Loren Eiseley
“I am midde-aged now, but in the autumn I always seek for it again hopefully,” begins the final essay, entitled “The Secret of Life,” in Loren Eiseley’s book of essays, The Immense Journey (1957). It is a great essay in a lifetime of great essays by one of the greatest naturalist-writers in American literature. It is characteristic that he wrote the essay claiming middle-age before he was 50, but then he may have had Dante’s beginning of the Inferno in mind — “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, / che la diritta via era smarrita” [Midway in the journey of our life / I came to myself in a dark wood, / for the straight way was lost.”] If any writer would be mindful of passing time and be a good guide for the reader in traversing a dark wood, Loren Eiseley (1907-1977) would be the man.
Eiseley was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and eventually graduated from the University of Nebraska there with a B.A. in English and a B.S. in Geology/Anthropology. While recovering from tuberculosis in mid-college, he rode the rails in the Depression, gathering experiences that would unexpectedly enter his writing about nature and time and humanity’s frail existence. He acquired a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and eventually returned there to head its Anthropology Department.
Eiseley’s essays are haunted by his perspective of the Other. Through temperment and training he acquired a distance from humanity, sometimes as close as the Neanderthal, sometimes as distant as a fox, often even further back in time. He walked the narrow ridge between a nonverbal lyrical approach to the universe and a scientifically honed analytical approach to the universe — and he would be the first to say it was all the same universe, not at all affected by a primate’s attempt to define it. He is one of a distinguished line of naturalist-philosophers that have arisen in modern times, among them Henry David Thoreau, Jean-Henri Fabre, Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, and other distinguished company.
Collected Essays: Volume 1 of 2 Library of America
Collected Essays: Volume 1 of 2 Library of America
An eminent paleontologist with the soul and skill of a poet, Loren Eiseley (1907–1977) was among the twentieth century’s greatest inheritors of the literary tradition of Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin, and John Muir, and a precursor to such later writers as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Carl Sagan. After decades of fieldwork and discovery as a “bone-hunter” and professor, Eiseley turned late in life to the personal essay, and beginning with the surprise million-copy seller The Immense Journey (1957) he produced an astonishing succession of books that won acclaim both as science and as art. Now for the first time, the Library of America presents his landmark essay collections in a definitive two-volume set.
This first volume begins with Eiseley’s debut collection, which displays his far-reaching knowledge and boundless curiosity about the mysteries of the natural world. Here are vivid accounts of prehistoric ecosystems, the origins of consciousness, the search for “living fossils” at the bottom of the sea, and the complexities of our evolutionary inheritance. Here too are literary qualities and aspirations that led many to hail Eiseley as a “modern Thoreau”: his quest for the ultimate meanings and cosmological significance of natural phenomena, along with his immense expressive gifts.
The Firmament of Time (1960), a lyrical and meditative tour de force, looks back at the many ways in which the sciences have been shaped by the changing cultures in which they developed. Examining the role of metaphor in scientific thought, anticipations of scientific discoveries in the works of poets and novelists, and the “unconscious conformity” of scientific theory to prevailing orthodoxies, Eiseley argues provocatively for the ongoing relevance to scientific progress of dreams, the imagination, and the irrational.
In his wide-ranging collection The Unexpected Universe (1969), Eiseley turns to the theme of the voyage of discovery: accounts of the mythical and historic journeys of Odysseus, Captain Cook, and Darwin frame his own more modest wanderings in the environs of Philadelphia. Sometimes he travels no farther than the local dump: and yet, like Homer’s hero or these great explorers, he continually finds a universe “not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
As an added feature, this volume presents a selection of Eiseley’s uncollected prose, including early autobiographical sketches, vivid and haunting entries from his private notebooks, and his 1957 lecture “Neanderthal Man and the Dawn of Human Paleontology.”
A companion volume presents The Invisible Pyramid (1970), The Night Country (1971), and the essays gathered after his death in The Star Thrower (1978).
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.