BOROUGHBRIDGE, YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND, a few hours before what will here be a partial solar eclipse—
The regular sunset—is that a charade? Hiding from us how irregular and wild our place in this universe really is?
In 2017, the path of totality passed just an hour or so south of where I grew up and where my parents lived. So with friends and siblings I flew to Charlotte, and we drove to a hamlet in South Carolina and set up camp for the day on a hill topped by a Baptist church.
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A festival atmosphere—a good crowd, not too crowded. My brother, then a bartender working on his PhD in the philosophy of physics, had brought his cocktail kit and made us drinks—Martinez and Tom Collins. Then we began to time travel.
First a noticeable chill in the breeze. Then the sky began to darken, quicker and quicker and quick—time was moving up, the day ending faster than we had ever seen a day end. The birds started their evening songs. With every minute the darkening accelerated.
Whoa whoa whoa, time! Slow down! Hold on! How do we stop it! Time was moving too fast. We were moving too fast!
Then clouds drifted over the sun. Damn. Would we miss it?
We looked behind us. People were running through the field toward a better vantage point. We joined the race to a road on a ridge across the way. It felt like a zombie apocalypse—scores of people running together toward nothing, turning into shades, in silence.
We made the ridge. Clear sky. Cold now, the last light of day fading.
Then: darkness. Coyotes howled, or foxes. Owls hooted. Down the road a lone car came toward us with its headlights on. Did they not realize what was happening?
People around us were shouting animalistically, others laughing deliriously. It was simply wild. Everything I knew about eclipses I had read as a boy in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court—the hero, thrown back into medieval England, remembers that a famous eclipse is about to occur and tells the king he will blot out the sky.
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Fortunately for the time-traveling trickster, the people relent to his demands before the sun returns. They were terrified. I had always thought: If you had no idea what an eclipse was, the event would indeed be terrifying. Standing there, I understood it was scary anyway for all of us. And we knew exactly what it was. Scary because it revealed how what seems so sure and sturdy to us is fleeting and small.
Those few seconds of total darkness held a universe. Each of us alone in it, and all of us together—tiny cogs, rolling around on a planet racing through the sky among other planets and galaxies. The veil between reality as we understand it and that which our minds cannot comprehend had gone thin, or maybe had vanished.
Then the diamond ring: that moment just before the moon begins to move off, when a single point of light bursts from the edge while the sun's corona still hangs around it. Magnificent: Awe, and the sense of living inside a fantastical epic, which we indeed are without realizing it.
Daylight came back the same way it left, at that sped-up, time-f-ing pace. We went from chilly autumn to hot summer in a few minutes. The night animals gave way to the day animals. And with the full light, time resumed its ordinary speed.
We drove home mostly in silence. What had we just seen. Who are we, and what is this life, this planet, this universe.
When the real sunset came that evening back on the deck in my parents’ home in Charlotte, I saw twilight differently. No sunset has been the same since that one time when time sped up, and the sun set midday, and the seasons changed in a moment, and we fell into wonder.The regular sunset—is that a charade? Hiding from us how irregular and wild our place in this universe really is?
*JP Lindsley, an American journalist based in Ukraine, is co-founder and editor-in-chief of UnderFire.News. *
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