May 2023; July 2023
Essays by Loren Eisley, first published in 1946. Although an independent book, I am reading these essays (with KC) in a two-volume edition of his complete works, so the page numbers in the quotes may not align with Immense Journey.
So far, I have enjoyed all the essays. While I would say “The Snout” is my favorite, I think “The Flow of the River,” is the one I’d most recommend to others… and it may well turn out to be my favorite. At this point I’m only about six essays into the book,
* The Slit
A lyrical essay describing his thoughts and feelings as he excavates a skull from a deep, narrow gorge.
In terms of things happening, it is a very simple event: he goes to a gorge, finds a skull, and digs it out. The complexity comes out of his thoughts as he does so, and the way that they are interwoven with both the place and the moment. He sees himself as part of a lineage of life, connecting first with the pre-human skull he is excavating, and then imagining pre-hominoid times and the earliest mammals. Beautiful and spooky writing.
The essay begins with this:
Some lands are flat and grass-covered, and smile so evenly up at the sun that they seem forever youthful, untouched by man or time. Some are torn, ravaged and convulsed like the features of profane old age. Rocks are wrenched up and exposed to view; black pits receive the sun but give back no light. It was to such a land I rode, but I rode to it across a sunlit, timeless prairie over which nothing passed but antelope or a wandering bird
–Loren Eisley, The Slit (from The Immense Journey), circa 1946
I love the way he depicts the landscape, ascribing a mood or nature to each, and how he rides along one to the other. And the way the “profane old age” of the land he is riding to forshadows the discovery of the skull.
Here we have the skull that he has discovered, almost but not quite his first sight of it. I like the linkage — it is staring up at him, and he is in turn staring up at the strip of sky at the top of the slit, and his reflection on the future that he would never see.
The skull lay tilted in such a manner that it stared, sightless, up at me as though I, too, were already caught a few feet above him in the strata and, in my turn, were staring upward at that strip of sky which the ages were carrying farther away from me beneath the tumbling debris of falling mountains. The creature had never lived to see a man, and I, what was it I was never going to see?
–Loren Eisley, The Slit (from The Immense Journey), circa 1946
And as we approach the end, he reflects on what the slit has come to mean to him, and how it has come to signify time in which he is fixed, even as the sight of human’s peers ever farther into the past and the future.
Perhaps the Slit, with its exposed bones and its far-off vanishing sky, has come to stand symbolically in my mind for a dimension denied to man, the dimension of time. Like the wistaria on the garden wall he is rooted in his particular century. Out of it – forward or backward – he cannot run. As he stands on his circumscribed pinpoint of time, his sight for the past is growing longer, and even the shadowy outlines of the galactic future are growing clearer, though his own fate he cannot yet see.
–Loren Eisley, The Slit (from The Immense Journey), circa 1946
** The Flow of the River
An essay on water, and specifically about a mystical experience Eisley had while exploring the upper reaches of the Platte river. I will mention that the The Platte River was a place I frequented during my adolescence, and so descriptions of it as a place have a strong resonance with me, and made reading this essay a particularly enjoyable experience. It also seems to be the case that, as a biologist and paleontolgist, Eisley has an appreciation for water and its role in the generation and maintenance of life:
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. Its least stir even, as now in a rain pond on a flat roof opposite my office, is enough to bring me searching to the window. A wind ripple may be translating itself into life. I have a constant feeling that some time I may witness that momentous miracle on a city roof, see life veritably and suddenly boiling out of a heap of rusted pipes and old television aerials. I marvel at how suddenly a water beetle has come and is submarining there in a spatter of green algae. Thin vapors, rust, wet tar and sun are an alembic remarkably like the mind; they throw off odorous shadows that threaten to take real shape when no one is looking.
—Loren Eisley, The Flow of the River (In The Immense Journey), circa 1946
And, at the same time, his feelings are conflicted. When he was young, he nearly drowned, and has carried from that a discomfort with water. Further, presumably as a consequence of this discomfort, has never learned to swim. But, so this essay recounts, one day, while conducting research along the remote reaches of the Platte River, he took it on himself to immerse himself in water, and to float.
On that day, however, the sight of sky and willows and the weaving net of water murmuring a little in the shallows on its way to the Gulf stirred me, parched as I was with miles of walking, with a new idea: I was going to float. I was going to undergo a tremendous adventure.
