APRIL 8, 2024 – Blogger’s note: In light (“In the darkness”?) of today’s event, this post interrupts my current series, The Neighbors. That series resumes tomorrow with a particularly amusing installment. Stay tuned.
Did you hear about today’s solar eclipse across a broad swath of the United States? You didn’t? Well, I’m glad that at least you’ve now emerged from a two-week-long coma.
I was mildly aware of the celestial “happening,” but given that Minnesota was neither in the path of totality nor under clear skies, I wasn’t as jacked-up by the prospect as I’m quite sure I would otherwise have been. Perhaps I suffered “totality envy,” but I found myself scoffing and smirking at all the media hype leading up to the day’s spectacle astronomique.
I stopped short, however, of allowing my cynicism to eclipse a teaching moment. Yesterday, with our eight-year-old granddaughter on hand, I pulled sun, moon, and earth from the dining room centerpiece bowl—in earthbound reality, three decorative balls—and presented the basic science lesson about “how it all works.” She was unimpressed by (but not unfamiliar with) the science and saw a chance to be silly, insisting that the sun revolved around the earth and the earth around the moon, then laughing—at my expense—when I said, “But I just said . . .” There was a time, I reflected, when her jokester’s contention was official church dogma.
Today our neck of the woods was soaked in early spring gloom. So much for seeing the eclipse in these parts. Besides, we were on the outer edge of excitement. According to the internet, we were slated for only 70% of the total eclipse—and a sky in a thickly churlish mood. The height of the experience—or depth of darkness—was scheduled for 2:02 local time. Whereas the local meteorologists expressed disappointment with the cloud cover, I figured that overcast would enhance the effect and bring greater darkness to our mid-day, mid-country lives.
The event came and went, however, with no greater effect on lighting than a late afternoon summer thunderstorm; in fact, with far less effect than from angry clouds green with hail.
When on my noontime walk I encountered a neighbor, I called out, “Ready for the eclipse?” She responded with a half-smile and a shrug of her shoulders. When shortly thereafter eclipse reportage filled the kitchen TV screen, I wondered what the shoulder-shrugging neighbor would think of the hubbub.
Faster than a shooting star my “eclipse envy” turned into “good grief” disbelief. Network coverage from Mexico to Burlington, Vermont featured human beings of all ages and backgrounds ooo-ing and ahhh-ing, even drooling, it seemed, over a relatively common astronomical phenomenon.
“I feel the universe,” said the mother of a TV personality.
“It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen!” said a Minnesotan who’d traveled all the way to Mexico to experience the eclipse.
“I can’t believe it!” said another.
“We’re here to repeat our wedding vows. It’s the most incredible thing that’s ever happened to us,” another person said, nearly levitating as she and her grinning spouse intertwined their arms.
The people most awed by the event were the garrulous reporters, in high orbit with excitement.
After half an hour of this, I found myself carried away by the degree to which others seemed to be swept off their feet. I worried that many had never seen the sun or heard of the moon or perhaps, had never gazed at the nighttime sky or seen a star other than on a movie screen. Are people so unaware of the cosmos, I thought, that periodic alignment of sun, moon, and earth is the alpha and omega of their blindered existence? Have we so narrowed our view and knowledge of science that we are “wowed” by a solar eclipse but unaware of all the rest?
Meanwhile, in Crazy Town we have a congresswoman claiming that the surefire signs America (not Ukraine, Sudan, or Gaza) is going to hell in a handbasket are the earthquake (the one in New York, not the one in Taiwan) and . . . you guessed it—the eclipse (the one in the U.S., not the one in Mexico); which reminds me: at the end of my walk today, when the eclipse was a few minutes from its apogee, I noticed a robin at the top of a young maple tree in our backyard. It was singing away melodiously much to my delight until I realized that perhaps as in the case of the honorable congresswoman, the poor bird had lost its bearings—on account of the impending eclipse.
Okay, okay, I’m not quite the geezer grouch that my pooh-pooh post might suggest. I was truly excited about demonstrating the eclipse phenom to our granddaughter; I was awed by the photos of the corona flares around the moon’s silhouette; and yes, in truth, I was envious of the people who’d found ecstasy in the shadowy effect of sun, moon, and earth dancing in perfect time in cosmic relativity—or at least in our tiny corner of our solar system within the mini-spot of the Milky Way, one of 30 galaxies in the “Local Group”—a mere 10 million light years wide—in the Virgo Cluster, one of 1,300 (but could be 2,000) galaxies in the Virgo Supercluster . . . and so on and so forth.
As it turns out, I’m as astonished by the total solar eclipse as is any of the gob-smacked TV reporters at a loss for an adjective more original than “incredible.” But when it comes to natural phenomena, whether at our very feet or in the deep reaches of the cosmos definable only by the highest math and detectable only by the farthest-seeing devices imagined, designed, constructed, and deployed by earthbound scientists and engineers, I share the awe and inspiration that filled those skyward faces I saw today on television.
The only difference is that I gave no one reason to laugh at my eyewear.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
