Dillard wrote in her brilliant 1982 essay 'Total Eclipse': "Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him." Oh well.

Eclipses are dramatic because they connect polar opposites. We expect the sun and moon to revolve in harmony. When the moon obstructs the sun, it breaks every rule we know about nature. It's unbalancing. Dillard wrote that seeing the eclipse in Yakima, Washington was like "slipping into a fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering."

Night skies of textured velvet can also feel like fever dreams. Vaporous skies fascinate me. I took this photo through our windshield as we drove in a purple haze late into the night. It felt to me like clouds were devouring the moon—a midnight of the soul. Then I remembered that both clouds and moon were in fact lit by the sun.