For A Few Hours, During The Eclipse, Everything Felt Normal Again

Joshua M. Patton
Aug 22, 2017 · 4 min read

Please help fund my independent work: https://www.paypal.me/joshuampatton

There are a lot of arguments to be made suggesting the United States has gone mad in the past decade or so, but on Monday it was true. For about five hours or so, the whole country went mad for the 2017 solar eclipse. What was really miraculous about this, however, was that for a few hours Americans seemed to be a lot less mad at each other.

All the broadcast and cable news networks went all out for their eclipse coverage. They had field reports from all along the path of the eclipse, and people who only were able to see partial eclipses (such as in my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA) watched their televisions and the skies alike.

It was also the first major breaking news event that wasn’t deeply rooted in politics. There were some mentions of it, particularly when the eclipse reached the East Coast and President Trump stood outside the White House to watch it. One NBC reporter, speaking to a man in Illinois who happened to be black, asked for him to comment about how the eclipse made him feel about the divisions in the nation. The man played along, saying that it felt good to have everyone coming together for something so simple as the movement of the moon.

Even the folks on “Eclipse Twitter” (which is how people generically refer to all the people tweeting about an event in real-time) were pleasant as opposed to “Politics Twitter” or really any other “Twitter” that is mostly people assailing each others’ mentions with pithy snark. For a few hours, most people stopped being suspicious, angry, and/or driven for a cause, and we all collectively looked up at the sky.

That’s the thing about people: for all we’ve changed and continue to change, there are still things that are universal about our species. In the age of speed-of-light communications, miracle cures, and on-demand everything, when the moon blocked out the sun in sky we looked up at it, just as our ancestors did one thousand or 10,000 years ago.

A celestial event is always a good time for perspective, for people to ponder their place not just in the world but in the larger universe. It’s serves as a reminder that we are simply clinging to this giant rock spinning violently around an even larger fireball in freefall around a giant black hole. And instead of allowing this fact to terrify us to our core, we gathered in parks and public spaces and cheered when the moon made it dark in the middle of the day.

I am reminded of a passage from Annie Dillard’s 1982 essay about a witnessing a total eclipse, in which she imagined how humanity’s ancestors from thousands of years ago must have reacted to a solar eclipse.

She wrote:

The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the Earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything. Only an extraordinary act of will could recall to us our former, living selves and our contexts in matter and time. We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our lives, but could no longer remember the way of them. We got the light wrong.

This passage says something about where we are as a society, both here in the United States and part of the larger world. Something has gone wrong. We got the light of liberty wrong, and its absence from the sky turned everyone into ravenous beasts, panicked and ready to draw blood. Only in this case, instead of the eclipse being the inciting event for this state of madness, it’s the (temporary) cure.

Something happened in the sky, and no matter what we were looking at before, as it unfolded we all turned our eyes heavenward (though, admittedly most people eyes were turned towards their TVs or computers at cameras aimed heavenward, but same difference). There were two lessons that came from the sky today. The first was a reminder that there are forces at work larger than our dreams and fears, and the second was that in the face of those forces sometimes all you can do is watch. But, we can watch together.

What do you think? Share your thoughts and reactions below.

Please help to support my independent reporting and analysis, if you can, by donating a few dollars to feed the writer. You’ll have my deepest gratitude and can even suggest what sorts of stories or topics you’d like me to cover.

)

Joshua M. Patton

Written by

Managing editor at ComicYears.com. Entertainment, culture, politics, essays & lots of Star Wars. Like my work? Buy me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/O5O0GR

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade