From Reason to Millennial Silliness

Europe’s last total solar eclipse of the millennium last week set something of a record for excess, touching off a media frenzy worthy of declaration of war.

Along with the show, observers got a glimpse of the fault lines that still disturb the vision of a united Europe, along with some evidence of the progress toward cohesion the region has made in nearly 50 years. When thousands gathered before the great gothic cathedral at Reims to see the sky turn to night for a few minutes, everyone wore protective glasses approved by European Union experts in Brussels. It was estimated that 100 million pairs of the glasses, each bearing the EU symbol of safety, were sold or given away for the big day.

There was also ample evidence that rationality, in addition to the sun, was in eclipse. Until Wednesday’s phenomenon, perhaps the most famous solar eclipse occurred on May 29, 1919, when Europe was recovering from war. Cambridge astronomer Arthur Eddington theorized that the brief alignment of the sun and moon would provide enough extra gravity to test the revolutionary proposal of an obscure German physicist named Albert Einstein. In 1915, Einstein wrote that matter and energy were inextricably linked, so that gravity would bend a wave of light. Eddington compared the apparent position of stars during the 1919 eclipse with their observed position when the sun and moon were apart, and found the values matched almost exactly those posited by Einstein. Classical physics, valid since Isaac Newton’s work in the 17th century, was overturned and the nuclear age had begun.

Last week, the eclipse was used to test the theories of two famous Frenchmen, the couturier Paco Rabanne and the highly fallible 16th-century prognosticator Nostradamus. Rabanne, relying on an obscure verse of Nostradamus about a catastrophe in the last year of the millennium, had a vision that the Russian space station Mir would crash and destroy Paris during the eclipse. While Rabanne, whose creations often seem several bolts of cloth short of a wardrobe, fled the city, a crowd of champagne drinkers gathered outside his house of high fashion, jeering as Paris survived. Lyon, the perennial rival of the French capital, jauntily offered to set up a provisional government, just in case. And on Mir, the two Russian and one French cosmonauts circling the earth became the first to see the remarkable sight of the moon’s shadow racing across Europe from west to east at 1,780 miles an hour.

At the beginning of the shadow’s flight, at Land’s End in Cornwall, Britain, there was evidence of that nation’s passion for animals as dogs, cats and horses were equipped with special glasses. Though animals, unlike humans, look away by reflex from harmful light, manufacturers in Britain could not keep up with the demand for glasses from pet owners and horse lovers. It was reminiscent of the roadblock Britain has long put up in the European Union to the free movement of pets into its territory. Despite the proven efficacy of anti-rabies vaccine, and the fact that there has been no imported case of rabies in Britain for more than 30 years, authorities insisted until recently that every foreign animal had to serve six months in British quarantine.

At the other end of European totality, in the gray factory town of Ramnicu Valcea in Romania, it was easy to see that all of Europe is not on the same page of development. Many of the people in the Romanian countryside, still invoking ancient Balkan superstitions that include Count Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, believe that catastrophe follows those on whom the eclipsed sun shines. They stayed inside their houses. In Sarajevo, Bosnia, people also stayed inside, but that was because protective glasses were not available. The supply of goods in the struggling city is still erratic, the heritage of years of destruction as the European Union dithered.

One thing that became clear in the eclipse is that the American-style media blitz is here to stay. The hip intellectual Paris daily La Liberation devoted 34 of its 48 pages to eclipse news on the big day. The two main French television channels engaged in a bitter battle for ascendancy. One hired three Mirage fighter planes from the air force to race across the sky with the moon’s shadow, while the other had to content itself with the resources of the French army, supplemented by interviews with various savants. It was a standoff completely unforeseen by Nostradamus.*