—Loren Eisley, The Flow of the River, p 14-15, (In The Immense Journey), circa 1946
The notion came to me, I suppose, by degrees. I had shed my clothes and was floundering pleasantly in a hole among some reeds when a great desire to stretch out and go with this gently insistent water began to pluck at me. Now to this bronzed, bold, modern generation, the struggle I waged with timidity while standing there in knee-deep water can only seem farcical; yet, actually, for me, it was not so.
I like how he depicts the attraction of the water (and also, in a passage I have elided, the potential perils of quicksand, deep pools, and a remote location), and how he evokes our sympathy with his timidity, in what he thinks we will see as a ‘farcical struggle’ with his very real fears.
I thought of all this, standing quietly in the water, feeling the sand shifting away under my toes. Then I lay back in the floating position that left my face to the sky, and shoved off.
The sky wheeled over me. For an instant, as I bobbed into the main channel, I had the sensation of sliding down the vast tilted face of the continent. It was then that I felt the cold needles of the alpine springs at my fingertips, and the warmth of the Gulf pulling me southward. Moving with me, leaving its taste upon my mouth and spouting under me in dancing springs of sand, was the immense body of the continent itself, flowing like the river was flowing, grain by grain, mountain by mountain, down to the sea. I was streaming over ancient sea beds thrust aloft where giant reptiles had once sported; I was wearing down the face of time and trundling cloud-wreathed ranges into oblivion. I touched my margins with the delicacy of a crayfish’s antennae, and felt great fishes glide about their work.
—Loren Eisley, The Flow of the River, p 15, (In The Immense Journey), circa 1946
I like how we move increasingly into his viewpoint, starting with his description of his timidity that is not ours, and then feeling, with him, the sand shifting between his toes (as sand does in moving water), and finally becoming one with him as as they sky wheels over him and his body expands to become one with the entire watershed.
The essay continues with reflections on how humans, and animals in general, are at some level just evolved mechanisms for carrying water beyond its bounds. And then he recounts, on a later journey to the Platte, the discovery of a catfish frozen in a block of ice. And he then retrieves the entombed catfish, takes it home, and discovers to his surprise that it survives freezing, and, living, needs a tank. He gets a tank and keeps the catfish for the winter, until, as spring approached, the catfish leapt out of the tank, during the night, and expired on the dry floor. Eisley reflects on the evolutionary impulse behind it — “a million ancestral years had gone into the jump” — and why, in the wild, perhaps trapped in a closed off channel, it would have been a good idea.
Eisley feels a kinship with other creatures, “some part of myself… that lies unrealized in the momentary shape I inhabit,” and refers to reprimands he has received from others in his lack of faith in man.
They distrust, it would seem, all shapes and thoughts but their own. They would bring God into the compass of the shopkeeper’s understanding and confine him to those limits, lest he proceed to some unimaginable and shocking act, perhaps create, as a casual afterthought, a being more beautiful than man.
—Loren Eisley, The Flow of the River, p 18, (In The Immense Journey), circa 1946
The Great Deeps
Recounts the voyage of the Challenger in the `1870’s, the first scientific expedition to provide oceanography with a scientific base, and the two principal theories and beliefs that motivated it.
One of the theories had to do with urschliem (German for ur-slime?) which was the idea that there was a sort of semi-living unicellular slime coating the bottom of the ocean which represented the earliest stage of life. And indeed, quite a few most famous scientists of the the time– Thomas Huxley, Ernst Haeckle, Sir Charles Thompson – embraced this theory, Huxley had received a sample, but it turned out that sea water, when treated with alcohol, produced a gel-like “sulphate of lime” (CaSO4 — amorphous gymsum) goo which someone had decided was the urschleim.
The second dominant theory was that life in the deep ocean represented the remnants of earliest life, both because the deep was a refuge from supposed more intense competition elsewhere, and because some thought the conditions of darkness and pressure were similar to what would have existed on early earth. Both theories were rejected as a result of the expedition, which primarily found already known life forms. Not a trilobite in sight.
Life did not arise on the bottom; the muds of the deep waters did not compound it. Instead, with its own pale lanterns, or the delicate, strawlike feelers of blindness, it has groped its way down into the dark.
—Loren Eisley, The Great Deeps (In The Immense Journey), circa 1946
And, at the end of the essay, he steps away from his narrative. He thinks of the great telescopes being built, to stare into distant space, and likens them to eyes, a billion years in the making. But then he brings the focus back in close:
Whenever I catch a frog’s eye I am aware of this, but I do not find it depressing. I stand quite still and try hard not to move or lift a hand since it would only frighten him. And standing thus it finally comes to me that this is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is, far more than any spatial adventure, the supreme epitome of the reaching out.
