Total Eclipse of the Sun: Freud’s On Transience Elucidates Achieving a Lifelong Goal

Solar Eclipse, Totality, On Transience. Psychology, Psychoanalysis of Everyday Life, 

Total Eclipse of the Sun: Freud’s On Transience Elucidates Achieving a Lifelong Goal

I “saw” my first partial eclipse when I was child of 8 or 10 in Florida.  My Mother made pinholes in sheets of paper and we used those to cast shadows and see the progression of the moon as it passed in front of the sun.  I was fascinated by both the celestial happenings, but also by the pinhole camera that we fashioned.

At about this time, I also began reading accounts of total eclipses at historically meaningful moments.  The one of those that stands out in my mind is reading that there was an eclipse during Joan of Arc’s burning at the stake.  A recent perusal of various online biographies turned up no evidence of such a momentous occasion, demonstrating my ability to manufacture memories – perhaps blending them together into an artful mélange of what should have been.  But the idea that the sun could be totally blotted out and that this would induce awe moved me to look up, when I was a ten year old boy, the date of the next eclipse in the US – and it was unimaginably in the future – from the 1960s to the 2000s seemed to be a traverse to the land of Sci Fi and never-never getting there.

In any case, I was excited about the possibility of observing not just a partial eclipse – not just seeing an eclipse through its shadow representation, but with seeing the thing itself.  In 2017, when we had the opportunity to see totality near here – within a three- or four-hour drive – I opted out, in part because I was teaching class and didn’t want to maroon my students and partly because I knew there would be one even closer in 2024.  So, in 2017, I went outside with my students – having taken a pin and lots of sheets of paper – and introduced my students to the wonders of pinhole cameras and partial eclipses. 

One of my students held up the sheet of paper to look at the sun through the pinhole and I had to shout “DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN”.  

I vaguely remembered from my days in Florida that the shadows of leaves acted as a type of pinhole camera and it turned out to be true – there were halfmoon suns all over the sidewalk.  God had invented the pinhole camera long before we did – and it was fascinating to discover that the shape of the sun determined the shadows all of the time – they are always round!

This time, we were not to be denied.  Because the reluctant wife has been commuting to DC a lot, she has lots of Hilton points, so we booked a room at the Embassy Suites in Huber Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton, that would have 2 minutes and 33 seconds of totality on April 8.  We did a quick Google Maps survey of the town and found that there was a good-sized municipal park a 20-minute walk from the hotel.  We checked it out the night before, and it looked perfectly suitable – a big square field in the middle of a town of brick ranch houses where many active duty and retired air force service people and their families live.  We decided not to drive over for fear that the tiny parking lot would be full of fellow gawkers.

I told my friend from Dayton that we were going to Huber Heights and he complained that there were no real heights associated with the town – it was essentially flat.  Yes, that part of Ohio was scraped flat by the glaciers from the last ice age, but those same glaciers also pushed far enough south that they closed an Oxbow in the Ohio River that had travelled north to Dayton and then back south, joining the current Ohio River bed West of Cincinnati.  Huber Heights, on the north side of Dayton, is actually a bit higher than Dayton, and we were on the crest of that gentle, but very long hill leading down to the old Ohio Riverbed.

We arrived early the next day – we were initially the only people in the park, and we were able to get a prime spot under a crabapple tree that was just beginning to bud.  Parking would not have been no problem, but the walk had been pleasant.  A perfect early spring day, the temperature was great, there were wispy thin clouds high in a mostly clear, blazingly blue day.  I had been looking for the moon, both the night before and when we got there, and while it must have been near the sun, the sun’s brilliance must have been blotting it out of sight.

This time, we were equipped with glasses.  Yes, I made a pinhole in some papers that I had brought to work on, but we had the ability to look directly at the sun which, through the glasses, was really quite dim – a very tame subtle orange ball.  I had thought maybe I would be able to see the moon through the glasses, but I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.  It was only when looking directly at the sun that anything registered through the glasses.

