In the middle of the Pobler marsh, the eclipse was seen awesomely. Days before, I had tried to gauge what the Sun would be like at that hour, and the truth is that according to the forecasts and the area, at that moment the Sun would be behind our Serra, lost beyond Búger and Campanet. Most likely it wasn't the best place in Mallorca to appreciate the thing, but I wanted to do it from atop the wall of my grandfather Joan's washhouse, whom the thing would have greatly amused. It is quite true that the temptation to look at the Sun is as old as Daedalus, and that, saturated with spectacles, we had nothing else left to consume but a cosmic spectacle. If one thing characterizes capitalism today, it is that it is based on attention, on the ability of any stratagem to attract people's eyes and keep them on it. What creates wealth is not selling things but buying and selling attention, because whoever achieves this can build any commercial trick on top of it. The eclipse, however, has democratized attention, and has made available to everyone in these parts the possibility of seeing how the fireball of the Sun, behind the glass of safe and affordable glasses, was being covered by a black ball that was bursting in from the left and from below, like a hungry balloon. It is a banality, and at the same time a marvel. What were we looking at but a concealment? Don't things become more present when they are made to seem hidden? No one wanted to miss it, or say they hadn't seen it, although, in this too there have been their snobs, their scatterbrains, their armchair scholars and those who kept worrying about the eyes of the young. I am more interested in sociology than astronomy, and that is why what happens on Earth is more illustrative of the world we live in than what happens in the sky. We have seen that almost everyone has taken it like New Year's bells, or those who, when it's all over, have asked aloud what was next, as if the stars were in the sky to make fools of us. Behind the dark plastics, however, it was all just a play of light and shadow, let's not kid ourselves. Nothing compared to the first eclipse we 'lived through', which wasn't televised but in a comic, when Tintin saved himself from being burned alive by invoking the Sun on a day marked by the eclipse before the Inca idolaters. Nowadays, the episode would be qualified as eurocentric, or white arrogance, the colonial domination of those who know over those who don't and can be – must be – manipulated to be taken out of 'barbarism'. The eclipse has also served to bring out our paranoids again, who now didn't trust the approved glasses, just as before they didn't trust the masks or the truth about covid. It's enough to make you want to pull your hair out, it's true, but looking at the horizon, where our beloved Sun goes to lie down, today well covered by a nosy Moon. Let's see if the Sun returns tomorrow, to crush us until we become more foolish. Until August next year, because the wise say there will be another one – a partial one, at least in our corner of the planet.
