The Total Solar Eclipse We Deserve
When Monday’s total solar eclipse gets under way, tracing an arc of temporary night across the nation, it will come as a profound relief. “Mr. Trump Makes a Spectacle of Himself,” ran the headline on a Times editorial earlier this week; only a greater spectacle, generated by some larger and far more marvellous force, might allow us to briefly look away.
The eclipse fits our historical moment disconcertingly well. It will be American from beginning to end. It starts over the Pacific Ocean at around dawn; becomes visible in Oregon at around nine o’clock; crosses a dozen states, from Idaho to South Carolina; and finishes in Charleston at four in the afternoon—the first time in our nation’s history that the path of totality will be visible exclusively to us. Weather permitting, an observer anywhere in North America will see at least something remarkable: the sun reduced to a sliver, the ground carpeted with crescents cast by the light as it passes through gaps in the leaves overhead. But the experience of full astonishment, the privilege of seeing the brilliant ring of the sun’s corona, will be confined to a dozen states that, with the exception of Oregon and a small slice of southern Illinois, voted for Donald Trump in November.
If Trump had a science adviser, which he doesn’t, he might be encouraged to tweet that no other President in history has presided over anything similar—not George Washington, not Ronald Reagan, not Barack Obama, not even Andrew Jackson. As a nation, we’ve seen total eclipses before, but they’ve been infrequent, many were washouts, and none were totally ours. The last time one visited the U.S., on July 11, 1991, viewers had to go all the way to Hawaii to see it, only to confront clouds. The first total solar eclipse visible in the new United States occurred on June 24, 1778; Thomas Jefferson, who was as interested in natural phenomena as political ones, wanted very much to watch it, for the thrill of precisely calculating his own longitude, but it was cloudy in Virginia that day, too. Jefferson tried again with the total solar eclipse of 1806, when he was President: cloudy again. The last time a total eclipse occurred only in America was on June 13th of the year 1257, when the U.S. had no states and the only Americans were the original kind.
If the President had a Shakespeare adviser, which he probably doesn’t, he might be concerned by the optics of an eclipse. “These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us,” Gloucester tells Edmund, his malevolent son, in “King Lear.” “We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.” We’ll see how the Great American Eclipse of 2017 goes. In July, Wade Caves, an astrological consultant, posted a twenty-nine-page analysis of the coming event that forecast trouble: “This is a time of great strength for Mars, when he is renewed in his energy and force, and with almost a blind naiveté dispenses martial virtue without discretion.” (Caves also noted that Trump was born during an eclipse, albeit a lunar one.) What’s most striking about Monday’s spectacle, though, is the genuine excitement around it. The eclipse will be broadcast, live-streamed, tweeted. Millions of people are expected to drive to and plant themselves under the path of totality, forming a seventy-mile-wide, cross-country Burning Man, or whatever the conceptual inverse of Burning Man is—Corona Man, maybe. According to Newsweek, officials in several states are preparing for the eclipse as if for a natural disaster: “Port-a-potty shortages. Cellular blackout zones. Ambulances stuck in gridlock.” (This, too, is an American tradition: in January of 1777, George Washington, wintering over in New Jersey, warned his troops about an upcoming partial eclipse so that it wouldn’t “affect the minds of the Soldiery, and be attended with some bad consequences.”)
Think of Monday’s event as a celestially imposed national moment of silence, a two-minute reprieve for reflection and grace. It will be unsettling, its beauty fleeting and unworldly, but in it we will see the outlines of democracy: for a few moments, a small satellite will overshadow a raging star a thousand times its size. (Perhaps the sun considers this unjust, the verdict of a loser astronomy.) Our current President is a man who cannot stand to be upstaged, but this is one event that he can’t control. We should savor such opportunities while we can. Each year, as Earth slows in its rotation, the moon, our weary ally, edges an inch and a half farther away. In six hundred million years, it will be distant enough that it will no longer fully occlude the sun. There will be eclipses nonetheless, though not as glorious as the one approaching; we should be so lucky as to last long enough see them.
Watch our coast-to-coast live stream of the solar eclipse, starting Monday at 11:30 A.M. EDT.
