Back To Earth Talk Index Eiseley, Loren
Loren Eiseley was born in Nebraska, tubercular as a youth, he did odd jobs and rode the rails during the early days of the depression. Finally he finished college, found a vocation in science and culminated his career as Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and the History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He became widely known as a naturalist, humanist, and accomplished author. He died in 1977.
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. The Immense Journey, 1957.
The door to the past is a strange door. It swings open and things pass through it, but they pass in one direction only. Ibid.
I think it was the great nineteenth-century paleontologist Cope who first clearly enunciated what he called the "law of the unspecialized," the contention that it was not from the most highly organized and dominant forms of a given geological era that the master type of a succeeding period evolved, but that instead the dominant forms tended to arise from more lowly and generalized animals which were capable of making new adaptations, and which were not narrowly restricted to a given environment. Ibid.
There are things down there still coming ashore. Never make the mistake of thinking life is now adjusted for eternity. Ibid.
We are one of the many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time. Ibid.
I have seen a tree root burst a rock face on a mountain or slowly wrench aside the gateway of a forgotten city, The Unexpected Universe, 1969.
Every man contains within himself a ghost continent - a place circled as warily as Antarctica was circled two hundred years ago by Captain James Cook. If, in addition, the man is a scientist, he will see strange shapes amidst his interior ice floes and be fearful of exposing to the ridicule of his fellows what he has seen. Ibid.
Goethe's genius sensed, well before the publication of the Origin of Species, the thesis and antithesis that epitomize the eternal struggle of the immediate species against its dissolution into something other: in modern terms, fish into reptile, ape into man. Ibid.
The power to change is both creative and destructive-a sinister gift, which, unrestricted, leads onward toward the formless and inchoate void of the possible. Ibid.
Mostly the animals understand their roles, but man, by comparison, seems troubled by a message that, it is often said, he cannot quite remember, or has gotten wrong. Ibid.
One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human. Ibid.
Biological time never creates the same world twice . . . Ibid.
The world we now know is open-ended, unpredictable. Ibid.
Early in the seventeenth century Sir Francis Bacon asserted that "by the agency of man a new aspect of things, a new universe, comes into view." Ibid.
A kind of desperate will resides even in a root. Ibid.
The human brain, so frail, so perishable, so full of inexhaustible dreams and hungers, burns by the power of the leaf. Ibid.
It is not enough to hold nuclear energy in one's hand like a spear, as a man would hold it, or to see the lightning, or times past, or time to come, as a man would see it. If we continue to do this, the great brain - the human brain - will be only a new version of the old trap, and nature is full of traps for the beast that cannot learn. Ibid.
One must repeat that nature is extravagant in the expenditure of individuals and germ cells. Our remote half-human ancestors gave themselves and never expected, or got, an answer as to the destiny their descendants might serve or if, indeed, they would survive. This is still the road we tread in the twentieth century. The Invisible Pyramid, 1970.
"A name is a prison, God is free," once observed the Greek poet Nikos Kazantzakis. He meant, I think, that valuable though language is to man, it is by very necessity limiting, and creates for man an invisible prison. Ibid.
Language implies boundaries. A word spoken creates a dog, a rabbit, a man. It fixes their nature before our eyes; henceforth their shapes are, in a sense, our own creation. Ibid.
A steady metabolism has enabled the mammals and also the birds to experience life more fully and rapidly than cold-blooded creatures. One of the great feats of evolution, perhaps the greatest, has been this triumph of the interior environment over exterior nature. Ibid.
Creatures who evolve as man has done sometimes bear the scar tissue of their evolutionary travels in their bodies. The human cortex, the center of high thought, has come to dominate, but not completely to suppress, the more ancient portions of the animal brain. Ibid.
We know that within our heads there still exists an irrational restive ghost that can whisper disastrous messages into the ear of reason. Ibid.
Powerful though the spell of human language has proven itself to be, it has laid boundaries upon the cosmos. Ibid.
Man is no more natural than the world. In reality he is . . . the creator of a phantom universe, the universe we call culture - a formidable realm of cloud shapes, ideas, potentialities, gods, and cities, which with man's death will collapse into dust and vanish back into "expected" nature. Ibid.
. . . . the nature of the human predicament is how nature is to be reentered; how man, the relatively unthinking and proud creator of the second world - the world of culture - may revivify and restore the first world which cherished and brought him into being. Ibid.
For what, increasingly, is required of man is that he pursue the paradox of return . . . {but} man does not wish to retrace his steps down to the margins of the reeds and peer within, lest by some magic he be permanently recaptured. Instead, men prefer to hide in cities of their own devising. Ibid.
At the climactic moment of his journey into space {man} has met himself at the doorway of the stars . . . He must learn that, whatever his powers as a magician, he lies under the spell of a greater and a green enchantment which, try as he will, he can never avoid, however far he travels. The spell has been laid on him since the beginning of time - the spell of the natural world from which he sprung. Ibid.
