I may not be a morning person, but Wednesday morning’s blood moon was pretty cool.
I woke up at 6 a.m., confused as to why my alarm was ringing at such an early hour. With classes at 1 and 2 p.m., I am far more likely to stay up until 6 rather than get up at 6. As I groggily pieced together the rationale behind this separation from my inanimate domestic partner — alternatively known as my bed — I became surprisingly excited. I’d never seen a total eclipse before — of the heart or otherwise. I’d only ever sung about them.
The view was worth the early wake-up call. As the moon passed through the earth’s shadow, its other observers and I marveled at the many fascinating aspects of the universe — the speed at which the moon and earth moved, the constellations we could see and the location of other planets in the sky. It was an incredible moment which forced us to recognize the often-overlooked precision with which the natural environment operates.
And then, we pulled out our phones.
Each of us made different — albeit similarly unfruitful — attempts to capture the eclipse with video and photograph. Some of us tried taking panoramas, others tried videos. Some took many shots, others took only a few. We added sounds and flashes to what had been a silent, natural occurrence.
Though I was as guilty of trying to capture this moment as everyone else, I couldn’t help but feel frustrated. My phone was unequipped to handle the insufficient light and incredible distance to produce a picture which even remotely looked like a circle, let alone a circle with an illuminated crescent as the sun’s light hit a portion of the moon from around the curve of the earth. However, I still wanted to try. I wanted to produce some evidence, no matter the the quality, of my presence at this moment and my role as witness to this phenomenon.
We often joke and say, “Pics or it didn’t happen,” — yet, in many ways, we aren’t joking. With the capacity to document every moment we experience — through phones which store thousands of photos and videos and apps to share them with our 652 closest friends — there is a strong impulse for us to ensure we have the visual evidence to substantiate the things we claim to have done. And in doing so, I believe we risk something fundamental.
We risk eclipsing the experience with the need to take it home.
In the desire to take a picture to possess evidence that I saw the blood moon, I took myself away from the moment. While I know many people — myself included — find it exhilarating to look through a camera lens and take control over the frame they give to the world, I truly believe there must be a balance.
When we experience a concert through effort expended to record a video which will likely sit indefinitely among our portable digital stockpiles; when we summit Humpback and begin to pick out a filter for the photo we will post; or when we watch the lunar eclipse through changing pixels on our screen, we mask our experience for ourselves. Even if only for an instant, we see it through a secondary medium and risk taking ourselves away from the moment itself.
I am not advocating we cease capturing events, images and surroundings in this way. But I think there are two things we as a generation can do better — and two things I certainly could have done better today. On the one hand, we can recognize our separation from the moment when we take photos, and we can actively re-immerse ourselves in our surroundings once we are done. Secondly, we can appreciate and believe in the value of the verbal stories and experiences of ourselves and others.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but those thousand words may convey a better story than a picture ever could.
Caroline’s column runs biweekly Thursdays. She can be reached at c.trezza@cavalierdaily.com.
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