—Loren Eisley, The Great Deeps (In The Immense Journey), circa 1946
…reading break…
*The Snout
I have reviewed this elsewhere: The Snout, by Loren Eisley
How Flowers Changed the World
A very nice essay. With the eyes of a writer (but also of a reader) I particularly appreciate the way it starts out: far way; very zoomed out. Eisley begins by imagining viewing the earth from the far side of the solar system, and watching it over vast periods of time. He imagines how the light and its color will change: for most of history it will have reflected light from vast deserts, plains of black basalt, and oceans of dark water. Only recently, geologically speaking, will green appear, and only an eye-blink ago will other colors be mixed with the green:
Out of the vast chemical bath of the sea — not from the deeps, but from the element-rich, light-exposed platforms of the continental shelves — wandering fingers of green crept up the meanderings of river systems, and fringed the gravels of forgotten lakes.
Loren Eisley, p 41 & 42
[…]
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 nonetheless. […] Flowers changed the planet.
In the essay, he describes the evolution of plants, and the coevolution of organisms that depend on them. The appearance of flowers — with their nutrient-dense seeds and fruits, and their freights of pollen and nectar — not only enabled the rapid spread of plants across the face of the earth by hitching rides with motile organisms, but also provided nutrients for those organisms that enabled them to prosper and diversify.
Later: KC notes, and I concur, that the claim that nutrient density actually made a big difference is speculative, and not that convincing; perhaps more important is that the co-evolution of features that enabled plants to spread away from water made a big difference in biomass, and in the way ecosystems work (e.g., by stabilizing soils and channeling rivers).
The old, stiff, sky-reaching wooden world had changed into something that glowed here and there with strange colors, put out queer, unheard-of fruits and little intricately carved seed cases, and, most important of all, produced concentrated foods in a way that the land had never seen before, or dreamed of back in the fish-eating, leaf-crunching days of the dinosaurs.
Though Eisley doesn’t mention it, elsewhere (I believe in Ed Yong’s The Immense World) it is noted that it was only after organisms had developed color vision, that flowers begin producing pigments that allowed them to signal their presence and readiness to their commensal partners.
There is more in the essay, but this provides a good gist.
The Real Secret of Piltdown
This was, in my view, one of the lesser essays. It is interesting, from a historical perspective, as it gives an account of the role of the pre-hoax Piltdown-man fossil in scientific thinking about human evolution, and the import of its debunking. In particular, it describes a debate, among evolutionists, about whether the human brain evolved rapidly (as Alfred Russell Wallace argued), or slowly (as Charles Darwin argued, and as the ancient age of the Piltdown skull suggested). The true secret of Piltdown, says Eisley, is that it forced scientists to re-examine the evolution of the human brain.
Even though this is not a favorite of mine, I can not help but be impressed by the lyricism with which he presents what is essentially a historical debate:
Most of our knowledge of him – even in his massive-faced beetle-browed stage – is now confined, since the loss of Piltdown, to the last half of the Ice Age. If we pass backward beyond this point we can find traces of crude tools, stone implements which hint that some earlier form of man was present here and there in Europe, Asia, and particularly Africa in the earlier half of Ice Age time, but to the scientist it is like peering into the mists floating over an unknown landscape.
Here and there through the swirling vapor one catches a glimpse of a shambling figure, or a half-wild primordial face stares back at one from some momentary opening in the fog. Then, just as one grasps at a clue, the long gray twilight settles in and the wraiths and the half-heard voices pass away.
Loren Eisley, p 56
…reading break…
The Maze
Eisley remarks, in the introduction to this essay, that two events followed the publication of his previous (and controversial) essay on The Real Secret of Piltdown. One he discusses here; the other in the following essay.
The event he discusses was what appeared to be the negation of his contention that man, and in particular his large brain, was an evolutionarily recent development. This was the discovery of Oreopithicus in a coal mine in Tuscany, and the claim that the ten million year old fossil had the large head (and brain) that characterizes homo spaiens. Eisley notes that this is resonates with a long-standing debate among anthropologists, some who believed that the ancestor of sapiens would be a small but large-headed specimen, a little man or homunculus, and others who more more committed evolutionists who looked only for the forms that contained the possibility of development.
