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Article Excerpt
The day was June 8, 2004, a dazzlingly clear day, as chance would have it, in often-gloomy Oxford. The weather had already turned toward full summer, and the River Cherwell looked ready to resume its hoary role, bearing swans and punters along as it wound through the willows, dragging limbs in its flow, as it meandered through meadows dotted with cows, composed by Constable, and moved ever onward, emptying finally into the Thames--a river that seemed unremarkable now but in its time had been "a great waterway, leading to the uttermost ends of the earth...." Or at least in the eyes of Marlowe, the narrator of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, for whom the Thames was a concept to conjure with, a font of heroic imagery, as in the days when ships sailed out of its mouth for the far side of the world, embarked on intrepid and epochal missions.
Among those missions was the observation of the transit of Venus, a matter of such official concern in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that it was judged too important to be left either to chance or to England's northerly latitude. Observers of the transit were driven to seek out locations closer to the sun, offering a greater likelihood of lucid skies-places like South Africa, India, and Tahiti, locales that from an Anglo-centric perspective were not only exotic but so far off they could be considered, with grandiose cultural solipsism, the ends of the earth.
The park where I had gone that June morning--to observe the first transit of Venus in more than a human lifetime--was familiar and domestic, a scene that in Empire's heyday could stand for the heart of the known world, or at least for home, with its copses and lawns, its patterned landscape where picnickers would later spread their blankets, where bowlers would spin their pitches toward wickets and croquet players bend to align their shots, where the pock of bats and the click of mallets would ring out, and whizzing Frisbees would rise and descend in elliptical arcs.
It was late in the morning, and the park was still quiet and largely empty, save for a cluster of amateur watchers come to observe the transit of Venus, gathering around a booth set up to provide information and tinted glasses, so we could witness the phenomenon without harming our sight. The sun burned brightly overhead. On its face, to one side and toward the bottom, at a four o'clock position, we could see a black dot, Venus indeed, caught in the process of a rare visible trajectory between the earth and the sun. For the few hours it took to complete this passage, the planet we know as the bright morning star or the luminous star of evening would, in a reversal of figure and ground, be black. To a casual contemporary observer this dark dot might appear innocuous, but in centuries past the astral event had seemed portentous, giving rise to such rhapsodic descriptions as this one, from Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon:
Thro' our whole gazing lives, Venus has been a tiny Dot of Light ... ever against the black face of Eternity. But on the day of this transit, all shall suddenly reverse, as she is caught, dark, embodied, solid, against the face of the Sun, a Goddess descended from light to matter ... dark, mad, mortal, the Goddess in quite another Aspect indeed.
Notwithstanding such a mythic incantation, the real cause for the fuss, the reason for getting excited about the transit of Venus, was scientific.
The intervals of years elapsing between the transits of Venus are variable, although they follow a pattern: 105, 8, 122, 8, 105, and so on, into infinity. The design is fixed and conforms to the laws of the solar system, but from a human perspective it can feel erratic, and with regard to opportunities for observation, the fact that some intervals...
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