Song of the Week: “You’re So Vain,”1 by Carly Simon - “Then you flew your Learjet up to Nova Scotia / To see the total eclipse of the sun.”2
On the morning of April 8, Taylor and I, along with four of our friends and two of their dogs, drove to the tiny town of Port Maitland, Ontario, around an hour and a half away from our homes in the Kitchener-Waterloo region.
We had chosen Port Maitland at random using Google Maps, based on three criteria: it was a beach town on Lake Erie, it was far away from major cities and tourist centers like Hamilton and Niagara Falls, and it was in the path of totality for that afternoon’s total solar eclipse.
We spent all day on a quiet beach, eating sandwiches, tossing a frisbee around, going for walks, and - from 3:18 to 3:21 pm - witnessing an astronomical marvel.
It was an entirely new and unique experience for me, and I have spent the rest of this week thinking about how to explain that experience to myself and to you, whether you were in the path of totality this week or not. Today’s newsletter is the result.
Looking Up
I’m not going to spend any time explaining how an eclipse works, or any of the science behind it. I’m not a scientist, and there are far better explainers out there, like this one from Hank Green answering common eclipse questions, or this one from MinuteEarth about how ancient civilizations figured out how to predict eclipses.
Instead, I want to talk about what it felt like to witness a total solar eclipse.
In 2017, I got to see a partial eclipse as part of the first day of orientation during my PhD in Boulder, Colorado. It was cool - wearing the little cardboard glasses that came with my orientation packet, standing on the roof of a building with faculty and newly-minted graduate students - but it wasn’t life-changing or anything.
I mostly remember it because that evening I walked across town to Trader Joe’s, and all the cashiers were making fun of Donald Trump for staring directly at the sun.
This eclipse was like that too, at first. I got our eclipse glasses back in February, straight from NASA, at a booth at the AAAS conference I told you about last week.
“What if they don’t work?” Taylor fretted a couple of weeks ago.
“If NASA is giving out fake eclipse glasses,” I replied, “Then I don’t know who to trust.”
Our eclipse glasses worked just fine, though, and we spent almost an hour reclining in our camp chairs, excitedly checking in on the moon’s progress every time the clouds cleared for a moment.
When I did look away from the sun for a moment, it was the most magical thing to look around and see everyone around me looking up too. It reminded me of sitting on a blanket in a field in a small town on the Fourth of July, watching the fireworks. It reminded me of watching the groom watch the bride walk up the aisle.
All week, I’ve encountered so many lovely photos and stories of people united by this shared activity, whether they traveled hundreds of miles or walked out onto their driveway and shared a pair of glasses with a neighbor. My favorite story was that of high school science teacher Pat Moriarty.
During his first year of teaching, in 1978, Pat told his students that the next time their town of Webster, New York was in the path of totality, he would host a watch party. His students laughed at him, because Webster wouldn’t be in the path till this Monday - 46 years later. Still, Pat repeated the promise to every class he taught, and with the eclipse coming up this year he made a Facebook event inviting his former students to join him. He didn’t think many people would show up, but more than a hundred students came, “equipped with lawn chairs, champagne, and their old yearbooks.” You can watch a short video about that reunion below.
I didn’t cry during the eclipse itself, but I cried that night when I got home and read through this wonderful interactive article from the New York Times, which features a map of totality and photos from major sites in Mexico, the United States, and Canada [gift link]. So many different people, in so many different places, all staring at the sky.
I love all the photos of people in their eclipse glasses, because absolutely no one looks cool in eclipse glasses. I love them because when you’re looking at the moon slowly devouring the sun, along with everyone else next to you, you don’t really care if you look cool. You know that no one is looking at you for very long, because you’re all too busy looking up.
Sonder
On the drive to Port Maitland, I scrolled through Spotify, looking for appropriately thematic music. After the obligatory listen to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (punctuated by swerving to avoid a swooping hawk and almost driving off the road!), I found a Spotify-created playlist described simply as “A playlist for the eclipse,” featuring a photo of the sun and moon in totality. It was called “Sonder.”
“This title seems really random,” I said. “I mean, all the songs are eerie movie soundtracks and vibey songs about space, but why sonder? What does that have to do with the eclipse?”
Sonder, as any Tumblr veteran will know, is a word coined in 2012 by author John Koenig in his project The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, inspired by the German sonder- (“special”) and French sonder (“to probe”). According to Koenig, sonder is:
the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own - populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness - an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
I’ve loved the concept of sonder ever since I encountered it, and thought of it often, during a particularly charming interaction with a stranger on vacation, or while walking in the city and seeing lights glowing high above. But that morning, I was confused - what did it have to do with the eclipse?
If anything, that day felt like the opposite of sonder. Instead of catching glimpses of mysterious lives and people on completely different paths, for a moment it felt like so many of us were on the same path. Our tangled lines became parallel. It’s an uncanny feeling, to see strangers and immediately know exactly what they’re doing, because you’re doing the same thing too.
The last time I felt that uncanny feeling this strongly was on March 11, 2020, the last day I spent on the CU Boulder campus before it closed for the pandemic. All day - whether I was hanging out in the graduate lounge or teaching my Introduction to American Lit class, walking across the quad or riding on the bus - every. single. conversation that I overheard was about the “coronavirus.” It was eerie.
This thing wasn’t just happening to me, or my friends, or even my community. It was happening to everyone.
It’s frightening, how that day seems so recent and so far away all at once. It’s already easy to forget how painfully lonely and yet paradoxically camaraderie-filled those first weeks and months of the pandemic were, before tests and protocols, vaccines and political feuds.
