Of course, astronomically speaking, totality is nothing more than a fortuitous geometric happenstance. The Moon insinuates itself perfectly between Earth and the Sun, casting a small shadow on our spinning planet. Dates and times and the extent of the shadow’s path as it races across the globe can be computed for millennia into the future. After playing with Styrofoam balls and projector lamps to grasp the “how” of totality, students can learn of the Saros cycle, the distinction between annular, partial, and total eclipses, and other practical details.

To really get totality, to fully grasp why people like Russo and Mr. Eclipse, Fred Espenak, and hundreds of others bounce across the globe to spend scant minutes standing in the Moon’s shadow as often as possible, you need to witness it.

“Some... celestial event... no... no words, no words... to describe it,” Ellie Arroway, the determined astrophysicist in Carl Sagan’s Contact, utters upon being the sole human witness to a spectacular celestial event. “Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful... beautiful... so beautiful, so beautiful. I had no idea.”

Indeed it’s hard to understand why something as simple as a chance alignment could inspire poetry. Even Billy Collins begins his poem “As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse” in a rather ho-hum fashion that perfectly encapsulates the classroom eclipse, detailing how he creates a model of our solar system using an orange for the Sun, a marble for the Earth, and an aspirin for the Moon. Does it describe the experience, though? In the poem’s title seems to be a sarcastic response: “As if…” But the poem continues,

I get a glass from a cabinet,

open a bottle of wine,

then I sit in a ladder-back chair,

a benevolent god presiding

over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing

a homemade canticle of thanks

for this perfect little arrangement”

The speaker becomes gradually inebriated —­ literally and figuratively — by the whole affair, marveling at the precise harmony of the heavenly spheres.

Then comes the feeling of being one with the whole of the universe. People who have witnessed totality understand this. We know that tears are shed as total strangers hug each other. We know the feeling of drunken euphoria as totality sets in. In Collins’ piece, the joy and gratitude and interconnectedness shine through:

Then I fill my glass again and give thanks for the trout, the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing the room full of shadows, as sun and earth and moon circle one another in their impeccable orbits and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.