The Dream Animal
Lyrically well done, but based on scientific claims that are a wrong or at least dubious. He begins by citing evidence that suggests the last ice age, which was through to drive the evolution of modern humans, began only 300,000 years ago (the modern consensus is 2.8 million years ago, and in any case I’m not sure if anthropologists still believe that the ice age was responsible for the evolution of human intelligence.
Questionable science aside, it is still reasonable to ask what function the vastly enlarged brain of modern humans played in their evolution. Eisley speculates that the evolutionary advantage of the human brain was not so much in tool building, as in enabling the construction of an imagined and yet shared social world:
… it is likely that the selective forces working on the humanization of man lay essentially in the nature of the sociocultural world itself.
– Loren Eisley, The Dream Animal, p. 77
[…]
He was becoming something the world had never seen before – a dream, animal – living, at least partially within a secret universe of his own creation, and sharing that secret universe in his head with other, similar heads. Symbolic communication had begun. Man had escaped out of the eternal present of the animal world into a knowledge of past and the future. The unseen gods, the power beyond the world of phenomenal appearance, began to stalk through his dreams.
The Man of the Future
Not one of his better essays: the science is out-dated and largely incorrect, and it is not quite up to his lyrical standards either. One scientific inaccuracy is that Boskop Man, fossils of humans with very large cranial capacity, represented a separate race or species of humans (current thinking is that these fossils are larger-skulled examples of Hottentot (or Khohasia) origin. Another scientifically questionable assumption is that brain-size is necessarily a good measure of intelligence. Not that Eisley is to blame for any of this — he was simply seizing on what at the time was leading edge science and speculating a bit.
The essay lays out the case for homo sapiens arising due to a mutation that vastly accelerated the growth of the brain after birth, and suggests the Boskop Man was an exemplar of future man: but one that ominously failed to compete with (purportedly) smaller-brained and more violent competitors.
Little Men and Flying Saucers
E begins by contemplating space, and the public interest in it: “Even in daytime, reflected light on a floating dandelion seed, or a spider riding a whip of gossamer in the sun’s eye, can bring excited questions from the novice unused to estimating the distance or nature of aerial objects.”
Since we now talk, write, and dream endlessly of space rockets, it is no surprise that this thinking yields the obverse of the coin: that the rocket or its equivalent may have come first to us from somewhere “outside.” … Later, contemplating the infinity of time, one wonders if perchance their messages came long ago, hurtling into the swamp muck of the steaming coal forests, the bright projectile clambered over by hissing reptiles, and the delicate instruments running mindlesslv down with no report.
—Loren Eisley, p. 91
At one point, when it was believed time was infinite, the absence of extraterrestrial visitors seemed to indicate that intelligence is exceedingly rare; now, however, that we know that the universe is ‘only’ about 14 billion years old, the question is more open. And if there is a mind, Eisley writes, it might as well reside in the body of a little man. Eisley speaks of the cultural fascination with little people. He also notes that animal life seems to follow a pattern, which argues against it being specially created — why would a creator not exhibit a bit more… creativity? And more so that extinct creatures can be fitted into this pattern as well. For a religious person, Eisley suggests, the fact that earth existed for hundreds of millions of years without humans, argues against earth being created for us:
Even more tragically, it [the ego] learns that the world supposedly made for its enjoyment has existed for untold eons entirely indifferent to its coming. The chill vapors of time and space are beginning to filter under the closed door of the human intellect.
—Loren Eisley, p. 95
He discusses a debate, in the 1850’s, of whether there might be human-like life on other planets: some argued that earth was unique; others that earth is but one among many (all) worlds with intelligent life. The advent of Darwin’s discoveries overturned this line of argument:
…once undirected variation and natural selection are introduced as the mechanism controlling the development of plants and animals, the evolution of every world in space becomes a series of unique historical events. The precise, accidental duplication of a complex form of life is extremely unlikely to occur in even the same environment, let alone in the different background and atmosphere of a far off world.
—Loren Eisley, p. 99-100
And thus Eisley ends: there may be life on other worlds, but it will not be like us.
But nowhere in all space, or on the thousand worlds, will there be men to share our loneliness. There may be wisdom; there may be a power; somewhere across space, great instruments, handled by strange, manipulative organs, may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life, and in the principles of evolution, we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever.
—Loren Eisley, p. 102
…reading break…