It is not fair to say this planet will destroy us. Space flight is a brave venture, but upon the soaring rockets are projected all the fears and evasions of man. He has fled across two worlds, from the windy corridors of wild savannahs to the sunlit world of the mind, and still he flees. Earth will not destroy him. It is he who threatens to destroy the earth. Ibid.
Today man's mounting numbers and his technological power to pollute his environment reveal a single demanding necessity: the necessity for him consciously to reenter and preserve, for his own safety, the old first world from which he originally emerged. Ibid.
His {man's}second world, drawn from his own brain, has brought him far, but it cannot take him out of nature, nor can he live by escaping into his second world alone. He must incorporate from the wisdom of the axial thinkers an ethic not alone directed toward his fellows, but extended to the living world around him. Ibid.
I have lifted up a fistful of that ground. I held it while that wild flight of south-bound warblers hurtled over me into the oncoming dark. There went phosphorus, there went iron, there went carbon, there beat the calcium in those hurrying wings. Ibid.
Evolution is far more a part of the unrolling future than it is of the past, for the past, being past, is determined and done. The Night Country, 1971.
The brain is a strange instrument. The things it chooses to remember are as fantastic as the things it chooses to forget. Ibid.
Nature, as I have tried to intimate, is never quite where we see it. It is a becoming as well as a passing . . . Ibid.
We lack the penetration to see the present and the onrushing future contending for the soft feathers of a flying bird, or a beetle's armor, or shaking painfully the frail confines of the human heart. Ibid.
Evolution is far more a part of the unrolling future than it is of the past, for the past, being past, is determined and done. The present, in the words of Karl Heim, "is still in the molten phase of becoming. It is still undecided. It is still being fought for." Ibid.
What is true biologically is also true along the peripheries of the mind itself. We possess our own Alpine meadows, excoriating heat, and freezing cold. Ibid.
Man's mind, like the expanding universe itself, is engaged in poring over limitless horizons. Ibid.
It is within the power of great art to shed on nature a light which can be had from no other source than the mind itself. Ibid.
I was born when father was forty, of a marriage that had never been happy. I was loved, but I was also a changeling, an autumn child surrounded by falling leaves. All the Strange Hours, 1975
Sir Francis Bacon once spoke of those drawn into some powerful circle of thought as "dancing in little rings like persons bewitched." Our scientific models do simulate a kind of fairy ring or magic circle which, once it has encompasses us, is hard to view objectively. Truth is elusive. Perhaps William James put things most felicitously when he said, "The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths." Ibid.
It is a commonplace of all religious thought, even the most primitive, that the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from his fellows and live for a time in the wilderness. The Star Thrower, 1978.
Man . . . is himself a flame. He has burned through the animal world and appropriated its vast stores of protein for his own. Ibid.
It has been said repeatedly that one can never, try as he will, get around to the front of the universe. Man is destined to see only its far side, to realize nature only in retreat. Ibid.
As adults, we are preoccupied with living. As a consequence, we see little. At the approach of age some men look about them at last and discover the hole in the hedge leading to the unforeseen. Ibid.
Flowers changed the face of the planet. Without them, the world we know-even man himself-would never have existed. Francis Thompson, the English poet, once wrote that one could not pluck a flower without troubling a star. Ibid.
Insects in the first frosts of autumn all run down like little clocks. Ibid.
With time, the bony fin is transformed into a paw, a round, insectivorous eye into the near-sighted gaze of a scholar. Ibid.
If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure. Ibid.
We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of wading amphibians. Ibid.
Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight - the light of our particular day. In a fortnight, as aeons are measured, we may lie silent in a bed of stone, or, as has happened in the past, be figured in another guise. Ibid.
Anthropomorphizing: the charge of my critics. My counter-charge. There is a sense in which when we cease to anthropomorphize, we cease to be men, for when we cease to have human contact with animals and deny them all relation to ourselves, we tend in the end to cease to anthropomorphize ourselves - to deny our own humanity. The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley, edited by Kenneth Heuer, 1987.
The uses of a great professor are only partly to give us knowledge; his real purpose is to take his students beyond knowledge into the transcendental domain of the unknown. the future and the dream - to expand the limits of the human consciousness. Ibid.
In the world there is nothing below a certain depth that is truly explanatory. It is as if matter dreamed and muttered in its sleep. But why, and for what reason it dreams, there is no evidence. Ibid.
The truth is . . . there is nothing very "normal" about nature. Once upon a time there were no flowers at all. How Flowers Changed the World, 1996.
Somewhere, just a short time before the close of the Age of Reptiles, there occurred a soundless, violent explosion. It lasted millions of years, but it was an explosion, nevertheless. It marked the emergence of the angiosperms - the flowering plants. Ibid.
Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all would be today totally unrecognizable. Archaeopteryx, the lizard-bird, might still be snapping at beetles on a sequoia limb; man might still be a nocturnal insectivore gnawing a roach in the dark. Ibid.