Enjoying the Umbra

Such is the sophistication of modern man that no scientists were in danger last week of losing their heads, as had the ancient Chinese court astronomers Hsi and Ho for failing to predict the imminence of a solar eclipse. No one in the U.S. shot arrows into the sky, as Peruvian Indians often did to frighten away the beast devouring the sun. No one even thought, as had the Tahitians, that the sudden darkness meant that the sun and the moon were engaged in celestial copulation. Nor in a smog-ridden society did the midday blackness even seem all that strange.

Despite its predictability and the fading of associated fables, the totality of last week's eclipse over the nation's most populous areas and its unprecedented television coverage carried echoes of ancient forebodings and reminded man again of his cosmic impotence. It may be more common today to dread the world's ending in a nuclear fireball than in deathly darkness, but the loss of light at noontime still suggests the extinction of life. To dream of an eclipse, many psychologists hold, is to confront fears of death and failure. A child born during such an event, contend astrologers, will be a powerful influence for evil--or for good. In Houston Sybil Leek, the witch and astrologer, computed that sun and moon were positioned to cause emotional destruction in families and earthquakes in the countryside. Also to tumble the stock market.

Most Americans were not at all concerned about any impact upon their subconscious or their investment portfolio. They reacted instead as their own perspectives dictated. Some, wholly indifferent to anything not directly affecting their daily living, acted as though the eclipse did not matter at all. Out of 14 Chicagoans quizzed before the event, five asked "What is it?", eight wondered "When is it?" and one looked up at the cloudy sky to demand "Where is it?" At Chicago's Adler Planetarium, the most frequent inquiry was a fretful "Is it safe to go outside?"

Underdog Moon. More gregarious spirits seized upon the blackout as an occasion for a Woodstock kind of togetherness. There was an "Eclipse-In" at Manhattan's Central Park and a "Sun-In" thrown by Washington's hip Aquarian Society to "share a common culture of music, drugs, love, liberation and the simple enjoyment of life."

Amid all the partying along the 100-mile-wide umbra of total darkness stretching from Mexico toward Florida and northward to Nantucket Island, the jammed hotels and motels included serious amateur scientists carrying altered telescopes and cameras to view or record the historic event without damage to eye or lens. The professionals took to high-altitude aircraft and isolated mountaintops to aim their instruments to best advantage. Out of Wallops Island, Va., NASA fired rockets rather than arrows into the heavens, seeking more precise knowledge of the phenomenon.

To more sentimental souls, the eclipse provided another chance to applaud the victory of an underdog. Now bearing human footprints, the moon has assumed a new kinship with mankind. And once again, that tiny body whose feeble reflective light is daily obscured by the overpowering brilliance of sun had succeeded in blotting out, however temporarily, the dominant light source in man's special locus within the universe.

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