1:40 p.m. Now, since some of us will be missing the phenomena, due either to clouds or location, here is a vivid description of another eclipse. It's from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3. That eclipse, the first to be visible in Britain for over 200 years, was viewed in North Yorkshire on June 29, 1927.

"There were thin places in the cloud, & some complete holes. The question was whether the sun would show through one of those hollow places when the time came. We began to get anxious. We saw rays coming through the bottom of the clouds. Then, for a moment we saw the sun, sweeping -- it seemed to be sailing at a great pace & clear in a gap; we had out our smoked glasses; we saw it crescent, burning red; next moment it had sailed fast into the clouds again; only the red streamers came from it; then only a golden haze, such as one has often seen. The moments were passing. We thought we were cheated; we looked at the sheep; they showed no fear; the setters were racing round; everyone was standing in long lines, rather dignified, looking out. I thought how we were like very old people, in the birth of the world -- druids on Stonehenge (this idea came more vividly in the first pale light though;) At the back of us were great blue spaces in the cloud. These were still blue. But now the color was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red & black; there was only one light burning; all was cloud down there, & very beautiful, so delicately tinted. Nothing could be seen through the cloud. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue: & rapidly, very very quickly, all the colors faded; it became darker & darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank & sank: we kept saying this is the shadow; & we thought now it is over -- this is the shadow when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no color. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment: & the next when as if a ball had rebounded, the cloud took colour on itself again, only a sparky aetherial colour & so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down, & low & suddenly raised up, when the colours came. They came back astonishingly lightly & quickly & beautifully in the valley & over the hills -- at first with a miraculous glittering & aetheriality, 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."

What a bright, shiny beacon of a career Virginia Woolf had. I've mused on one of her near-to-last entries in 1941: "Haddock and sausage meat. I think it's true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down." In my first introduction to Woolf's diaries, A Writer's Diary, those were the very last words. It wasn't until the complete diaries were printed in the 1980s that we could read the few words that actually followed those last ones.

Why is it that the very book you want to lay your hands on is the one book you can't find? I have a habit of giving my books away, and so maybe the last of the Woolf diaries is safely on someone else's bedside table even as I search for it here. Trust me when I say that those words following the sausage-haddock statement shed no extra light on the darkness that was enveloping her soul. But still, you want to read them, to "gain a certain hold."

It's why they always interview the friends and neighbors of the quiet nerdy mass killer of the moment. It's why the newspapers printed the disturbing letters of Mark Barton, trying to explaining what no one can ever, really explain. Because when Virginia Woolf went down to the riverbank and filled her pockets with rocks or when Burford Whomever filled his Uzi with another clip, you wonder if they're thinking ... this is the shadow.