Elizabeth Foulke’s essay “Totality” is in issue 49.2 of The Journal: A Literary Magazine (Ohio State University).

In “Totality,” Elizabeth thinks through the concept of totality by engaging with work by Annie Dillard, William James, Lewis Black, and others. It’s also a personal account of her trip to see the 2024 total solar eclipse and an attempt to put the transcendent into language. Here’s an excerpt: “Psychologist William James cataloged mystical experiences the way a biologist catalogs the species of moths in the Amazon rainforest. In a series of lectures that make up the text The Varieties of Religious Experience, James lists occurrences that transcend and elude hard science. A pattern emerges. He identifies four features that are common to mystical experiences, one of which is ineffability. James admits that the most useful classification hinges on a kind of lack. They ‘[defy] expression…no adequate report of [their] contents can be given in words.’ But we try.”