I’ve been thinking about one of my step-brothers a fair amount in the past couple of days. He passed away several years ago. I can’t say we were especially close; certainly not when we were older. Mostly, I think he’s a proxy for me to think about myself when I was a specific age – probably 7 or 8 years old. The first instance had to do with a question about the first radio song you remembered. For me, it wasn’t the first, but when I was eight, he lived in a small town in western Colorado. He got a transistor radio, and it seemed like that thing only picked up one music station. And that station had “Le Freak” by Chic and “My Life” by Billy Joel on heavy rotation.

My father and his second wife initially lived on a farm in rural Wayne County, Indiana  and then on a property with a fair amount of land in rural western Colorado. The second wife’s kids were of a similar age and genders: older girls and a youngest son. When my sisters and I would go visit my father, we’d pretty naturally split off by age and gender. Michael was a little more than a year older than me; and we would spend a lot of time together.  And at that age, all things space were very, very cool.

It was the mid-to-late 70s. The height of Space Age fever had passed, but it was still very much a thing. Out in the country, things in the sky loomed larger. We’d sleep out at night, and in 1978, there weren’t many satellites. We’d get excited seeing one blink against the sky. I’m sure we mislabeled more than a few airplanes. There was a meteor shower that looms large in my imagination. My guess is that this was the Perseid shower in the summer of 1979, but I couldn’t say for sure. In my memory, a huge meteor flashed overhead, traveling more or less directly over the lane leading to the house. (I have doubts about the quality of my memory – the orientation of the visual is a little too perfect for real life.) After that, the night sky had frequent meteor flashes. The night sky in western Colorado really has to be seen to be believed.

And, of course, there were the space shows. Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica were our favorites. We had Battlestar action figures: his was a cylon, mine was a “Colonial Warrior.” (I was jealous of his.) Which brings me to the eclipse. Yesterday, we went down to Bloomington for eclipse festivities at Memorial Stadium. William Shatner gave a spoken word performance. But that was only part of it – in general, space stuff brings out my inner eight year old. There’s a level of earnestness and wonder that tends to crust over with age. Cataracts of the soul or something.

Every so often, you can still be dazzled by the beauty of it all. A total eclipse is one of those moments. My wife and I went down to IU where our kids go to school. Cole is in the Marching Hundred which was playing in the event. Harper lives only a few blocks away, so she walked up and met us at the stadium.

Eclipse at Memorial Stadium

In addition to Shatner, astronaut and engineer, Mae Jemison spoke. One quote that stood out for me was her statement that “space exploration is based on the miraculous work of generations.” Shatner did a sort of spoken word thing, backed by an orchestra from the Jacobs School. In part, he used the eclipse to talk about our place in the cosmic scheme of things. For example, he referenced the creatures evolving over the earth’s millions of years experiencing eclipses from the shallow seas. Shatner sounded great for any age. For a man who is ninety-three years old, he sounded fantastic.

As for the moment of totality, if you didn’t experience it yourself, you’ve seen pictures that do the moment justice more than I can. Everyone experiences it differently. If nothing else, it’s something different that encourages you to take a minute or two and look around. For many, it’s much more. Maybe it’s spiritual. Maybe it’s a profound reminder that you are a very small part of a vast universe. Maybe totality is a moment of solidarity with the millions watching it with you or maybe with the generations over the millennia who have witnessed similar events with awe. At the very least, it’s not nothing. I reconnected a bit with my inner eight year old even while I was sharing a moment with my wife and kids that we’ll probably always remember.

On the way back to West Lafayette, there was some eclipse congestion. Normally, the trip takes a little less than two hours. Yesterday evening, it was more like three. Waze took us on county roads and state highways rather than the Interstates. At one point, we crossed over I-74 in a rural part of west-central Indiana, and westbound traffic was noticeably slow and backed up. Overall, not too bad for us though – an extra hour winding through the back roads was fairly pleasant on a sunny, dry Monday evening.

[Edited to add on 4/10/24]: This morning I came across a Shatner quote I’d seen before but found insightful and apropos to this post. It had to do with his experience going into space when he was 90:

I was absolutely wrong. The strongest feeling, that dominated everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced.

I understood, in the clearest possible way, that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting so starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

Joy is part of the fabric of existence, and to avoid it is to diminish, if not imperil, oneself. That is the great truth evil cannot imagine or understand.

