What does eclipse offer for nation’s future?
The year was 1504 — Feb. 29, to be exact — and members of the Arawak tribe on the north coast of the island we know as Jamaica were sick to death of their alien visitors from beyond the sea. Christopher Columbus and two of his ships had cast up on the island in June the year before, with shipworms gnawing through the planks of what had been a four-ship expedition. The undaunted explorer was on his fourth voyage to the New World.
The story goes that the Arawaks welcomed the castaways, providing them sustenance and shelter, but as the weeks stretched into months, half of Columbus’ restless crew mutinied. They began robbing and murdering the native people. The peaceable Arawaks withdrew, leaving Columbus and his men to fend for themselves. It wasn’t long before the stranded sailors were on the verge of starving.
Columbus hit upon a devious plan. Relying on a navigator’s almanac that contained vital astronomical tables, he happened to notice that on the evening of Feb. 29, 1504, a total lunar eclipse would block out the rising moon. He asked to meet with the chief, informing him that his Christian god was very angry and was about to show the Arawaks just how angry. He told the chief that three nights hence, the hand of God would pluck the moon out of the sky.
According to Columbus’ son, Ferdinand, when the eclipse took place, the Arawaks in a great panic “came running from every direction to the ships laden with provisions and beseeching the admiral to intercede with his god on their behalf.” The interlopers remained well fed and well supplied until relief ships from Hispaniola came to their rescue a few months later.
While we don’t know how Arawak people would have told the story — and they likely had their own knowledge of astronomy — they would not have been the first to respond to an eclipse with awe, with fear, with a sense that they were experiencing an omen. Nor were they the only people to experience upheaval after one. In 840, in Europe, a total eclipse sent Holy Roman Emperor Louis the Pious into such a distemper that he refused to eat and died a month later, plunging his empire into a civil war. From prehistoric cultures to the ancient Greeks to the Chinese who recorded the first textual reference to the phenomenon in about 1200 B.C., eclipses have broken through the mundane, leaving witnesses unsettled, in awe. (What if the sun or the moon doesn’t return?)
Depending on the weather, Monday’s solar eclipse promises to be even more awe-inspiring than the lunar event the Arawaks witnessed — and, we hope, a positive experience for the millions of people placing themselves in the path of totality. Awe is still our intuitive response. We can also take comfort in knowing that eclipses have not always portended doom and disorder. The 1878 total eclipse over parts of the Rockies and Texas inspired the pursuits of noted scientists and inventors, including Thomas Edison’s development of the light bulb. As David Baron writes in the book “American Eclipse,” the event galvanized this young nation “to embrace something much larger than itself — the enduring human quest for knowledge and truth.” May it be so again, in 2024.
Millions of us have been inspired to become umbraphiles (eclipse chasers). Millions have been making plans for years to intersect the zone of totality Monday for approximately four minutes of midday darkness. They will be unsettling minutes prompting birds to tweet in alarm, bats to emerge, worried dogs to pace. They promise to be inspiring minutes, prompting an awareness both of our insignificance and our connection to something larger than ourselves.
Car rental agencies have little to offer. Most hotels, motels and vacation rentals are booked up along the zone’s path across Texas and beyond. Delta Air Lines and Southwest Airlines are operating flights that promise to give passengers unobstructed views. Law enforcement is on alert, not knowing what to expect from the arrival of sky-watchers expecting something awesome.
Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has researched awe for the past 20 years. He celebrates what the visitors hope to experience.
“Those moments of awe are about as good for you and your body and your mental health as anything that you can do,” he told a Kansas public radio interviewer last year. “They benefit your immune system, your brain, your heart and your mind. And your social relationships.”
Melanie Rudd also knows awe. An associate professor in the marketing department of the C.T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston, she studies the experience of awe as it relates to consumer psychology. Perhaps more significant when it comes to awe, she has been on maternity leave this spring after giving birth to a daughter.
“Awe,” she told us, “requires a sense of vastness, which can come in many forms. There’s also a need for accommodation, for understanding that you’re connected to something greater than yourself. It’s self-transcendence.”
Both Rudd and Keltner report that feelings of awe nurture a sense of connectedness, not only to something greater but also to each other. In a nation that seems intent on tearing itself apart, that’s obviously a quality much needed.
Rudd, who grew up at the foot of magnificent Mount Rainier in Washington state, points out that awe is not confined to the spectacular. It’s an observation that may come in handy Monday, since clouds now seem likely to obscure the view. “I think what we have in the next couple of days,” she says, “as we pay attention to the weather reports, is an opportunity to recalibrate our expectations.”
No need for umbraphiles to run amok if the clouds obscure nature’s spectacle. With Rudd’s observation in mind, we hope they’ll notice all the other reasons for awe. That includes one another, stuck on the ground but turned to the heavens like the innumerable bluebonnets in bloom this spring, in the Hill Country and elsewhere. Stuck in traffic for hours after the event or waiting it out at campsites or roadsides, they may have a lot of time to appreciate the awesomeness of the flora and our capacity for shared purpose.
May those who look for the awesome find it, whether cloudy or not