WITNESSING THE ECLIPSE OF THE SUN AND THOUGHTS IT INSPIRED
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. - Carl Sagan
I traveled with my partner and two friends to Lake Placid, New York, on the weekend of April 6th to witness the total eclipse of the sun two days later. Astronomy has enchanted me since my childhood, and the eclipse is something I could not miss.
Millions of people headed to the zone of totality, which spread in an arc from Mexico through Texas to the upper Midwest, northern New York, New England, and then entered Atlantic Canada before leaving North America as it moved beyond the Newfoundland shore.
Before the appointed hour in mid-afternoon Monday, it was a nail-biting experience. Clouds obscuring the event would leave millions of people, many who traveled long distances and paid exorbitant rates for hotel rooms and Air bnbs badly disappointed. I was among the anxious ones. Annually, the northern Adirondacks experience over 70 percent cloud cover. Texas would seem a more promising place. I started consulting, I admit obsessively, weather predictions a week in advance, knowing full well that with such lead time, such prognostication is badly unreliable. As the date approached, meteorological reports improved and sunshine was predicted for Monday. Then it got worse. The day before was to be cloudless, and indeed it was glorious. But the reports indicated that on Monday the morning would be clear, but as the day progressed, partly sunny skies would turn to mostly cloudy in the afternoon. Most threatening was the needed two hours for the duration of the eclipse from shortly after 2:00 pm until 4:30.
I began to manage my heightened emotions. I became reconciled to the reality that our journey to the Adirondacks would be a pleasant time away in a lovely place, but the eclipse would be a missed opportunity, taking its place among many of life's disappointments. So it would be.
But my ruminations turned out to be a salutary lesson in the futility of what my late wife, Linda, referred to as “negative projections.” Looking ahead I too often assume that things will turn out badly, perhaps readily overlooking the reality that unseen dynamics not infrequently alter the projected course of events in more positive directions. We most often cannot know the future, and this ignorance can be a good thing in leaving us to experience more benevolent outcomes than we would otherwise assume.
So it was on the day of the eclipse. The day started bright and sunny as predicted, and indeed clouds began to accumulate. But whereas I assumed that “cloudy” denoted heavy, gray, opaque clouds, I turned out to be happily mistaken. The clouds that slowly appeared in the sky were few, high, and wispy. Large swaths of sky were a beautiful blue and left unobscured.
The sun shone brightly in the south about 45 degrees above the horizon. We merely had to walk across the street, where we could make use of a stone ledge to lean on and look up. There were pockets of people along the stone wall, others behind us on the tennis court, and beyond people gathered on the lakeside beach, engaged in low-key eclipse parties. Other folks were ambling across the streets heading toward their viewing destinations. The number of people amassed in a small town verified that this was a big event.
For a short while, eclipse viewers comprised a loose community of strangers, all inspired by a common interest and a tense sense of excited anticipation as the hour drew near. For a few precious minutes, the preoccupations of life were suspended. Practical concerns were pushed aside. For a few blessed moments, I could jettison the dread of the political nightmares that continually consume me. I took special delight in seeing families with small children carrying their eclipse glasses in hand. I contemplated that they would soon have an experience they would remember for the rest of their lives.
Our eclipse glasses blocked out all light except the brilliant glare of the sun. Through the glasses, the sun appeared as a yellow-orange orb, bald, almost round, and smaller than anticipated.
The eclipse began at 2:33 pm with the moon, completely black, taking a small bite of the sun on the lower right side. The moon began to slowly devour the sun as it inched its way to the upper left. As it did, the sun's surface changed its shape. Someone noted that it looked like a Pac-Man figure. With the sun almost totally covered by the moon, its surface was reduced to a tiny arc resembling the glowing tip of a fingernail. We knew that the magical moment was about to strike.
And then it appeared – totality! With the sun completely covered, we could remove our protective glasses, and remain transfixed for two and half minutes by a unique and glorious phenomenon utterly discontinuous from ordinary experience.
Perfectly covered, the sun's corona appeared surrounding the blackness that was the moon. Its solar atmosphere appeared faint and ill-shaped with a short spear pointing upward. A red jewel briefly appeared at the moon's bottom, most likely a sun's ray jetting through a lunar crevasse. The temperature began to drop well before totality. The surrounding environment grew darker. But the darkness was strange; a pervasive, still grayness covered the landscape.
