Awe & a Total Eclipse of the Sun

This is an argument for managing to get yourself into the “zone of totality” on April 8th and doing your darndest to avoid clouds (crowds are fine). And it is arguing that – if somehow it is inconvenient for you to do so this time around – that you should feel shitty, cause it is a really, really cool thing to do and, given the significance the sun and moon undoubtedly had in your life, a pretty important thing to do. And there won’t be another total eclipse in the United States for twenty years. And you will, if the clouds part, feel awe.

     Let’s talk “awe” and “Ridgemont High” for a few paragraphs: The word awe which goes back almost a thousand years, originally was associated with dread or terror – of great power, of the awe-full. But soon the word was being applied to that which was said to possess more power than anything else in the universe: the (alleged) deity. So “awe” got an additional meaning: reverence. We stand in awe of something that is awe-some, that is scary powerful, undeniably astonishing and well beyond ordinary experience.

     But then, in the late twentieth century, the word “awesome” drifted down from the heavens to the earth as an exclamation, as a replacement for “wow,” ‘far out” or the traditional “wonderful.” Surfers were among the first, the internet reminds us, to adopt this usage.  Big waves are both thrilling and scary. However, soon everyone everywhere under the age of 40 began pointing out the awesomeness of everything from the song “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler to Cherry Garcia ice cream – no terror, no breathtaking required. The proximate cause, says the internet, was the Sean Penn character in 1982’s “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” The subsequent passage of “awesome” from cool to hackneyed was, as the internet does not explain, rapid – as it is with most such over-the-top exclamations – e.g. “far out,” “Outtasight,” “dope” and “aight.” (“Cool,” on the other hand, apparently will never get old.)

     But things that are indeed full of awe – in the pre-Ridgewood High sense – ought to be cherished (as I argue, in the short video attached to this article). We’ve lost some of them: I used to be able to see the Milky Way from the front yard of my childhood home in Queens, New York. Now that requires exiting cities and suburbs.

     Nonetheless, there remains awe to be found – at the Grand Canyon, for example, or maybe even in watching the New York skyline expand as a ferry pulls closer. And, need I mention it, in sex. We’ve actually shared some televised awe: when, notably, on November 5th, 2008, at 11 pm eastern time, we learned that a Black man had been elected president of the United States of America…and most of the news people on TV and many of us at home began crying.

     Which brings me back to the eclipse. I raise the subject because an event that is on my short list of the truly awesome – in the full meaning of the word – is going to occur on April 8, perhaps in a state near you. The one example of a total eclipse of the sun I did previously manage to experience – by driving from New York City to Tennessee in August of 2017 – had all the elements: profound, intense, disturbing power and eerie unnaturalness. I was truly in awe.

     I’ll be in a car on Monday the 7th motoring up to near that area where the full eclipse can be seen. On the 8th I’ll be in that “zone of totality” (a partial solar eclipse, sadly, is no big whoop), “staying mobile,” as my son puts it, in an attempt to dodge the clouds (which would also subtract a lot from the experience).

     Life has many calm pleasures, but life seems incomplete without some deep, moving, exhilarating awe.