A Solar Eclipse Reader

Hi everyone!

It’s almost eclipse day! In case you aren’t totally stoked, I thought I would send around a note I posted to substack with a selection of things to read before the solar eclipse.

One poem:

Two things from me:

• If you didn’t see it, I’m really excited to share an essay I wrote for Christianity Today on eclipses and the edges of night. Check it out at this link.

• If you are looking for an info dump on everything solar eclipse, you can read my last post here.

Three things that made me laugh researching eclipses:

• “The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, even God. The mind’s sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy. The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel. And, incredibly, the simple spaniel can lure the brawling mind to its dish. It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg.” — From Annie Dillard’s “Total Eclipse”

• From webcomic Randall Monroe, on clouds and eclipses: https://xkcd.com/2915/

  (see also this comic on how cool it is to see a total eclipse — the mouseover text reads: “A partial eclipse is like a cool sunset, a total eclipse is like someone broke the sky.”)

• And last, but not least, some literary humor from James Folta: Celebrate the solar eclipse with some of the best and worst ellipses in literature (and life).

Four quotes from literary giants:

• James Fenimore Cooper — “The Eclipse”: “I shall only say that I have passed a varied and eventful life, that it has been my fortune to see earth, heavens, ocean, and man in most of their aspects; but never have I beheld any spectacle which so plainly manifested the majesty of the Creator, or so forcibly taught the lesson of humility to man as a total eclipse of the sun.”

• Virginia Woolf — from A Writer’s Diary: “How can I express the darkness? It was a sudden plunge, when one did not expect it; being at the mercy of the sky; our own nobility; the druids; Stonehenge; and the racing red dogs; all that was in one’s mind.”

  (I couldn’t find a full text online, but it is quoted extensively in this article)

• Annie Dillard — “Total Eclipse”: “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it. … What you see in an eclipse is entirely different from what you know.”

• Chet Raymo — The Shape of the Night (from The Soul of the Night): “Sometimes, when the moon is just the right distance from the Earth, its shadow brushes the surface of the Earth as gently as the tip of a feather, and the eclipse of the sun is at the borderline between annular and total. The eclipse of May 30, 1984, was just such an eclipse… In Shelley’s poem… Earth speaks: ‘I spin beneath my pyramid of night, Which points into the heavens — dreaming delight… Under the shadow of his beauty lying, Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep.’ And the moon responds: ‘As in the soft and sweet eclipse, When soul meets soul on lover’s lips.’ On May 30, 1984, the moon interrupted the sun’s watch of light and warmth with a kiss so gentle it was barely felt.”

  (Unfortunately you’ll also have to head to your local library for this one since I can’t find it online, but the entire essay is excellent. It was an important influence in my Christianity Today reflection.)

Five (ish) relevant internet articles:

Three from Sky and Telescope, which has been doing some really helpful reporting, including the following:

• Live streams to watch the eclipse if you can’t view it yourself

• What planets and stars will be visible during totality

• and low-tech eclipse viewing.

Speaking of interesting ways to view the eclipse a new thing I learned about this year is that apparently you can use a disco ball to project the sun’s light. If you happen to have one handy, give it a try!

And two articles about Arthur Eddington’s famous 1919 eclipse voyage to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity: here and here.

Essentially, Einstein had this idea that gravity, rather than being a push or a pull, is a warping of space. His theory predicted that massless light would experience the same bending of its path as it passed the sun as a rogue planet or other massive object. But to test this prediction, astronomers needed to measure starlight close to the sun, something that’s impossible, except during an eclipse. One team of astronomers tried to test this using an eclipse in 1914, but were arrested as a result of the outbreak of World War I. The war put a hold on additional tests until, shortly after its conclusion, Eddington and colleagues were able to travel great distances to test whether Einstein’s crazy idea was right. You can read more of the story at the links above!

One of my favorite parts of the story is Einstein’s reaction. Reportedly, he was extremely calm, and when asked his reaction if he was wrong, he quipped, “I would have been sorry for the dear lord, because the theory is correct.”

Eddington, in contrast, reacted with a parody poem, which he shared at a dinner held by the Royal Astronomical Society:

Finally, a small concluding thought:

I’ve been struck that Dillard’s eclipse essay — which begins in dying, climaxes in terror, and ends in a sigh — is still the first essay include in her collection titled The Abundance. An eclipse, in the end, is dancing abundance — a gift that we might better see.