The excitement was intermixed with the anticipation that the event would soon end. And in a flash, the sun reappeared, so brilliant that even the tiniest slither of sunlight instantaneously turned night into day again.
The eclipse cannot help but inspire reflection. I am admittedly somewhat of a romantic. An eclipse is a cosmic event and contemplation of the cosmos in its infinite reach inspires the realization of our extraordinary insignificance in a universe that is incomprehensibly vast. But what moves me more is the realization that beyond our everyday preoccupations and worries, nature is totally indifferent to our concerns. It is this indifference, in its austerity, that I find oddly attractive. It is a source of transcendent contemplation, wonder and awe, and often beauty.
My thoughts have turned to my favorite philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century rationalist whose philosophy was formed in the Age of Science. Spinoza, in his radical thought, was two centuries ahead of his time. In what was a monumental heresy in an age still controlled by the authority of religion, Spinoza, through logical deduction, declared that there was no God that stood outside of Nature but God and Nature were one and the same. Hence Spinoza's universe is one devoid of a divine custodian, devoid of a personal deity who both created the world and us within it. There is no supernaturalism, no divine purpose, no miracles, no supervening morality in Spinoza's universe. Humanity is not created in the divine image. We do not possess a soul or any attribute that sets us apart from all other creatures and inorganic objects. We are part of the fabric of Nature and nothing else. And Nature is all there is and there is nothing outside of Nature.
Moreover, for Spinoza, there is no contingency in Nature, no happenstance. Spinoza's universe is one of exceptionless determinism. Reality is rationally ordered. Everything that occurs is an effect of preceding causes.
But we are not hapless, passive entities, merely subject to external forces far greater than we are. Spinoza asserted that through the correct use of reason we can gain a glimpse of how Nature is rationally structured, and this rational understanding can be a source of empowerment and sublime happiness.
Again, God is Nature, and as thoroughly natural creatures we are embedded in the web of Nature. As such, we find that Nature is impersonal and thoroughly indifferent to our interests. To my mind, the elegance of Spinoza's thought gives rise to two somewhat contrary ways of relating to the natural world. Noting Nature's independence from our concerns and interests, Spinoza's philosophy inspires in us feelings of the austerely sublime. In an elegant phrase, Spinoza states in his magnum opus, The Ethics, “He who loves God (think Nature) cannot strive that God should love him in return.” In short, through understanding the rational order of things we can come to know Nature, and that knowledge is a form of sublime love. There is also an element of selflessness to this type of love. I surmise that scientists, mathematicians, and numerous philosophers understand such love that emerges from the objects of their inquiries and contemplation. It is the independence of the natural world, its indifference to our concerns, that, given my temperament, I find spiritually uplifting, perhaps paradoxically so. Nature becomes the source of transcendent beauty, an object of contemplation and not of our use and exploitation.
I believe that Albert Einstein had these feelings about our relation to the universe and the sublime satisfaction that comes from being able to discern order behind the manifest appearance of the world as we experience it on the surface. Einstein, who often remarked that his religion was the religion of Spinoza, touched on these feelings when he noted,” The individual feels the futility of human desire and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought.” Again, nature is indifferent to our interests and desires. I believe there is a sublime austerity that, in an apprehension of Nature, its order, its necessity, and its grandeur, we can also sense that we are part of a reality much greater than ourselves.
It was basic to Spinoza's thought, as noted, that we are natural beings who are part of nature. As the astronomer Carl Sagan famously stated, “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff. ” “The cosmos is within us.”
I return to the eclipse. It has inspired in me these two responses, ostensibly contradictory, with disparate insights that meld together. I stand in awe of the grandeur of nature that operates by its own laws totally apart and indifferent to the mundane concerns that so pervasively govern our practical lives, our emotions, and our purposes and which we imbue with misplaced significance. We cannot use or exploit the eclipse of the sun. It stands on its own terms untouched by us, and this is essential to the awe that it inspires.
But at the same time, I feel a connection with those cosmic realities, knowing that both they and I are components of the same natural world. That the solar eclipse - the sun the moon, the stars beyond – and I are all manifestations of the encompassing realm of nature is no less a source of abiding inspiration.
Thoughtful reflections on Nature.