The Comet Year

One evening during the first pandemic summer, I stepped outside to see if I could spy the comet. C/2020 F3, a celestial crag of ice known as NEOWISE, was the first comet clearly visible to the naked eye since Hale-Bopp in 1997. I found it below Ursa Major. Its plume—a massive spray of indigo gas, dust, and red sodium—was as magnificent as a peacock’s feather. Chinese astronomers, in the first recorded observation of a comet in 613 B.C., called it a “broom star.” The Greeks called them komētēs, “long-haired” stars.

Not long before, my wife had been reading Middlemarch and shared an arresting line with me: “Things will grow and ripen as if it were a comet year, and the public temper will soon get to a cometary heat.” I had never heard of a comet year, but it seemed we had found ourselves in one. It certainly felt like the temper of things was heating up, as protests for racial justice took place across the country, the political gulf grew ever wider, and coronavirus cases surged in wave after wave.

Fault lines that fragmented the country are quieter now—but they’re still here.

In Boston, where I was then working as an emergency physician, we were inundated with critically ill COVID-19 patients. On some shifts I would walk from one room to another, intubating people. For those who didn’t make it, the last thing they saw was me, standing over them in a yellow gown and green respirator, the blade of the laryngoscope that I would use to intubate them in my hand. When paramedics brought us patients with COVID symptoms, they would sometimes throw a sheet over their heads as they wheeled them in, to keep the virus down as if it were dust. We didn’t know if we would run out of personal protective equipment, or how many would die. We didn’t know anything.

It was fitting that a comet should have appeared in the midst of that crisis year. The arrival of a comet has often been seen as a sign of what Shakespeare called a “change of times and states.” One appeared just after the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. The comet of 1066, which appears in the Bayeux tapestry, was believed to have prefigured the death of King Harold and the Norman conquest of England. Charles V, ruler of the Holy Roman