When the World Grows Still and Life Hushes
Tonight, in most of Europe time will stop in hushed wonder. Birds will stop chirping people will be in vantage points with their protective glasses and the media will feature the beauty of the eclipse My wife and I plan to grab our chairs and sit on the local beach and observe, but also observe the human reaction because therein lays the wonder of nature also.
I recall being in Poreč in Croatia and Lake Garda in Italy and at night people would come and observe the sundown. I believe people in Vietnam do the same with sunrise. They bring their seating down to an appropriate location and stop at the wonder, the awe that holds their attention in busy lives. We may be occupied with the ordinary business of living—appointments, worries, conversations, the small anxieties that somehow manage to fill our days—when something causes us to stop and look. A magnificent sunset can do it. So can the first snow of winter, moonlight upon the sea, a mountain disappearing into cloud, or a night sky suddenly revealed far from the lights of a city. For a moment the noise within us grows quiet. A total eclipse of the Sun may be one of the most powerful examples of this strange human capacity for wonder.
An eclipse is particularly affecting because it alters something we regard as almost unalterable. Evening darkness is familiar; we have known it since childhood. But during an eclipse, darkness enters the day. The temperature falls, the light acquires an eerie quality, the landscape becomes unfamiliar and, as totality approaches, people often grow strangely quiet. Then the brilliant surface of the Sun disappears behind the black disc of the Moon and its delicate corona becomes visible. Across different countries and cultures people have responded by cheering, praying, embracing one another, standing speechless and sometimes weeping.
What is remarkable is that scientific understanding has not taken this wonder away. Some of the greatest minds in history understood the heavens more profoundly than almost anyone who had lived before them, yet knowledge frequently seemed to deepen rather than destroy their astonishment.
Johannes Kepler helped transform our understanding of the solar system by discovering that planets travel around the Sun in elliptical orbits. The heavens were becoming mathematically intelligible, yet Kepler saw no conflict between discovering their laws and experiencing their magnificence. For him, uncovering the mathematical order of nature was itself an encounter with something profound.
Isaac Newton went further. His laws of motion and universal gravitation showed that the falling apple and the orbiting Moon belonged to the same physical order. The heavens were not governed by one set of mysterious principles and the Earth by another. Gravity reached from the ground beneath our feet into the celestial distances. Yet Newton, who revealed so much of the mechanism, was hardly left with a cold or diminished universe. He wrote of himself near the end of his life as a boy playing on the seashore while the “great ocean of truth” lay undiscovered before him. The more he knew, the greater the mystery appeared.
Albert Einstein expressed something similar. Few people penetrated more deeply into the workings of physical reality, yet he repeatedly wrote about the mysterious and the experience of awe. For Einstein, the fact that the universe could be understood at all was itself astonishing. Scientific explanation did not close the door upon wonder; it opened another door behind it.
This tells us something important. There is a mistaken idea that wonder belongs principally to ignorance—that ancient people marvelled at an eclipse because they did not understand it, whereas modern people can merely calculate it. But knowing how something happens is not the same as exhausting its meaning as an experience. We understand the scattering of light that produces the colours of sunset, yet who has stood before a sky ablaze with crimson and gold and thought its beauty had been cancelled by atmospheric physics?
Indeed, knowledge can enlarge wonder. To watch the Sun setting is beautiful. To know that the Sun is a star vastly larger than Earth, that our planet is rotating us away from it, and that its departing light has travelled roughly 150 million kilometres before touching our faces does not make the sunset poorer. It makes the familiar almost unbelievable.
So too with an eclipse. We can calculate the Moon's orbit and predict the path of its shadow, but then comes the human experience of standing beneath it. The Sun that has illuminated every day of our lives seems to disappear. For a few minutes we become aware of forces and distances enormously greater than ourselves.
This produces something close to humility. Most days our personal world seems very large. Our successes, failures, disagreements and fears occupy the centre of consciousness. Then we stand before an ocean, beneath a mountain or under an eclipsed Sun, and the scale changes. We realise that we are very small.
Strangely, this need not make us feel insignificant. It can have the opposite effect. There is something astonishing about being a tiny creature on a small planet who is nevertheless capable of looking into the heavens and understanding something of what is happening there. We are small enough to disappear within the scale of the cosmos, yet conscious enough to contemplate it.
This is why beauty sometimes brings tears. There is a kind of crying that has little to do with sadness. People cry at the birth of a child, at a reunion, before great landscapes and at sunsets. Tears sometimes arrive when an experience has become larger than our ability to express it.
One morning recently, my eyes filled as I listened to Classic FM playing The Humming Chorus. The same thing can happen when I listen to Runrig’s In Search of Angels, and to many other pieces of music.
I once read Dubliners by James Joyce, in which he mentions a nineteenth-century song called Marble Halls. I found Enya’s version and passed it on to a friend, who in turn sent it to his wife while she was at work. She cried.
A sunset carries another gentle truth. Its beauty lies partly in the fact that it cannot be held. The colours deepen, blaze for a few moments, and disappear. We watch precisely because it is passing. Perhaps we recognise something of ourselves there. Childhood passes. Youth passes. Summers pass. The people we love will not always sit beside us. Our own lives are brief. Yet transience need not make beauty meaningless. It may be what makes us treasure it.
For the Christian, there is a further resonance. The Psalmist looked into the heavens and asked, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” Modern astronomy has made that question more extraordinary. We now know how immense the universe is and how physically small we are within it. Yet the Christian claim is that smallness is not the same as worthlessness. The God of the stars is also mindful of persons.
Eclipses, sunsets, stars, mountains and oceans touch us because they temporarily strip away the illusion that ordinary life is all there is to see. They remind us that we inhabit something immensely greater than ourselves. Science can tell us how these wonders occur, and that knowledge is magnificent. But it does not silence the deeper human response.
Newton could calculate the heavens and still stand metaphorically upon the shore of an undiscovered ocean. Einstein could uncover the structure of space and time and still speak of mystery. We too can understand why the Moon crosses the Sun, why the sky becomes red at evening and why stars burn—and still look upwards in astonishment.
Perhaps wisdom lies in holding both things together: understanding and wonder.
For occasionally the world grows still, the familiar becomes mysterious again, and we remember the simplest and perhaps most profound of human responses.
We look.
And we wonder.