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Niagara on the Lake, Ontario, Canada
My virtue is that I say what I think, my vice that what I think doesn't amount to much.

Saturday, May 12, 2018

We had seen the world dead. This was within the power of nature - Virginia Woolf’s Account of a Total Solar Eclipse


On June 29, 1927 the Moon’s shadow swallowed the sun in southwest England. Virginia Woolf was traveling by train with family and friends when the eclipse occurred and recorded what she saw and felt in vivid detail.
We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment; and the next when as if a ball had rebounded the cloud took colour on itself again, only a sparky ethereal colour and so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down and suddenly raised up when the colours came. They came back astonishingly lightly and quickly and beautifully in the valley and over the hills — at first with a miraculous glittering and ethereality, later normally almost, but with a great sense of relief. It was like recovery. We had been much worse than we had expected. We had seen the world dead. This was within the power of nature.
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