Convinced that totality would mean total darkness, when the moon started to move in front of the sun, we pulled our hat brims low and covered the areas around the glasses so that our eyes would acclimate to the dark and we would be able, we assumed, to see the Milky Way when totality struck.  This meant that we very slowly tracked the moon’s progress across the sun, but we didn’t see the subtle changes in light – some described the light as becoming grey and shimmery just before totality, though we did feel the change in temperature.  It went from cool to just the edge of cold.  But perhaps most importantly we were able to have a lazy day, talking idly, petting the dog, while sitting outside.  That has not happened in a very long time, if ever.

As totality approached, we prepared for our 2 and ½ minutes in the dark.  We noticed in our peripheral vision that it was getting a bit darker, and then the last of the sun’s rays blinked out and we were free to look, without glasses, at the sun and at the world around us.  

Much to my surprise, it was an eerie twilight, not the blackness I had expected.  In the south east, it looked like the sky looks just before sunrise while to the west and north (we were not dead center in the middle of the dark area, but a bit to the east of it), it was a kind of hazy blue sky.  There were two stars, which a couple near us identified as Venus and Mars, but we later learned were Venus and Jupiter.  The star of the show, though, was, of course, the Moon eclipsing the Sun.

The sun was blotted out, but still very much present.  Radiating from around the moon was light – reminiscent of the rays that children color going out from the sun, but moving and shifting and changing as we looked at them.  

The Moon was the blackest object I had ever seen – so black that it looked, not flat, like the moon usually does, but threateningly, pregnantly spherical – it looked like the Death Star.  Around the edges of it were a few of Bailey’s Beads – something we had been told to look for.  The beads are created by sun rays striking craters at the edge of the moon and reflecting golden light that glows brilliantly against the black. 

One of the loveliest things about this odd moment is that it was just that – a moment.  There was a lot to take in and very little time to do that.  One hundred and fifty-three seconds.  Part of what was odd about this moment was that there was a clear awareness that we are a planet – a ball suspended in a space so vast that it is incomprehensible.  Two other celestial objects are lined up – by chance – in such a way that we can know that we are one of them – a round object floating in space, held onto them by the gravitational pull that holds us in orbit around each other, while each of the objects, despite that connection, are very much alone.

Afterwards I read that one of the Bailey’s beads looking things may actually have been an eruption on the surface of the sun – some of the sun stuff shooting out into space – and the estimated size of that eruption was about equivalent to the size of the earth – but it appeared to us as just a tiny glowing dot on the side of the sun.

In the moment of seeing it, of course, I was unaware of what I was seeing – I didn’t have a way to measure the vast distances and the huge size of the sun, but I sensed it, and sensed our smallness in comparison.  It was both a humbling and a thrilling moment.  We were in touch with the galaxy (even if we couldn’t see it) in a whole new way.  We belonged to the objects that we were observing; we were not the stable place from which celestial activity was observed.

This week, on the pencast that I listen to (a podcast about fountain pens – put that in your nerd pipe and smoke it), Brian Goulet reported that there are more trees on the earth – over a trillion – than there are stars in the sky – 8 or 9 billion.  While it is reassuring that we have such a huge reservoir of green stuff, especially in the time of climate change, that actually seemed to underscore the sense of - I’m not sure what – our insignificance in the grand scheme of things?  But that insignificance, in the tradition of Freud’s On Transience, where he argues that the glory of a poem or statue is not that it will last forever, but that it exists at this moment, that insignificance has its own glory.  We are here, now, and that is what matters.

On the drive home, the reluctant wife commented that it is rare when an event lives up to expectations.  We had both just witnessed an event that far exceeded our expectations.  A very plain suburban park, with maybe 5 or 10 couples and families dotted around it, had been transformed into something uncanny – a place that was both known and familiar and oddly and totally strange.  Magic.

We began looking for the next full eclipse.  It will be in August of 2026 and will be visible from Spain, Iceland and Greenland.  Would it be worth the trip across the ocean to spend a moment in space?  How could you question that?

 

 

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