Yesterday, near Mason, Texas, I saw the total solar eclipse that traversed Mexico, the United States, and Canada. It was my first time seeing one. Like others before me I was stunned and amazed.
I know a lot of ink has been spilled about eclipses. Maybe you’ve also heard stuff like how “life-altering” they are, or been told “you have to see one!” I personally find such encouragements, after the first couple times I hear it, a little brow-beating. I think the reason I’m writing this is, in addition to acting as a note to my future self for memory preservation, I experienced some thoughts and feelings that I haven’t heard articulated elsewhere.
The surprising, weird aspect about the eclipse, for me, was the following bizarre fusion of emotions: intellectual disbelief, awe toward something beautiful, and also a certain gnawing, fear of something maybe horrible happening. All of this was involuntary. I should say, I consciously tried to “let go” psychologically and allow my senses to guide my thoughts, and not the other way around. But all of these thoughts and feelings came to me without premeditation or someone else telling me I could or should feel that way.
Of these three thoughts, the first to come to me, actually, was that mild, gnawing fear. I think this has been written about before: the brightness of day gradually and then suddenly fading to dimness (not total darkness, in this instance) felt very, very ominous. After about 80% of partial eclipse, the lighting of our surroundings were dim and wan. It reminded me of literary depictions of purgatory, such as Dante’s Purgatorio or Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. If my memory is right (it’s been a while since I’ve read these books, as memorable and amazing as they are), purgatory is described as a place where the sun never shows and it’s perpetually dim and sickly looking. Plants don’t grow well, I think, it’s mentioned in Bulgakov’s tome.
Anyway, maybe I’m inventing my memories (it’s fun - I recommend it!) but, basically, the terrain around me before, during, and after totality really reminded me of this. Today (April 9) I’m reminded also of the land that becomes Mordor in the Amazon Prime prequel to Lord of the Rings (with the Puerto Rican elf, and the guy who inserts the sword into the big plumbing system, thereby destroying civilization. This was never an issue under sewer socialism!). You get the idea, though - wan, sickly, pallid. “Blue hour in a gulag” vibes. Looking toward the south-west, whence the moon’s shadow raced toward us at 2,000 miles per hour, it was getting dimmer. And dimmer. And dimmer. And oh - cooler, too. In this way, it did feel apocalyptic - and in a way that I couldn’t rationalize away.
Speaking of rationalism, I experienced something that I haven’t heard as much: a sort of disbelief and awe in the physics of it all. It’s just so perfect and wonderful to see, let alone imagine: the geometry lining up, with the sun’s size, the moon’s size, the little ~150 mile wide shadow on Earth, and us humans watching. It’s so simple. But my only words and feelings during totality were of pure disbelief and shock. I have a record of this because I recorded a voice memo on my phone before, during, and after totality, and I also recorded video starting ~10 seconds before. I remember this well, but it’s amazing to hear myself on the audio saying, “oh my gosh” … “what the heck” … “that is so weird!” I was just dumbfounded. Looking back on it, I find this interesting, because it’s clearly not rational at all. We all knew this eclipse would happen, we’ve seen photos, it makes sense physically. Eclipses have been understood, and predicted, for hundreds of years. Anyway, as a former student of physics in undergrad, I just love how something so physically elementary - a shadow - can be so marvelous to experience.
I think the nerd in me (physics major) was especially fascinated and captivated by this aspect. I was brought back to a science project I did in 6th grade. It was about Earth’s seasons; the Coriolis Effect, the planet being tilted as it orbits the sun. In addition to having a tilted axis of rotation (relative to the axis of revolution around the sun), Earth’s orbit also isn’t perfectly circular. Digression: we are closest to the sun in January, resulting in Australia having especially brutal summers. It’s right around the Australian Open, I think (late January). Perhaps this is due to the higher rates of melanoma there? That is pretty multifactorial - ozone, sunscreen usage culture, skin fairness, etc. - but I have wondered about this. End of digression. That said, the eclipse made me very happy that the moon was “perfectly” aligning with the sun in that moment. What is the source of this joy? It’s both cognitive and non-cognitive: based on an intellectual concept (orbits, post-geocentrism) that has only existed a few thousand years, and yet my preference for a “perfect” lunar orbit is aesthetically arbitrary. It’s just beautiful, for some reason, when it happens to line up in the way it does. Part of me wishes the moon’s orbit was in the same plane as ours with the sun, so it would happen all the time. At least it happens with the frequency with which it does.
Lastly - and I think this is probably least interesting to hear but most profound of what I felt - I felt a sheer awe and amazement at it all. I didn’t expect to feel this way, at all. Eclipses are not absurd, complex phenomena. It’s just a shadow. I think I basically described this feeling in the previous paragraphs. But since I’m not editing this draft as I write it, the bleeding of one topic into another will stand.
Some other observations. Animal behavior was unchanged with one exception - birds. Birds started chirping more around 90% partiality, as it was much dimmer. I saw a handful of birds of prey gliding over the Texas hills nearby, which I hadn’t seen earlier. The main animals that went crazy were us homo sapiens.
On the beauty of rare, natural phenomena
While reading about solar eclipses, I somehow - sorry, I forget - came across a satellite project to artificially create solar eclipses. Don’t get too excited (or weirded out) - it was for a pair of two small satellites. One, about a meter wide, would occlude the sun while the second satellite, hundreds of kilometers away, would point a camera at the first one and collect data about the sun’s corona or other features.
This had me thinking: what if we could artificially engineer total solar eclipses? And if we could, should we? Would such an artificial eclipse be worse in some way? Of course there are negative impacts of any technology to consider - economic, health, etc. - potentially outweighing aesthetic or experiential benefits. However, an ecliptogenic satellite could be good for climate change. I’ve read that satellites are being explored as a way to reduce warming by blocking some amount of sunlight.
But here I find more interesting the moral and aesthetic questions. Personally, I would absolutely love to see an artificial total solar eclipse. I think more eclipses the merrier. I wish they happened more often. Like many other “values” questions like this, I am brought back to the moral concept of the “appeal to nature”: that which is natural is also morally superior. Some say recent technologies like Ozempic or e-bikes allow us to achieve happiness too easily, with not enough hard work or sacrifice. Others oppose things like genetically modified foods because they are simply “unnatural,” even when entirely safe and indeed healthier than heirloom cultivars. Perhaps some would oppose artificial eclipse technology on similar grounds. It could take the magic out of it, or worse, be offensive to the natural purity of the phenomenon.
Related to this moral value of naturalness is an aesthetic and economic value assigned to rare events or scarce goods. Being the geek that I am, I sometimes think about which foods I often eat that, if they were rare, I’d maybe cherish or even pay a lot more money for. If the rarity of something makes it more or less beautiful or enjoyable to me, I personally want to think twice or more why that is, and which common phenomena I’m not enjoying as much as I might if they were less common. (For me, citrus come to mind, especially oranges. I simply love them. Whenever I imagine them being as rare as a passion fruit (in the US), for example, I really appreciate them much, much, much more.) Perhaps there is a similar phenomenon happening here with Ozempic and weight loss. In addition to “naturalness” concerns about a weight-loss drug, there is the “rarity” of thinness. As weight-loss drugs become more accessible and thinness more common, will the perceived beauty of thinness decline accordingly? If so, would this be undesirable or harmful in some way?
In any case, there is an abundance of writing about eclipses. I hope this addition to the literature does not make the genre any more annoying to read than it is already. Because, well, I hope to write about more in the future, too - natural or not. 🙂