Photography: Solar Eclipse Flushing Meadows-Corona Park 4/8/24
Much like countless other New Yorkers, yesterday my mom and me went to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park to view the Solar Eclipse. We were excited because we hadn’t seen an eclipse in person — and we both knew that we wouldn’t see another one in the Continental US for at least another 20 years. With the eclipse glasses, it’s a profound, awe-inspiring experience that’s hard to describe but I thought of two things:
Pink Floyd “Eclipse”
All that you touch
And all that you see
All that you taste
All you feel
And all that you loved
And all that you hate
All you distrust
All you save
And all that you give (All you give)
And all that you deal (Woah)
And all that you buy
Beg, borrow, or steal (Hey-hey)
And all you create
And all you destroy (Woah)
And all that you do
And all that you say (Hey, yeah)
And all that you eat
And everyone you meet (Everyone you meet)
And all that you slight
And everyone you fight (Ho-ho-ho)
And all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that’s to come
And everything under the sun is in tune (Everything)
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon
____
“It might help if we knew where we were going, and how fast.
The Earth revolves at half a kilometre per second.
The Earth orbits the Sun at thirty kilometres per second.
The Sun orbits the centre of the Milky Way at 300 kilometres per second.
The Milky Way is travelling in the general direction of Virgo at 250 kilometres per second.
Astronomically, everything is always getting further from everything else.”
_____
“It might help if we knew what we were made of, how we keep going, and what we will return to.
Everything before your eyes — the paper and the ink, these words, and your eyes themselves — was made in stars: in stars that explode when they die.
More proximately we are warmed and hatched and raised by a steady-state H-bomb, our yellow dwarf: a second-generation star on the main sequence.
When we die, our bodies will eventually go back where they came from: to a dying star, our own, five billion years from now, some time around the year 5,000,001,995.
It might help if we knew all this. It might help if we felt all this.
Absolutely unquestionably, the Universe is High Style.”
— Martin Amis
