By viewing eclipses, one can, in a way, travel back in time, since nearly identical eclipses happen every eighteen years, eleven days, and eight hours. He’ll have a chance to view the 1970 eclipse properly on April 8, 2024. The path of totality, looking virtually the same in the shape it will inscribe on the Earth’s surface, will have shifted slightly to the west, so instead of driving to Nantucket, he and Saskia will be able to see it in western New York. He doesn’t want to curse the luck that he doesn’t believe in, but he can’t help imagining that they will still be together. He wishes his mother could be there, partly to see the eclipse that she missed, and partly to give her a chance to change her opinion about Saskia. As an adult he became his family’s failed peacemaker, and he realizes he’s still trying to carry out that mission, even though everyone else in his family is dead.
Ten more minutes. There was a contrail in the sky that was worrying him, but it has drifted south. The sky around the sun is completely clear. This eclipse is going to be a beauty. Saskia’s first! Humans are so fortunate to have such a large moon. As is all life on Earth, probably—such an unusually massive satellite has prevented the Earth from undergoing occasional chaotic motion in the tilt of its axis. A plausible theory proposes that complex life might not have arisen if the seasons had been as unstable as they would have been without the Moon. And for humans, who love to look skyward and dream—and surely their dreaming gave birth to astronomy—there’s the sheer coincidence that, while the Sun’s diameter is 400 times that of the Moon, the Moon is 400 times closer to Earth. Thus this nearly perfect alignment. What are the chances? The Mediocrity Principle goes out the window again.
It won’t last very long, cosmically speaking. The Moon is moving away from Earth about four centimeters each year, so in 600 million years, there will be no more total eclipses. Solar radiation will have increased by 5 percent, leading to an increase in global mean temperature of ten degrees Celsius. There’s no way to predict greenhouse warming from this remove, but there’s a good chance life will have retreated to the oceans by then. If not, then probably during the next 200 or 300 million years. Complex life on Earth is about halfway through its allotted span. What, too, are the chances that his life would occur at this halfway point?
At that thought, all of a sudden, just as it happened to him last year when he was driving to the recycling center, his awareness suddenly blooms. An elation, an inflation—something firing ecstatically in the brain. He feels, really feels, that he is alive on this Earth, that he is standing at a fulcrum. This place is important, this moment is precious, something momentous is about to happen. One order will collapse and another, possibly a better, will arise. He feels as if he can actually sense the stretch of billions of years. Life on Earth has a new chance every few million years. It has dozens more chances to get it right. His nanosecond life means nothing, yet he feels incredibly lucky to be alive.
He looks at Saskia, sitting in the shade. She stands up and comes to him. She kisses him. “I know you want to be by yourself for totality. There’s a great view from the far end of the field. You should go there.” She points.
“Do you want to come with me?”
“No, it’s fine. Go on.”
He gives her a grateful glance and squeezes her hand. “Remember not to look with the naked eye until—”
“I remember.”
• • •
She watches him execute his little-boy wave in the direction of the young people and start off, periodically walking backward with his head up and the slot-shaped welder’s glass glued to his eyes. He looks like Gort, in The Day the Earth Stood Still.
She waits a few seconds, then also moves away from the young people, to the point where the pavement ends and the field begins. The darkness is rising faster. She looks through the glass and sees that the Moon is now covering almost all of the sun. She thinks of the Fenris Wolf and Ragnarok.
“Here it comes!” one of the young men calls out.
Saskia looks to east and west, north and south, to the ground at her feet. The light is failing uncannily, like a rheostat being turned down. It’s nothing like a sunset. The Moon’s shadow is approaching at 1500 miles per hour. Mark told her that if you stand at a high enough vantage point you can see the edge of the darkness racing toward you. It’s thrilling to feel how huge the Moon is, how fast she moves. You can almost imagine a roar.
Through the welder’s rectangle she sees the thinnest sliver, then a single strand of hair, then nothing. She takes away the dark glass and looks face to face. The total eclipse is a furiously glaring eyeball of deepest black, something sinister and evil. Or maybe it’s a wondrous black hole, shining at the edges with Hawking radiation.
She has two minutes. She gazes at the crystalized ebony vegetation all around, at the weird sky of glistening iron, at the black hole she has journeyed millions of miles to see. She is standing on an alien world, where the native intelligent life form is not self-destructive, where an insignificant creature such as herself has the luxury to worry only about her art and her loved ones.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Sarah Chalfant and Paul Slovak, for their support through the dry years. Presumably it’s a
