Editorial: Shadow Touch

Mercury, September/October 1999 Table of Contents

Early in the morning on 13 August, the solar eclipse was nearly two days past and I was on the deck of an immense cruise ship. Lights on the fore deck had been extinguished, the Captain willing to forego a bit of safety to permit us to catch the Perseids. Yet clouds covered the north Irish Sea and drizzle drops ran down my glasses. In spite of this and the early hour, there were about thirty people on deck with me.

"It doesn't look too good, does it?" asked one of my companions. "No," I replied, "but let's wait a bit." A cry jostled us.

"There! Up there! I see a star overhead."

We strained to look, and just as I spotted the cause of the excitement, someone sighed, "Our star has wings."

One and then other high flying birds, seemingly hanging high over the ship, looked down as we looked up. And the drizzle continued. We had been permitted to view the eclipse, but nature put the Perseids out of our visual reach.

A number of the people stood with me, and we talked about astronomy, science fiction, the world. A mother with her young son shuffled close into the group, all of us blocking the chilly, damp wind from one another.

The child spoke quietly to me, and leaning over I caught "Éand I got it on tape." His mother spoke up to say that, yes, Neil had captured the eclipse with his video camera. I looked at the twelve year old, who was nodding his head. "Hey, I would love to see it, Neil. Do you think I could tomorrow?" I asked. Before I knew it, however, he was off, back to their room to fetch his camera.

There we all stood, a mass of sleepy, wet humanity watching the tiny screen on Neil's video camera. Neil taped all of totality; although his camera's gaze wandered a bit, the eclipse was much as I remembered.

Regardless of the science and technology brought to bear on a total solar eclipse, it is, in the end, an experience of nothing. It is the passage of shadow, not something but the absence of something - light. We personify the lunar shadow with qualities of speed ("it was coming toward us fast"), touch ("caressed the globe first at..."), and communication ("its departing message was clear"), among many others. We do the same thing with regular old everyday shadows, too. We watch them, we box with them, we talk to them, and sometimes we look behind us to make sure they follow us. "You're blocking my light," in shadow language, means, "Your shadow is on me, get it off." Can you really feel a shadow? I feel the coolness under a leafy elm tree on a sunny day. A parent will stand to block sunlight and shield her child from the heat and light. But neither the child nor I feel the shadow. We feel the lack of light. Shadows are nothing, then, right?

When the Moon's shadow came rushing over us during the eclipse, all this shadow philosophy fell to dust around me. I felt as if I were touched by somethingÑalien, chilly, vacuous, as if I were immersed in a dark, cool liquid. And as the shadow left us, I felt a gasping longing for more. I wanted to stand in the shadow again. To be bathed in its nothingness. Now I understand why people chase eclipses through their lives and around the world: They want more of the shadow touch.

"That's all...This is just stuff after the eclipse." Neil's voice brought me back to the deck in that profound damp darkness. We had relived the eclipse together again in the rain by watching that tiny screen. And I stood there momentarily thinking of the Moon's shadow again, wondering where it was in space now.

James C. White II, Ph.D., Editor

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