I was a freshman in college in the Boston area in the spring of 1970, and a solar eclipse was coming to Nantucket Island. A bunch of us guys piled into my friend George’s beat-up Plymouth convertible early in the...
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I was a freshman in college in the Boston area in the spring of 1970, and a solar eclipse was coming to Nantucket Island. A bunch of us guys piled into my friend George’s beat-up Plymouth convertible early in the morning to be first in the ferry line.
Ha ha. Not a chance. We were stuck outside totality.
READ MORE: Eclipse Mania
But we had a shot — at the very point of the elbow of Cape Cod, at the beach near Chatham, it would be 99.99 percent total — so off we went to the beach.
I had seen pictures of a solar eclipse first in a kids’ book on astronomy that I loved early in grade school. I was so disappointed that they were rare and small. I had to make do with lunar eclipses, which I thought were pretty cool. Now at last I was going to see the big time — a real solar eclipse was in reach.
It was more than I had expected. It was more than just the sun going dark — it was the stars coming out. It was the sudden silence of the birds as gulls came wheeling in over the ocean with no sound. It was the cold wind that blew in with it.
The dark was over quickly. It didn’t matter.
In the past seven years, it got easier to see them. In 2017, it took me only a five-hour ride to see the eclipse. My wife and I pulled into a McDonald’s crammed with about 100 people. People were tenting in its parking lot as well. It was in southern Kentucky, a mile or two from the Tennessee border. Folks with no frills, lots of kids — it was a country get-together. When totality came in, everyone clapped and cheered. We drove away having felt among friends (and then it took about 10 hours to drive home to Ohio).
Today, I could just go out on my front stoop. Almost three full minutes of totality — well, maybe two and half or so. Didn’t matter too much.
Eclipse at 3:10 p.m. (Shmuel Klatzkin/The American Spectator)
A friend stopped by for some eclipse shades; neighbors sat out in their lawn chairs. I snapped some pics, having gotten a filter for the purpose.
Everybody all over the town today was excited in a calm kind of way. Lots of smiles, not party smiles, but a different sort. The local radio chat show was all about the eclipse — how the birds started to sing their morning song as the sun reappeared, and then, in response to a question, a farmer phoning in to say that the roosters crowed just like at dawn.
What got to people? It was as if the darkness in the middle of the day brought light. Suddenly, this ordinary world was shown as a majestic and beautiful. There is more to it that a watchmaker’s mechanism, left to run by itself. Isaiah’s reflection seemed a lot closer to home: “Lift your eyes up on high and see who created these!”
We can’t afford to shut out the numinous, the awesome, to choose to give our attention only to the machines that clamor and insist they are all there is.
As the astronomer Arthur Eddington once said in gentle irony, “Show me the square root of a sonnet.”
We are in the midst of something far greater than ourselves. In the midst meaning that we are of it and within it, for all that we are unique and individual. That we are merely observers of this great reality is an indulgent fantasy masquerading as wisdom. We are, rather, participants, choosing to attend to it, and our attention shapes the world we live in, for better or worse.
A little bit of darkness interrupted the day today, but it brought much to light. People are thinking and talking. In a grim year of war and belligerent politics, the eclipse seized our attention effortlessly.
God is here too, even in the darkness. He beckons us through that darkness, to emerge from that darkness together into a new light.
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