Though it’s true that if a church I am in happens to be crowded, and I end up closer to other parishioners than I would choose to be, I am ok with that, and in fact try to forget about it, and simply get on with what I am there to do, which is to be attentive and to participate in the celebration of the Mass.

The ‘real’ in this case involving my personality, and the way it prefers (when I’ve entered a church, and am looking for a place to sit) that I be at a distance from other parishioners, rather than in proximity to them.

Which I suppose isn’t a big deal, and hardly something to remark on, except to the extent that it reveals how one’s prayerfulness will show its shallowness or depth in its encounters with the ‘real’.

The sitting in a pew toward the rear of the church, for instance, is something I do because it makes me comfortable, not because I’m moved by humility or altruism.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. I ended up going to church in the evening. It was the feast of the Annunciation, which commemorates the appearance of the archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary. During Mass I sat in a pew toward the rear of the nave, which I guess is my habit. I try to be aware whenever I go into a church of all the things I’m doing out of rote psychological necessity, and, once I am aware, resist them. But doing so isn’t always easy.

One girl who happened to be standing near us, with some of her friends, gave us a pair of those flimsy paper glasses with the special lenses in them that can be used for observing an eclipse. A. and I took turns looking through them, handing them back and forth to each other. As we left the roof, to ride the elevator back down to our floor, we handed the glasses to someone else, some guy who we noticed didn’t have any and who was happy to use them.

Nothing unexpected occurred. The eclipse progressed the way I more or less imagined it would. There were many people on the roof during the time that A. and I were present, and everyone stood around or sat around looking up at the sky while making conversation.

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I’ll let you know how it goes, though I’m guessing nothing unexpected will occur.

In a few minutes A. and I are going to go up onto the roof of our building, to have a look at it, as it progresses over the tri-state area.

Everyone’s losing their marbles over it, naturally.

Today is April 8, and it is said that a solar eclipse will be visible across much of the United States, later this afternoon.

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Unless by that phrase (‘getting something’ out of it) we might mean having a little diversion, or distraction.  

Which I suppose means the book might meander somewhat, but what of it? Nobody who is reading this will be reading it for the purpose of ‘getting something’ out of it, I don’t think.

Which is to say, I allow the previous entry to lead me to whatever thought happens to occur to me, though I don’t put any constraints on, or have any expectations about, what that thought might be.

Each morning, as I sit down to write, I look at what I’ve written in the previous entry, and continue from there, though I don’t try very hard to maintain a connection between that previous entry and the new one.

Maybe that’s what it always was, from the beginning — a diary. So that it isn’t becoming like a diary so much as continuing as one.

This book is becoming something like a diary, I feel as though I should acknowledge that.

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