Thinking about it this week, though, I remembered my favorite commercial from those early days. Amongst platitudes and increasingly desperate reminders to keep consuming in “these unprecedented times,” Nike released the brilliantly-edited spot “You Can’t Stop Us,” which connects amateur and professional athletes across time and space in a message of solidarity and hope.
I’ve never been a sports fan, but I think I finally understood sports in 2020, when they were taken away. I understood the desire for that collective joy, and attention, and catharsis.
More than a year after that eerie March day, double vaccinated and on the cusp of summer, Taylor and I went to a baseball game with our friends Robert and Joe. It was my second baseball game ever. I don’t even remember who the Colorado Rockies were playing against, nor do I remember what happened in the game (like I said, I’ve really never been a sports fan).
What I do remember is that, as “Gangnam Style” played during one of the breaks, a man in the stands started wildly - almost manically - dancing, and the jumbotron stayed fixed on him the entire time, and the crowd cheered and screamed, and I screamed too until I started to cry, because we were back.
Totality
Like I said, at first, watching the eclipse this Monday was like watching it in 2017.
But totality? Totality is something else entirely. The birds, the onlookers, even the waves seemed to hush. The lights on the pier flicked on. Sunset stretched from horizon to horizon. The north star appeared. Where the sun should have been there was a perfectly circular void, encircled in white light.
It felt like dreaming. I had expected, planned, to cheer, but instead I found myself whispering “This is so weird” again and again, caught in the space between dread and wonder. This, I realized, was the “sublime,” a term I had carefully defined in so many studies of the Romantic period, but had never quite understood until now.3
It was an emotion The New Yorker’s usually verbose staff seemed to struggle to describe.
“The celestial light was so alluring, yet it didn’t feel safe to look at, and I kept looking away,” wrote Paul Moakley, from St. Albans, Vermont. Two hours away in St. Johnsbury, Jenny Blackman wrote only in fragments: “Silver everywhere, cold silver, and you see the sun for what it is - diamonds… My inability to form complete sentences in this majesty.”
Later, I couldn’t help but think about how I had been witness to something that connected me to every person in human history who had witnessed an eclipse before. Immediately following that thought was the realization that, for much of human history, eclipses must have been moments of sheer unbridled terror.
I saw several videos this week in which people purported to tell about one such moment of terror - a solar eclipse in ancient Ireland, recorded via carved spirals and fended off through human sacrifice.
Alas, dear readers, I am here again to burst your bubble - in trying to add detail to that story to tell it to you, I instead debunked it for myself and for you. As this Atlas Obscura article explains, while it is true that there are spiral carvings in a 5,000-year-old tomb in County Meath, Ireland, and while there was likely an eclipse visible near the site around 3340 B.C., we have no way of determining whether the two are connected. “The idea that you can selectively take a motif and then say it is depicting an event is mistaken,” says archaeoastronomer Frank Prendergast.
Still, it’s easy to imagine ancient people seeing eclipses as supernatural - a belief memorably exploited by the protagonist of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). The titular yankee, an engineer named Hank Morgan, accidentally time travels to the legendary court of King Arthur, and uses his knowledge of science and modern technology to convince everyone that he has magical powers.
Before he becomes influential, however, his strange ways almost get him burned at the stake - until, through a stroke of absurd luck, he remembers that there will be a total solar eclipse that day. Morgan, of course, claims to be a powerful wizard, and threatens to extinguish the sun forever if his captors do not free him.
It got to be pitch dark, at last, and the multitude groaned with horror to feel the cold uncanny night breezes fan through the place and see the stars come out and twinkle in the sky. At last the eclipse was total, and I was very glad of it, but everybody else was in misery; which was quite natural.
I said: “The king, by his silence, still stands to the terms.” Then I lifted up my hands - stood just so a moment - then said, with the most awful solemnity: “Let the enchantment dissolve and pass harmless away!”
There was no response for a moment, in that deep darkness and that graveyard hush. But when the silver rim of the sun pushed itself out a moment or two later, the assemblage broke loose with a vast shout and came pouring down like a deluge to smother me with blessings and gratitude.”
I’d like to think that I am much wiser than those frantic medieval peasants, but the truth is that when totality ended and the light began to return, I applauded. I think I was relieved that the sun hadn’t gone out forever.
Midnights
It was one of those days where, even as it happens, you know you’re going to be nostalgic for it forever.
Remember swerving to avoid a swooping hawk and almost driving off the road while Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” blared through the speakers?
Remember how I whooped when we got to the beach and there were still parking spots?
Remember walking out onto the sand and feeling like all of Lake Erie was there for us and us alone?
Remember how I texted you “do you believe in miracles” because I had to go to the bathroom and found a clean, well-stocked port-a-potty tucked behind an old stone church?
Remember how we all spontaneously held hands three minutes before the eclipse began because we were so excited?
It felt like New Year’s Eve. We gathered with the people we loved, and we all counted down together, and it happened when it was going to happen, regardless of what we did.
When the sky went dark, we hushed. We took photos. We kissed.
And then the light returned, and we cheered.
When it comes to totality, what should I add to my syllabus?
I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!
While we were driving home after the eclipse we put this song on as an example of a good alto karaoke song, and were shocked and delighted by the serendipitous mention.
Simon is likely referring to the total solar eclipse which took place on July 10, 1972, four months before the release of the song. Atlantic Canada would not see another total solar eclipse until this week.
