In the last few seconds before totality, you feel as if you are being swallowed by some gigantic whale. It panics the world of nature. The cows cease their grazing, form a line and march back to their barn. Daytime has become night and the temperature falls. You feel something of what ancient people must have felt as they watched the sun, on which they depended for warmth and light and life itself, disappear.
Darkness brings solemnness and some fright.
All was dark on that crucifixion day so long ago, like the darkness of an eclipse. He said that people who think like that suffer from the blight of contemporaneousness and believe that the world began last Saturday night. One example was a jonquil blooming alongside his house with its joyful yellow and green. He called it the best news in the world of nature, a sign of spring after a long winter. The moon can be seen the same way.