SOLAR ECLIPSE

WHEN YOU LOOK AT a solar eclipse, you can’t really look at it. If you stare right at it, you’ll go blind. It’s too bright to look at with the naked eye. You have to take measures, precautions to get the best, safest results. So instead look at the sun’s projection, the shadow created by light through, say, a tiny pinhole in one piece of paper onto another. Or the shadow of an apple tree’s leaves like gray almond slivers on the side of your house. Or between the cracks in your interlaced fingers onto the asphalt. The farther away from the surface you hold it, the larger and clearer the image. Others might try to use smoked glass as a filter to look directly at it. Don’t. It will only blur your vision. What you actually see are the traces of it. The sun masquerading as the moon in the shape of a waxing crescent. Really, you don’t look at an eclipse, you witness it. And what are you witnessing? It’s like you’re at the scene of a crime, or an accident. And maybe you are.

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