Eclipse

On Monday, April 8, 2024, the path of totality of an eclipse of the sun passed through North America, from Mexico to Canada. Central Indiana was in that path, and for four minutes, we watched as the utterly black-shadow moon stood in front of the sun. Later I talked to someone who expressed feelings of smallness and insignificance, feelings that quickly gave way to something better and more positive in my opinion. My feelings were of awe and wonder. What a great and beautiful, an awesome and wondrous place is this universe and this creation! There isn't any smallness and insignificance in us or to us at all. For all we know and for all we ever will know, this is all for us and we are the only ones in it to witness and to contemplate it, to admire and appreciate it.

As I thought about images of eclipses as they relate to weird fiction, the one below came immediately to mind, in vivid memory and color. The image is from the cover of The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918), published by Ace Books in 1962. The art is by Ed Emshwiller (1925-1990), known as "Emsh" to fans of science fiction and fantasy. This as well as anything shows what we saw in the twilit sky on April 8. Emsh's illustration has a Lee Brown Coye-type house, also what looks like a Thark on the right. There are also elements of surrealist art, especially the art of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978).

William Hope Hodgson died 106 years ago, today, on April 19, 1918, this according to research carried out by Randal A. Everts. A year and a month later, on May 29, 1919, members of the Eddington Expedition to the southern hemisphere gathered the data that helped to confirm Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Their gathering of that data was made possible by a total eclipse of the sun, observable on the island of Príncipe and in Sobral, Brazil, among other places. Einstein's countryman Karl Schwarzschild (1873-1916) had "provided the first exact solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity" in 1916 (quoted from Wikipedia, which is an okay source for things that are not political and a terrible source for things that are). Like Hodgson, Schwarzchild was an artillery officer, in his case, in the German army and on the Eastern Front. Neither man survived the war, although Schwarzchild died not in combat but at home from a terrible disease.

British historian Paul Johnson (1928-2023), who died last year, dated the beginning of the modern world to May 29, 1919, to that very eclipse and that very experiment. His thesis in his highly readable and really indispensable book Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (Rev. ed., 1991) is that the confirmation of relativity in physics crossed over into the positing of relativism in moral and intellectual terms, in our everyday lives and in the affairs of the murderous and oppressive State. Moral relativism allowed for the horrors of the twentieth--and by extension the twenty-first--century to be perpetrated. They're still going on and still will go on until we return to the fold. None of that is against Einstein or Eddington, but it is everything against the collectivists, socialists, social engineers, and other morally and intellectually bankrupt people who rule over us. There are signs that their rule is being diminished. Let's do all we can to make that happen even more--into totality--and to cast them into the dustbin of history.

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson, published in 1962 by Ace Books, with cover art by Ed Emshwiller, better known as "Emsh."

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley