Mark Twain made effective use of an eclipse.
In his novel “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” Twain has his protagonist, a 19-century engineer from Hartford named Hank Morgan transported to medieval England, use his knowledge of an eclipse to save himself from execution and convince onlookers that he possesses wizardly powers.
t is an effective episode, delivered with Twain’s singular panache.
At first, the scene seems to send up the ignorance of the simple folk from sixth-century Britain. It appears to elevate Morgan’s education and expertise over their superstition and credulous faith in miracles.
But nothing ever is quite the way it seems with Twain.
That’s not surprising, given the identities the Missouri river rat born Sam Clemens acquired and layered through his long life and career.
At different times, he presented himself to the larger world as a young man on the make, a frontier yarn-spinner and humorist, then a fixture on the lecture circuit, then an East Coast dandy, then a confidant of presidents and business moguls and, through them all, a national treasure.
Like so much of Twain’s work, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” was dismissed as a “boys’ book,” an adventure tale aimed at allowing its audience to pass time without provoking thought.
As usual, these dismissals missed the darker and more substantive strains that moved through Twain’s work.
There always was more going on in Twain’s books than his critics wanted to acknowledge.
The eclipse sequence in “Yankee,” for example, sets the audience up to believe that Morgan’s 19th-century technological expertise will liberate the downtrodden of an earlier era.
Things don’t work out that way.
Each innovation from Morgan’s time he introduces into King Arthur’s days backfires in unintended ways.
The mishaps, misunderstandings and misadventures escalate until the book’s penultimate sequence, when Morgan and a small band of allies engage in a pitched fight with the faithful. Using electric fencing and Gatling guns, the Connecticut Yankee and 50 or so comrades slaughter 25,000 people.
Instead of freeing humanity, Morgan’s technology wreaks havoc and horror upon them.
And it all starts when the true light is hidden from sight.
Mark Twain lived and worked during a time when the industrial revolution, like a train barreling down a track, gathered steam.
That revolution altered almost everything it touched. Expanding industrialization’s desperate need for labor turned children into wage slaves, prompted otherwise decent men and women of means to ignore even the most abject human suffering in their midst.
Twain took note—and realized that even progress itself was not an unmixed blessing.
Education and expertise themselves could be curses if not balanced by humility and a basic concern for others.
We live now in another era in which yet another technological revolution—the digital one—has produced profound divisions in America.
At few times in our history have we Americans spent more time and energy thinking ill of each other. We snarl across the divide in digital bunkers entrenched in social media, both ignorant and contemptuous of views and experiences different than our own.
In “A Connecticut Yankee,” Hank Morgan has opportunities to see the unwitting damage he has done and is doing. He ignores them and plunges on, though, because his confidence in his knowledge and the innovations it produces is so great—right up until the moment he engages in mass slaughter.
In his case—as in our case—a little humility and a greater desire to understand the concerns of others might have averted a tragedy.
This is the moment for another eclipse.
Another blotting out of the light.
Today, we do not see such occurrences as manifestations of magic or examples of divine will. An eclipse now is a natural phenomenon, a temporary alignment of the sun and moon.
We observe it not as a reason for genuflection but almost as an occasion for entertainment.
But it can and should be a reminder of something else, something larger—a reminder that we are all but small parts of this great universe.
For that reason, it behooves all of us to walk humbly through life, cognizant always that we can do grave damage without intending to and aware that even vast knowledge can be destructive if it is not guided by a moral compass.
As Mark Twain showed us, bad things can and will happen when we cannot see the light.