As cheers rose up, I saw the parallel between the collective humility we felt in the early days of the pandemic, and what we were feeling now
I had gathered with a small group of friends in a Montreal square to watch the heavens do their thing. I had snatched an hour from work, and we shared two pairs of eclipse glasses, passing them around between the five of us.
I hadn’t gotten too worked up in the days leading up to the eclipse. I wasn’t fretting over the hourly forecast, having long given up the illusion that I control anything, let alone the weather. I had barely put effort into finding glasses. I hadn’t read anything about the eclipse’s path or what we would see, about Baily’s beads or first contact. I had no idea what the squirrels or the birds would make of it all. All I knew was not to look up unprotected.
Because when the world went dark, a spontaneous cheer went up, and I could hear the same cheer from Parc Jeanne-Mance a few blocks away, where thousands had gathered on the grass. Awe is a sense of wonder that leaves us feeling small against something beyond our comprehension. It is the shock of immensity. A source of humility and humanity. An eclipse qualifies. But so does a pandemic, which, when it hit our shores, was the last time we felt collective awe, just not of the sort we wanted to feel.
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