Eclipsed!

Where man is not nature is barren.

— Blake, Proverbs of Hell, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”

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Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids.
In fact, it's cold as hell.
And there's no one there to raise them if you did.

— Bernie Taupin and Elton John, “Rocket Man”

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There was an eclipse of the sun last spring, you remember. In the path of totality, it got dark. I wasn't in the path, but I enjoyed using the funny glasses and tracking the progress of a phenomenon that’s anything but a big deal, cosmically speaking.

No, that’s putting it too mildy. I think it’s truer to say that, cosmically, the eclipse didn’t even happen.

An eclipse of the sun occurs when the Earth’s moon passes between the Earth and the sun. Such a passage did of course objectively occur last spring, here, in our unimaginably infinitesimal part of a solar system in a galaxy in a supercluster, etc.

But what we’re really talking about when we say eclipse is a particular effect of the passage, and that effect is purely subjective. Only from the point of view of beings on Earth’s surface capable of perceiving the effect of the passage is the sun actually eclipsed—obscured, blocked out, deprived of significance—by the moon. From which I draw the conclusion that there’s a legitimate way in which eclipses can be said to be, if not unreal, inventions of point-of-view, of perception.

I did see it happen. The moon did pass between Earth and the sun. It got dark. Then it got light again.

But that’s true only—literally only—because beings on a certain part of Earth register the effect on the relative amount of sunlight falling on Earth. If there were nothing on Earth capable of registering that effect (the effect may be registered by the most primitive life forms, or not, I don't know), then the eclipse literally wouldn't be happening.

I do know the moon would still pass between Earth and the sun. But if no being on Earth in any way sentient of the effect existed, there would be, quite literally, no eclipse. An eclipse depends for its very existence on being perceived.

Can't we say, then, that under those grim circumstances, where nothing on Earth existed to perceive an eclipse, it would at least still objectively get dark, then light again?

No. Those are perceptions too. Something’s going on outside us when we perceive light and darkness, and science can say something about what it is, but our and other life forms’ incredibly limited sensations of and/or reactions to the event are not to be confused with the event itself. If those drastically limited perceptions didn't exist, the event itself wouldn’t be endowed even with that weak and approximate degree of being perceived. Under those circumstances, the event wouldn’t be the kind of thing we can say happens, which in itself is just a word gesturing weakly not at an event but at our drastically limited perception of it. If there’s nobody around to say a word about the event (or write a formula), the event doesn't in that sense happen, and then there are no words (or equations) for what the event (huh?) even . . . is (wha?)?

The thought experiment itself collapses into gibberish.

With all perception wiped out by, say, an apocalyptic event, could a surviving scientific device that measures relative amounts of light register the effect of the eclipse? No, because no one would be there to read it (let alone to raise your kids).

I know that this is just the old cliche about the tree falling in the forest. If nobody’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? Old cliches can run pretty deep.

One answer to that one: whether or not a sound exists if it can’t be heard, the energy that we perceive as sound would still be released. We can’t smell much of what dogs smell, and they're smelling something. That’s why, when I first heard the cliche, when I was maybe twelve, and thought it was deep, which I still do, I wondered not whether the tree makes a sound under those circumstances but whether it falls at all. Or, obviously, exists.

Though now we know trees themselves communicate. It really doesn’t matter if a being that can see or hear or smell is hanging around that forest to perceive the felling. As certain philosophers have noted, existence might come down not to what happens but to what you can say it about it. Or what a tree can?

But while trees communicate, they don't speak.

I said above that I know that in an imagined circumstance where nothing on Earth can perceive what we call an eclipse, the moon would still pass between Earth and the sun, and I think I do know that: those passages occurred, of course, before there was anything on earth to perceive their effects. But I think I know that only because—only because!—there exists on Earth a form of life capable not just of perceiving, and not just of communicating, but of studying the situation and considering the question by saying things about it.

So: Hallelujah! The whole wide universe really does happen, in all its incomprehensible complexity and beauty.

Or as Bob Marley once put it: Hallelu-Jah.

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When I came home, on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat-sided steep frowns over the present world, I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds hovering on the sides of the rock; with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men, and read by them on earth:—

How do you know but evr’y Bird that cuts the airy way
Is an immense world of delight, close’d by your senses five?

— Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”

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Esse est percipi. (To be is to be perceived.)

— George Berkeley (an epigraph to Beckett’s monologue “Not I”)

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Half of the people can be part right all of the time/Some of the people can be all right part of the time/But all of the people can't be all right all of the time/I think Abraham Lincoln said that/I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours/I said that

—Dylan, “Talkin' World War III Blues”