When I read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in high school, I was delighted by Mark Twain’s use of a solar eclipse as a plot fulcrum. Hank Morgan, bonked on the head and woken up in sixth-century Camelot, leverages his 19th-century, American-bred knowhow to fend off superstitious Englishmen who would've had him burned at the stake. Not only that, his ability to magically blot out the sun convinces Arthur and his courtiers to make Morgan the king’s right-hand man.
Twain wrote the book as a satire of chivalric romance, and he shows Hank Morgan’s good side in his attempts to democratize Arthurian England and end slavery. But we also find in Morgan, who dubs himself “The Boss,” the mixed seeds of the flimflam man, carnival magician, and Gilded Age entrepreneur—much like the character played by Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz.
Four years before Twain’s book was published, H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines came out, using a lunar eclipse as a plot twist to the benefit of adventuring Victorian Englishmen. Twain might have been one-upping the British author, but both may have taken their cue from Christopher Columbus, who not only stumbled upon America but also set the tone for a certain strain of flimflammery that continues to this day. Upset that the local inhabitants of Jamaica had stopped providing food to his men (after his men had plundered their villages), Columbus used a lunar eclipse to convince the locals that his god was angry. Now, some might argue that Columbus was only being shrewd in using his greater cosmic knowledge to gain provisions, that the local tribe members on this island were simply being outwitted and outplayed as if they were contestants in an episode of Survivor. But we should remind ourselves that, if knowledge is power, then with great power comes great responsibility. Or so saith Stan Lee.
Know-nothingism is not the alternative, of course. Few people could spot a good flimflam man like Mark Twain, and few people made more fun of gullible mobs than Twain did. To rise above the mob, Twain suggests, we could use more empirical evidence and less romanticized superstition. We need scientific inquiry. Consider, for instance, that it took the study of solar eclipses to discover helium and prove Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
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I recall two partial solar eclipses from my childhood in the Pacific Northwest. The first was probably the one that occurred on March 7, 1970, when I was in kindergarten. My class marched out of its portable at Sunny Hills Elementary to the playground and lined up to look into pinhole boxes so that we wouldn’t go blind. I felt a bit perturbed that I had to watch at a remove, that what I was witnessing was a representation of the actual thing—a shadow puppet on a wall. Seeing the moon partially fill in the dot of sunlight on the piece of paper was sort of like watching a hesitant student take a multiple-choice test. Of course, today I’m appreciative of the precautions our teachers took in preserving our five-year-old retinas. My middle-aged retinas thank them profusely.
The second partial solar eclipse likely was when I was sitting in 7th-grade math class at Pine Lake Junior High, just across the road from Sunny Hills. The teacher might have made a reference to the eclipse as he taught us how to calculate the area of a rhombus, but for the most part we just sat in our hard plastic chairs as day outside turned to not-really-night and the buzzing fluorescent lights became increasingly annoying. It’s possible that this moment marks the beginning of the end of my mathematical aptitude, but I’m not certain.
If I lost interest in math, however, I did not lose interest in the larger scientific questions that math could help solve—I just didn’t want to be the one performing the equations. What I liked most, and still like most, are the stories related to cosmic events and how people have tried to explain them, use them to their advantage, or simply give in and feel the awe of the moment. Herodotus writes of an eclipse that ended a six-year war between the Lydians and the Medes. Like the stadium lights going out at on a Friday-night football game, the lack of illumination put an end to hostilities. During the Peloponnesian War, Athenian general Nicias (with a little help from his priests) took a lunar eclipse as an omen to tarry around the harbor of Syracuse, only to be routed by the Syracusan fleet. So saith Thucydides.
Even in modern times, people get weird about eclipses. Annie Dillard, writing about a total eclipse in my home state of Washington (one that I have no recollection of but which occurred when I was still in junior high), notes the near hysteria: “From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching.” Dillard was in the Yakima Valley at the time, standing on a hill of wild barley, but where was I on that Monday morning in 1979? Learning to square dance in P.E.? Snoozing, open-lidded, through another math class? Why did this particular eclipse escape me?
Well, I had no choice but to be in school, learning, learning, learning. And maybe I didn’t even care at the time. It wasn’t the sun and the moon that concerned me most that year so much as sports, girls, and hobbits.
The following year I read about Hank Morgan and his exploits among the Knights of the Round Table (probably about the same time that I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Such spoofery helped loosen some of the cataracts of childhood gullibility from my eyes. I was probably also listening to Pink Floyd and The Who at the time and thinking: The Boss? Hmmm. Same as the old boss? . . . We don’t need no thought control. I was, at least internally, starting to question authority.
Fortunately, some authorities have the ability to inspire. My youngest daughter, who had a fantastic 8th-grade science teacher last year, is excited to see the upcoming eclipse, so much so that she’s incredibly disappointed that we can’t travel one state south to experience totality. Marching band camp at the high school has precluded that option. (“Trouble with a capital T!” I can hear a certain flimflam artist singing in The Music Man.) So we will instead head somewhere local on Monday morning, perhaps even our own yard, to see if the world as we know it will end.
Based on what I’ve learned so far, I don’t think it will—but there might be screaming.