Opinion | Go see the solar eclipse on April 8

Regarding Bina Venkataraman’s April 3 Wednesday Opinion column, “It’s okay to give in to eclipse-mania”:

In August 2017, I took two of my boys, Peter and Isaac, to Kentucky to see the eclipse. After a long, uneventful drive and a fitful night of sleep, we spent the morning setting up a pair of binoculars to project the image of the sun onto the ground for clear viewing. We talked with people who had driven in from Michigan, New Jersey and Ohio, among other places.

Mostly, we waited.

Then it started, and anticipation grew as we watched the orb of the moon consume the orb of the sun. Some watched through their filter glasses; some watched the projection. All of us felt growing anticipation and excitement as the moon marched across the sun. As totality approached, we began to sense a slight diminishment of light and feel a slight cooling in the air.

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Then the moment of totality hit. It was everything that past witnesses have described. Something deep inside stirred as darkness descended. The animals started making night noises. The corona of the sun streamed out, whiter than any white I have ever seen, and in place of the sun, the life-giving light, was a void of the deepest, darkest black imaginable. The world was plunged into darkness. A dark twilight sky held stars. I saw Venus, Jupiter and Mercury, but the deep abyss where the sun belonged drew me to it. It was surreal; it looked as if it came straight out of a science-fiction horror movie. A shiver at the cold, all nature askew — and then a diamond cracked the black, and light returned.

In an instant, we started to feel warmth return, and nature’s pulse returned to its normal rate. We watched with sadness as the moon continued a now anti-climactic march off the sun’s disk, and everything returned to normal. All we had left of the amazing beauty were our memories and the bond of friendship forged by sharing such a glorious event. If you have a chance to witness totality yourself, even if you must drive for hours, do it. Take those you love and share it together.

James Garner, Montgomery, Ala.

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Regarding the April 2 news article “A total solar eclipse can reveal a lot of profound cosmic truths”:

The title of this article was true as far as it went, but it’s an understatement, as a May 1919 solar eclipse led not merely to a feeling of amazement but to the confirmation of a spectacular cosmic truth: Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which had been published in 1915 as “The field equations of gravitation.”

During the 1919 solar eclipse, scientific teams led by British astronomer and physicist Arthur Eddington pointed to a match between their observations of the eclipse from Brazil and West Africa and Einstein’s then-theoretical prediction that light, responding to gravity, is bent by the sun (or any massive star). The measured gravitational deflection, corroborated again by a 1922 solar eclipse, validated general relativity as the cosmic model of space-time.

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In 1675, Isaac Newton wrote to polymath Robert Hooke that “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants” — luminaries who came before him, such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei. Einstein humbly acknowledged that he similarly stood on others’ shoulders, especially crediting Newton, chalking up a paradigm-shifting achievement in the history of science to centuries of work by the physics and astronomical communities.

Keeping in mind, then, that a total solar eclipse can help broaden our understanding of the universe, we should ask: Where does one take the science next? If we look past the upcoming total solar eclipse and deeper into space, what will we learn as astrophysicists ascertain impressive new truths from the space-based Hubble and Webb telescopes and yank back the cosmic shroud?

Keith Tidman, Bethesda

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A note from Alyssa Rosenberg, letters and community editor: Like so many of you, I’m looking forward to Monday’s eclipse, and my colleagues in The Post’s newsroom have been publishing wonderful guides to the experience. For comprehensive information about everything from photographing the phenomenon to making sure your eclipse safety glasses are the real deal, please check out their complete guide here. Afterward, please share your impressions with us at letters@washpost.com. I’ll be watching along with you from Washington, D.C., where the sun will be 87 percent obscured.

An overlooked monument to overlooked women

Regarding Marsha Blackburn, Cindy Hyde-Smith, Cynthia Lummis and Katie Britt’s March 30 op-ed, “Where are the women on the National Mall?”:

The Women’s Suffrage National Monument would be a welcome addition to the Mall. However, the senators were incorrect when they stated that the Mall features “not a single [monument] dedicated to American women.”

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The Vietnam Women’s Memorial celebrated its 30th anniversary on the Mall on Nov. 11. Diane Carlson Evans of Helena, Mont., a former captain in the Army Nurse Corps who served in Vietnam, spearheaded a campaign to place a national monument in the nation’s capital to recognize the contributions of the nearly 10,000 women who served in Vietnam. The bronze statue, a figural group of three women and one injured male soldier, is by celebrated female sculptor, Glenna Goodacre.

Charlotte Kroll, Washington

I read with great interest the laudable op-ed from four Republican female senators from red states about the bipartisan effort to improve the representation of women on the National Mall. I was pleased to read that this is a bipartisan effort. Women undoubtedly deserve a dedicated monument to the fight for women’s voting rights.

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I have to ask these Republican women, though: In their zeal to recognize women’s history, could they spare some energy to ask why the right to vote is still the only right guaranteed to women in the Constitution to date? Where is the long-overdue Equal Rights Amendment? How about some assurance that women should have full agency over their own reproductive health? How about full enforcement of equal pay?

These measures might not be a physical monument, like the one these senators are proposing, but they would be of much greater impact to the lives of women and girls in our country. You can visit a statue and reflect on history. Enshrining women’s rights in the Constitution would make history.

Adriana van Breda, Alexandria

While I certainly agree with the sentiments of the four female Republican senators concerning the lack of monuments on the National Mall dedicated to American women, I would also like to add my smaller voice to a simpler task: appropriately recognizing women in our U.S. passports. The large version has 52 pages. On those pages, there are quotations from former presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan; minister Henry Emerson Fosdick, an antiwar activist and avowed anti-Zionist; newspaperman Horace Greeley; José Antonio Navarro, one of the people who helped found the state of Texas and an enslaver who defended the state’s secession from the Union; civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.; writer E.B. White; Founding Fathers Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson; and Revolutionary War naval commander John Paul Jones. The quotes of only two women were deemed worthy of inclusion in these passports: Black feminist and educator Anna Julia Cooper and author Jessamyn West. Our U.S. passports need to be revised and updated to acknowledge the contributions of women and men in a more balanced and vibrant way.

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Laurel Neff, Chevy Chase

Dark history in deep waters

Regarding the March 31 front-page article, “In Brazil’s dark waters, a truth about America’s role in slavery”:

This fascinating article illuminated a great deal about the pre-Civil War slave trade around Brazil and the work done to find notorious slave trader Nathaniel Gordon’s sunken ship. Gordon’s life is also a window into other aspects of both the traffic in human beings and into American politics during the Civil War.

As Christopher Dickey noted in his book “Our Man in Charleston: Britain’s Secret Agent in the Civil War South,” Gordon’s “trade” was evil even by the standards of the day, and President Abraham Lincoln was shrewd in his handling of the decisions following Gordon’s eventual capture after his narrow escape near Brazil and leading up to Gordon’s execution.

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According to Dickey, Lincoln’s description of Gordon as a man who, “for paltry gain and stimulated only by avarice, can rob Africa of her children to sell into interminable bondage” was quite literal. Tagged “Lucky Nat,” a major reason Gordon had been successful as a slave trader for years was that he trafficked primarily in children, which drastically reduced the chances of shipboard revolts. His decision to focus on the sale of children also explained the high percentage of his victims who perished.

Lincoln saw the need to make Gordon an example and was counting on the execution’s international impact on his war effort. Lincoln actually had a reputation for granting pardons, but this denial of clemency was completely planned and thought out to the point that there was a two-week stay to allow “family preparation” for the execution.

David L. Evans, Arlington

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