Sunday Pages: "A Solar Eclipse"

A poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Dear Reader,

Solar eclipses happen about once every 18 months—like how long it takes Netflix to drop a new season of a binge-worthy television series. And yet somehow, I’m 51 years old, and I’ve never seen one. How is that possible?

The answer is that solar eclipses are only visible in certain places on the planet. To witness a total eclipse, you have to be in what’s called the Path of Totality, which is somehow not the title of a book by Eckhart Tolle or an album by Megadeath. When Carly Simon sings, “Then you flew your Learjet up to Nova Scotia / To see the total eclipse of the sun,” it’s to convey how lucky that vain asshole is that he can do such a thing, how fortune seems to smile upon him.

It’s an astronomical slot machine: you pull the lever, and if you land on the eclipse itself, and the proper geographical coordinates, and—if that’s not enough—clear skies, then and only then can you experience this space oddity in all its dark glory. Here is a list of all the solar eclipses visible in New York from 1900-2100:

• January 24, 1925 (Total)

• May 10, 1994 (Annular)

• Aug 21, 2017 (Partial)

• April 8, 2024 (Total)

• May 1, 2079 (Total)

• July 23, 2093 (Total)

In 1925, my grandfather was 14 years old and living in Southern Italy, where the eclipse was not visible. In 1994, I was living in Washington, DC, where the eclipse was not visible. I don’t remember what happened in April of 2017, but I believe the weather did not cooperate. Unless I plan to take my Learjet to Nova Scotia or live to be 107, tomorrow is a once-in-a-lifetime chance for me to take in a solar eclipse. (In a related story, we are leaving later this afternoon so we can be in the nearby Path of Totality by 3:26 pm tomorrow.)

This is all celestial randomness, I know, but it’s tempting to look at the dates of the last two solar eclipses—August 21, 2017 and April 8, 2024—as bookends of a period of collective national madness. Maybe MAGA came to power seven years ago under cover of darkness, when the sun was blotted out of the sky, and tomorrow is the expiration date? There also seems to be a coded message in the places within the Path of Totality, the collection of second-tier heartland cities you have to change planes to fly to: San Antonio, Little Rock, Indianapolis, Dayton, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, Burlington, Vt.

I recall a “Sunday Pages” from September of 2022, one of my favorites, called “Welcome to the Simulation.” In that piece, I outlined a theory about how our reality diverged into an alternate universe somewhere along the line, and I proposed when exactly that happened:

[T]here are only two separate realities: the real one, which we are no longer conscious of, and the alternative one we’re living in (suffering through?) right now: Earth and Bizarro World. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that this soul divergence is exactly what happened. The question then becomes: when did the realities diverge? Where was the crossroads where the Scarecrow did his little dance? And no, it wasn’t the 2016 election—that wasn’t a single discernible moment. It had to be something else.

I argued that the moment of divergence was the rain delay in extra innings of the 2016 World Series, a game played in Cleveland—which just so happens to be smack dab in the Path of Totality. Maybe, just maybe, after the three minutes of darkness—when the stars are visible, when the planets appear, when the insects stop buzzing, when the crickets play their shrill music, when the cats and dogs freak out, when the temperature drops, when day becomes night for the duration of a pop song from 1962—the country will snap out of its collective madness, like the denouement of some film about demonic possession?

I know, I know: this is just a quirk, a bit of celestial randomness, and nothing more.

I like to imagine some proto-Greg Olear from ten thousand years ago. He doesn’t wear glasses but doesn’t need them, because there is nothing to read, no fine print to ruin his eyes. He is walking along, going about his day in the sun—perhaps scurrying to avoid being lunch for some apex predator—when out of nowhere, the moon begins its slow glide over the face of the sun, and the world goes dark. What goes through his mind? How can he not be terrified at the awesome, awful power of the heavens, blinding him? How can he think anything other than the world is coming to an end?

But we are smart, here in the 21st century. We know that solar eclipses are unique to Earth: because the sun is 400 times the size of the moon, and the moon is 400 times closer to us than the sun, the two celestial bodies appear to be exactly the same size in the sky. (The chances of that happening are vanishingly small.) We know why eclipses happen. We know the Path of Totality well in advance. We understand the science behind it, the physics, the astronomy, the geology, the meteorology, even the astrology. We have technology at our disposal that our ancestors could have never even dreamed of: video calls on handheld devices from the other side of the globe, vaccines that stave off pandemics, AI deep-fakes, smart refrigerators, eclipse glasses. And for all of that, for all we’ve accomplished, it is nothing—nothing—next to what some of us will witness tomorrow. A solar eclipse is nature’s way—God’s way, if you prefer—of saying, “Oh yeah? Watch this.” It is the ultimate trump card.

I leave you with this gorgeous Petrarchan sonnet by Ella Wheeler Wilcox—the poet who wrote the eternal lines “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone.” This poem was likely inspired by the total solar eclipse of July 29, 1878, or perhaps he one on New Year’s Day 1889, both of them visible in North America. Here, she argues that what we call a “solar” eclipse is really a gift of love from the constant consort of human beings, the moon:

In that great journey of the stars through space
     About the mighty, all-directing Sun,
     The pallid, faithful Moon has been the one
Companion of the Earth. Her tender face,
Pale with the swift, keen purpose of that race,
     Which at Time’s natal hour was first begun,
     Shines ever on her lover as they run
And lights his orbit with her silvery smile.

Sometimes such passionate love doth in her rise,
     Down from her beaten path she softly slips,
And with her mantle veils the Sun’s bold eyes,
     Then in the gloaming finds her lover’s lips.
While far and near the men our world call wise
     See only that the Sun is in eclipse.

Happy solar eclipse day! I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon…

---

ICYMI

Kurt Andersen was our guest on The Five 8: