Once in a generation, the moon asserts its place in the cosmic order, briefly erasing the sun from the sky and reminding those below how small and fortunate they are. On Wednesday, that ancient geometry played out across the Northern Hemisphere, tracing a shadow from the Russian Arctic through Iceland and into northern Spain — a country that had not stood in totality's path since 1905. For roughly two minutes at any given point along that corridor, day became night, and 230 million Europeans were offered at least a glimpse of the sun's slow disappearance. The universe keeps its own calendar, i