Keep your face always toward the sunshine — and shadows will fall behind you
– Walt Whitman (1819-1892), American poet.
Three years ago, in the middle of the night, my wife, kids and I drove from Belfast, Northern Ireland, to Dublin to catch an early morning flight to Munich, Germany.
From there we caught another plane to Bangkok, another to Singapore and yet another to Perth in Western Australia.
There, we rented a camper van and began a drive of more than 1,200 kilometres north to the town of Exmouth on a remote peninsula on the northwest coast of the continent.
This was the only reasonably accessible location on the planet with decent weather prospects from which to view the total solar eclipse on April 20, 2021. The entire event lasted 62 seconds. It was the third total solar eclipse we’d travelled to witness.
We were extra determined to make the pilgrimage that year after being thwarted by clouds in Chile in December 2020 and we couldn’t afford the eye-watering cost of travelling to Antarctica in 2021. I wish I could have gone on another expedition to see the totality of the April 8 eclipse in Mazatlán, Mexico.
It may sound absurd to go to such extraordinary lengths to witness such a fleeting phenomenon, again and again, but there is no other celestial event that anyone I know would devote so much time and effort to seeing.
If you wish to see the northern lights, you can hop on a plane to Iceland or Norway and have a fairly decent chance of seeing them in the winter months.
If you are on the night side of the planet during a lunar eclipse and the skies are clear, you just need to go outside and look up to see it happening.
But unless you are fortunate enough to live within or close to the path of totality, witnessing a total solar eclipse will probably require meticulous planning and marshaling time and money to get you to an optimal location and a bit of luck to make sure the weather forecasts you’ve pored over hold true.
Believe me, it is worth the effort.
A total solar eclipse is not something that you see — it’s something that you experience. You can feel the temperature around you begin to drop by as much as 15 degrees Celsius over the five to 10 minutes that lead up to the eclipse.
The birds and other animals go silent. The light becomes eerie and morphs into a dusky, muted twilight, and you begin to see stark, misplaced shadows abound.
A column of darkness in the sky hurtles toward you at over 1,609 kilometres per hour as the moon’s shadow falls neatly over the sun, turning day into temporary night — nothing like the calming sunset we take for granted every day. Sometimes, a few stars or planets begin to appear faintly in the sky as your eyes get used to the new darkness.
The hairs stand up on the back of your neck and the adrenaline kicks in as your brain tries to make sense of what is going on. But it cannot. It has no other point of reference to compare these sensations to.
A total eclipse elicits a unique, visceral, primeval feeling that cannot be evoked by a photograph, a video or a newspaper article, and that can be experienced only within the path of totality when the moon completely obscures the disk of the sun.
And then of course there is the crowning glory: the sun’s corona, the pearly white outer atmosphere of our nearest star that we can otherwise see only using a fleet of dedicated solar-observing spacecraft. It has an ethereal beauty that is challenging to articulate.
For those brief few moments when the corona appears bright in the sky, all the effort made to experience the totality becomes worth it.
You want to soak up every second of it and process every feeling because it is over all too soon. Once the moon’s shadow has passed you feel both exhilarated and deflated because the next opportunity to experience this sensation again could be years away and on the other side of the world. And it is something that you will crave.
Eclipse chasing always brings to mind the story of William Stanley Jevons, who was just 22 years old and working as an assayer for the Sidney Mint in 1857. Two eclipses passed over Australia that year, and Jevons enthusiastically tracked both.
“After a sleepless night I got up about 3.30 and started to Bellevue Hill in the dark,” he wrote in his diary about one, which must have happened shortly after dawn.
“About 5 am commenced observations concerning the eclipse.” (After the eclipse, he went to work, wrote a detailed report on it for a local newspaper, had tea with the mint’s chief engineer and in the evening caught a performance of “Much Ado About Nothing.”)
This would be no more than a historical footnote if — well, actually, it is no more than a historical footnote. I think it’s interesting nonetheless, because Jevons went on to become one of the most important economists of his century. What made him a great economist was the same studious, curious habit of mind that got him out of bed at 3.30 in the morning to record that eclipse.
He never lost his interest in celestial events. Starting at around age 40, he developed a theory that the movements of the business cycle were connected to sunspots, which come and go over roughly 11 years. He theorised that sunspots affect the weather, which affects agriculture, which in turn affects the investment decisions of businesses. That turned out not to be the case, but I credit Jevons for seeking to understand the interaction between the physical world and economic activity.
Society will never function like the heavenly bodies, whose elliptical orbits are almost precisely predictable. But Jevons realised that. His hunger to put economics on a more scientific footing wasn’t misplaced. His thirst for knowledge and ability to see across a wide range of disciplines are exactly what economics needs today.
In 2022, I persuaded several of my friends to join us to enjoy the spectacle without forcing them to traipse halfway across the globe. They later told me that they at first thought I may have been somewhat exaggerating the experience because of my professional bias, but when the eclipse was over, I knew that they finally got it. Their faces were overcome with emotion and they struggled to articulate how they were feeling. Because it wasn’t just about what they had seen — it was about what they had experienced.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune.
