"The sun was too small, and too cold, and too far away, to keep the world alive." Annie Dillard witnessed a total eclipse in 1979, and the essay she wrote about the experience--touching on mortality, the mind, the natural world, and much more--is just about the best piece of writing we've read in a long while. The Atlantic, which ran the piece in 1982, recently made the timely decision to republish it.