I’m hardly the first to observe this, but social media and our current regular media environment is doing us harm. I read two pieces related to this idea this morning. Daniel Schultz (“Pastor Dan”) has a piece on “The Editorial Board” entitled, “Doom is a Virus: it saps the will when you need it most.” Teri Kanefield has a post on her blog entitled “the Outrage Machine Strikes Again” in reference to the Supreme Court’s recent decision on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment which nominally disqualifies oathbreaking insurrectionists from  federal office.

Kanefield notes how the media environment leading up to and following the Supreme Court decision does citizens a disservice. Pundits, particularly those ostensibly given a platform because of their legal expertise, who pretend certainty and then double down when they’re wrong might make for good, profitable TV; but they don’t inform the public. She focuses on Laurence Tribe and Michael Luttig as examples. When nine Justices determined that states lacked the authority to enforce the provision barring oathbreaking insurrectionists from office, Tribe and Luttig didn’t grapple with that unanimity. The courts were simply corrupt, broken, or lacked courage. I don’t love the opinion or necessarily think it was right – certainly not the dicta that went beyond concluding that states lacked the authority to enforce the provision against federal officials. But, I also don’t think, for example, that Justice Sotamayor is corrupt, ignorant of the law, or lacking in courage. Kanefield notes that the kind of noise generated by pundits like Tribe and Luttig dilute the information stream.

As a result of our current information disruption, people who inhabit certain media ecosystems are being sprayed with a firehose of speculations, conjecture, and hype. They get confused. They don’t know what the truth is. … Sometimes when people are continually confused, they conclude that the entire system is hopelessly broken and they give up on it. This is what Russian propaganda does deliberately. Guess what happens when enough people give up on democracy or decide the truth is unknowable?

For me, this leads into Pastor Dan’s piece. He talks about how feelings of Doom sap our will when we need it most.

In the fourth century AD, the early Christian monastic Evagrius Ponticus wrote about acedia, a state of restless futility. The “Noonday Demon,” as he called it, convinced his brother monks their day was “fifty hours long” and hard work not worth the toil.

He calls this DOOM (all caps), observes that it is more common among terminally online types, and says, “DOOM is experiencing a surge on the left these days. Joe Biden continues to struggle in (as-yet unpredictive) polls.” It is tempting, he says, “to throw up our hands, declare democracy already dead in the United States, and head out for fairer pastures.” Our media environment is a powerful vector of despair.

But, Pastor Dan encourages us, we have been here before. We live in a country “founded on high-minded ideals of liberty as well as low-life practices of oppression.” Struggling with acedia prepares us for the fight. Evagrius counseled that we should:

[D]ivide ourselves in two. “One part is to encourage; the other part is to be encouraged,” he says. “Thus we are to sow seeds of a firm hope in ourselves.” DOOM may be a virus, but so is its opposite. Hope is contagious, and it spreads through giving and receiving support.

I always go back to Bruce Cockburn who said, that you “got to kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.” And, frankly, to an old fantasy series I read as a kid, “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” which was, in large part, a meditation on despair and how to resist it. Here is one scholarly article where the work is discussed. I’ve mentioned the scene before around here, so clearly it had resonance for me:

[P]erhaps Schopenhauer is right: “Humor is the only divine quality in man.” In the third book of Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series, Lord Foul finally gets his poetic justice. Yet it comes not from a battle or contest of power but from a place of pure joy. Known throughout the books as “the Despiser,” the cynical destroyer and source of large-scale evil in the world, Lord Foul has chained up the giant Saltheart Foamfollower, who is at the brink of despair. Covenant tells him to laugh, to recall the power of laughter: “I want you to laugh. Take joy in it. Bring some joy into this bloody hole. Laugh!” (466). Laughter begins to well up in his soul, and the laughter purifies first himself: “as Foamfollower fought to laugh, his muscles loosened. The constriction of his throat and chest relaxed, allowing a pure wind of humor to blow the ashes of rage and pain from his lungs. Soon something like joy, something like real mirth, appeared in his voice” (467). After the laughter purifies himself, it begins to cleanse the world. It vanquishes Lord Foul, whose life in the face of the laughter unwinds like a clock and finally vanishes. As characters like Donaldson’s Covenant and Foamfollower look into the malevolent forces that drive evil, look deep into the gaping void that evil creates about itself, they come to understand that joy is part of the fabric of existence, and to avoid it is to diminish, if not imperil, oneself. That is the great truth evil cannot imagine or understand. Perhaps fantasy writers cannot do without the trope, after all. Perhaps Schopenhauer’s one glowing spark might be kindled again.

I firmly believe that we have to embrace joy. There is no other way.