In the Path of Totality

On ascent.

Awe.

Darkness raced across the surface of the earth. The air cooled. Silence reigned.

Glory.

I cast my eyes upwards, to the heavens. Before me, I saw the black Sun itself, only the pure white corona majestically arcing out of the perfect disc of darkness. Above me, the sky turned suddenly to night, stars shimmering in the ring of darkness. At the edges of the horizon: daybreak as I have never seen it, as if the sun were rising from every direction.

Fear.

I could hardly look upon the now-hidden star. Such terrible beauty—I suspected that if I stared at the corona for more than a moment, I would be unable to turn away at all, that I would be blinded when Apollo’s chariot once more burst forth once more out of the shadow.

A reminder of man’s smallness. Before the raw power of nature, his insignificance.

But we are not nothing.

The world around us—the world of human life—is the realm of sweat, dirt, tears, blood, pain, death, and birth.

The realm of the stars is, by contrast, a realm of order and light. Clean and perfect but sterile. The heavenly bodies chart their courses with precision, the titanic forces of nature propelling them on an unflinching trajectory. We know today with near-perfect certainty the eclipses of decades and centuries hence. The heavens in perfect obedience follow the eternal law.

That is nature—inhuman, cold, and indifferent. And yet…

And yet without the sun’s bounteous energy and light, there would be no life.

Man has only two paths—he can ascend or he can decline. He can remain mired in the consuming drudgery of the everyday, his face aimed downward at the earth, at his stomach and genitals. Or he can raise his eyes upward, towards the heavens. He can aim beyond himself, at something higher, more perfect, more noble than his own mere being and survival.

In the light of the gleaming power of nature and of the stars, the best part of man is called upwards and outwards. We must aim high. We must ascend.

Be ye perfect as your father in heaven is perfect.

It is not enough to simply exist. We must do more. We must be more.

Ascend up from the muck, up from the refuse, up from the sewers that threaten to drown the whole world in filth.

Be ye perfect as your father in heaven is perfect.

We will never succeed fully. Our boundedness, our mortality, our inescapable finitude restrain us. But that should not stop us from trying.

Be ye perfect as your father in heaven is perfect.