Loren Eiseley

Just a reminder here to read him more often, here and there, interspersed in my days, some wonder and rumination.

I have often borrowed the Library of America edition of his collected essays, read a little at a time, but at times that is plenty to restore perspective on life, and everything about it. And I have often wondered why is he not talked about more, or why didn't I hear of him until I stumbled on this book. Anyhow, here are some snippets from here and there. For me, it is not as much about finishing this book, as about dipping in again and again to refresh, renew and somehow engage with a tranquil soul which passes on its wisdom and tranquility to you.

From The Lost Notebooks:

"Walked along the edge of the daisy field. Interesting to see nature going on here at the verge of the Penn Fruit Company. Abandoned cups, match cases, whiskey bottles slowly being covered and made "natural" by red clover and diasies. How fast life flows from one form to another. The illusion of things. To the generations of cabbage butterflies I must be as everlasting as the Sphinx. I turned round sharply to make sure the Wynnewood shopping center had not disappeared while I gazed. I half expected to see a little plaster and a few bricks disappearing into the insatiable maw of the clover. Matter disappears of modfieis its appearances so fast that everything takes on an aspect of illusion -- a momentary fizzing and boiling with smoke rings, like pouring dissident chemicals into a retort. To a time-foreshortened eye all form would become bubblings or momentary imaginative shapes such as one sees when dreaming before a winter fire. One thinks one sees a shape and it is gone. Perhaps it is so with God half-asleep over the dying embers of his universe, and dreaming the shapes that come and go through the coals. "

From The Hidden Teacher:

"And war it has been indeed -- the long war of life against its inhospitable environment, a war that has lasted for perhaps three billion years. It began with strange chemicals seething under a sky lacking in oxygen; it was waged through long ages until the first green plants learned to harness the light of the nearest star, our sun. The human brain, so frail, so perishable, so full of inexhaustible dreams and hungers, burns by the power of the leaf."

 

"The student of fossil life would be forced to tell us that if we take the past into consideration the vast majority of earth's creatures -- perhaps over ninety per cent -- have vanished. Forms that flourished for a far longer time than man has existed upon earth have become either extinct or so tranformed that their descendants are scarcely recognizable. The specialized perish with the environment that created them..."

 

"The spider was a symbol of man in miniature. The wheel of the web brought the analogy home clearly. Man, too, lies at the heart of a web, a web extending through the starry reaches of sidereal space, as well as backward into the dark realm of prehistory. His great eye upon Mount Palomar looks into a distance of millions of light-years, his radio ear hears the whisper of even more remote galaxies, he peers through the electron microscope upon the minute particles of his own being. It is a web no creature of earth has ever spun before. Like the orb spider, man lies at the heart of it, listening. Knowledge has given him the memory of earth’s history beyond the time of his emergence. Like the spider’s claw, a part of him touches a world he will never enter in the flesh. Even now, one can see him reaching forward into time with new machines, computing, analyzing, until elements of the shadowy future will also compose part of the invisible web he fingers.

    Yet still my spider lingers in memory against the sunset sky. Spider thoughts in a spider universe—sensitive to raindrop and moth flutter, nothing beyond, nothing allowed for the unexpected, the inserted pencil from the world outside.”

 

"Let man spin his web, I thought further; it is his nature. But I considered also the work of the phagocytes swarming in the rivers of my body, the unresting cells in their mortal universe. What is it we are a part of that we do not see, as the spider was not gifted to discern my face, or my little probe into her world?"