Civilization In Eclipse

The care usually given to crafting these essays will yield tonight to a deadline set by a cosmic event. A lunar eclipse is in progress and I am rushing to complete and post before the moon emerges from Earth's shadow.

The shadow had begun munching on the moon before I could reach the dark alley for the view. I had been making herbal tea to keep me company (mint and chamomile, if you must know) but the tea bags broke open, requiring some time-consuming improvisation to strain the liquid clear. 

Yes, you are ahead of me. The episode started me wondering about how the Tea Party people regard this event, and how the long, telling history of eclipses both lunar and solar, powered much early progress in science.

Rushing outside again just now, when the moon was closest to the center of the shadow, I saw that a gradient pointed the way toward the core of darkness, a shading illuminated by what little light bent round the Earth's shoulders by edge diffraction and atmospheric refraction, darkest where the least light falls.

In such details is so much revealed. From such nuance is the grand structure comprehended, the mechanisms and objects assembled by the brightest minds into a model of how things work, tested for accuracy by measuring its predictions. For the eclipses of the moon and the sun, this process required many brave thinkers to observe and ponder over many centuries.

The obstacle they faced was not the phenomenon itself, but the resistance by the times they lived in to the acts of observing and thinking. We are still living in such times.

My broken tea bags did not prevent me from making a clear beverage, they just made the effort take a little longer, and I enjoyed the challenge of being resourceful.

We are experiencing in our time an avalanche of broken tea bags, a willful cluttering of scientific clarity that seeks to overthrow the rule by reason which was hard fought and won through centuries of conflict with oppressive institutions that had no compassion or vision, that sought only everlasting power. 

We are being inundated by a self righteous tidal wave of foolish piety that undermines that very bedrock of modern times: the ever accumulating knowledge that builds the made world we live in, and disrupts the natural world we depend upon, and strives optimistically for a reconciliation between the two.

We are a civilization in eclipse, as the fearful seize the reigns of power and the rich deceive themselves that the alliance they form with the fearful can be rescinded at will. It can, yet it will be the fearful who rescind it.

But the moon is growing brighter every minute now, casting an emerging light of shame upon the arrogant greed that sought to command ignorance and convert it into power. The moon reemerges to rule the sky on its appointed night of fullness, undiminished from traveling through the Earth's shade.

All eclipses end. All eclipses teach. All eclipses make us thankful. The heavens will not submit to human foolishness, and neither should we.