The Firmament of Time is a collection of lectures published three years later. I’ve read the monograph a-half-dozen-times since, and decided that I’d try some of his later works. I first read The Immense Journey during my sophomore year of college (1970) and was struck by the Gibbon-esque language. When the last seared hand has flung the last grenade, an older version of that hand will be stroking a clinging youngster hidden in its fur, high up under some autumn moon.” Let the storms blow through the streets of cities the root is safe, the many-faced animal of which we are one flashing and evanescent facet will not pass with us. Yet well over a hundred years ago Kierkegaard observed that maturity consists in the discovery that "there comes a critical moment where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood."Īt the end of the third lecture, Eiseley gives us a fairly representative burst of prose: “On my office wall is a beautiful photograph of a slow loris with round, enormous eyes set in the spectral face of a night-haunter…Sometimes when I am very tired I can think myself into the picture until I am wrapped securely in a warm coat with a fine black stripe down my spine…At such times a great peace settles on me, and with the office door closed, I can sleep as lemurs sleep tonight, huddled high in the great trees of two continents. We wish our lives to be one continuous growth in knowledge indeed, we expect them to be. It is our custom to deny this we are men of precision, measurement and logic we abhor the unexplainable and reject it. It is a very difficult thing for a man to grasp today, because of his power yet in his brain there is really only a sort of universal marsh, spotted at intervals by quaking green islands representing the elusive stability of modern science - islands frequently gone as soon as glimpsed. I have learned this with my face against the ground. IN man, I know now, there is no such thing as wisdom. I have crawled downward into holes without a bottom, and upward, wedged into crevices where the wind and the birds scream at you until the sound of a falling pebble is enough to make the sick heart lurch. I am a naturalist and a fossil hunter, and I have crawled most of the way through life. I do not say this last pridefully, but with the feeling that the posture, if not the thought behind it, may have had some final salutary effect. "I am a man who has spent a great deal of his life on his knees, though not in prayer. Take the time to consume this brief but special book. it is not surprising that this work won the John Burroughs Medal for best publication in the field of writing - back in 1961!. Loren Eiseley is a naturalist, but writes as a poet. But whatever the motivation, it was divinely inspired. I am not truly sure how I came across this gem - which book list suggested that I add it some years ago to have it slowly rise to the top of my reading list. What does it all say about self-awareness? We are the first species on our planet to become aware of who we are and our relationship to the rest of the universe and the first species hellbent on destroying ourselves. For too many men, the exterior world with its mass-produced daydreams has become the conqueror.”Īnd as I sit staring at this computer monitor, I suddenly feel the overwhelming need to go outside and sit on the porch to ponder. In the presence of so compelling an instrument, there is little opportunity in the evenings to explore his own thoughts or to participate in family living in the way that the man from the early part of the century remembers. “Much of man’s attention is directed exteriorly upon the machines which now occupy most of his waking hours…In America he sits quiescent before the flickering screen in the living room while horsemen gallop across an American wilderness long vanished in the past. Not only are we not connected to the environment, we are rarely connected to even ourselves. Lost the time we once had to explore our own thoughts. On Time: Eiseley laments that we have actually lost time. ![]() Since the six lectures were written to be read aloud, they lack the poetry of his other books but they do underscore his mastery of the lecture, something of a dying art form in itself. ![]() We’re even more isolated, existing in an artificial world. And now, 50 years later, Eiseley's concerns have only become more troublesome. This book consists of a series of lectures Eiseley did in 1959 to honor the 100th anniversary of Darwin’s “The Origin of the Species.” They explore evolution and our relationship to time and the natural world, or rather our growing disconnectedness from both. Loren Eiseley was an anthropologist, educator and natural science writer, who taught at the University of Pennsylvania.
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