Arts and Letters

Loren Eiseley and I were what might be thought of as distant friends, a relationship made possible by jet travel, both as to the friendship and as to the distance. We knew one another initially through our books, became acquainted some years ago through some phrases in a book of his which helped me with a poem of mine which he permitted me to dedicate to him on that account, and thereafter corresponded intermittently and had an hour's talk no more than once a year, in his study atop the University of Pennsylvania's Anthropological Museum on Spruce Street, when I was in Philadelphia to talk to a friend's class. So we continued to know one another chiefly through each other's books, and it is about my reading of Loren's books that I will say my small say.

A couple of texts to set in contrast:

No one objects to the elucidation of scientific principles in clear, unornamental prose. What concerns us is the fact that there exists a new class of highly skilled barbarians—not representing the very great in science—who would confine men entirely to this diet. Once more there is revealed the curious and unappetizing puritanism which attaches itself all too readily to those who, without grace or humor, have found their salvation in "facts."

Even though they were not great discoverers in the objective sense, one feels at times that the great nature essayists had more individual perception than their scientific contemporaries. Theirs was a different contribution. They opened the minds of men by the sheer power of their thought. The world of nature, once seen through the eyes of genius, is never seen in quite the same manner afterward. A dimension has been added…

Both passages come from Loren Eiseley's little book The Man Who Saw Through Time, or "Francis Bacon and the Modern Dilemma." I had long thought anyhow that "the man who saw through time" as accurately characterized the author as his subject; Loren, I said, can see through time as easily as I can see across the room. And the two passages, when put side by side, also characterize the position he took up in his several books of meditative and anecdotal and aphoristic essays: a little defensive about his possible or actual, his fancied or real, rejection by "those who have substituted authoritarian science for authoritarian religion;" but committed all the same, with a modest firmness, to the great tradition coming from Sir Thomas Browne (who didn't get elected to the newly founded Royal Society because his prose was insufficiently "unornamental") through such men as Gilbert White and Richard Jeffries and W. H. Hudson down to such exemplars in our own day as Donald Culross Peattie and our late colleague Joseph Wood Krutch.

Before the eighteenth century, when the word "science" was first applied to distinguish its method and objects and attainments from "art," and before the nineteenth century, when Whewell felt a need to distinguish its various practitioners by the one word "scientist," these activities went under the noble if now abandoned names of "natural philosophy" (Newton), "natural knowledge" (charter of the Royal Society), and even "natural theology." As late as my boyhood, children were introduced to science under the appealingly innocent name of "nature study," with its ambience of woodland walks and albums of pressed flowers. Nowadays, the architecture of new science buildings reveals a striking progression; over the past couple of decades, their windows got fewer and narrower, and then were omitted entirely; and the outsider's impression of "science" is made mostly of such devices as oscilloscopes, particle accelerators, computers, and of the activity itself as almost altogether one of counting things and events. No doubt the results are imposing and even astonishing; but one sometimes idly wonders, Where did Nature go?

My own interest in the sciences came on me late, and found me with no preparation beyond the high school in the mathematical languages; so for me the pursuit of even the most modest understanding has seemed a sort of random search in the stacks; and when, some twenty years ago, I came across whichever book it was first introduced me to Loren Eiseley's writing, I understood at once that I had made a friend, though the literal sense of that didn't come about till our first meeting a decade later.

I suppose that what we poor literary folk want in the first place is not to be talked to de haut en bas by Lord Snow, and certainly not in the second place to be defended by Dr. Leavis, but to be written to on scientific subjects with eloquence, good sense, patience, loneliness rather like our own, and a strong, continuous awareness of the presence of the knower in the known; which is what I have found in a small number of physicists and biologists, and what I derive from Loren, paleontologist, anthropologist, "bone-hunting man" as he described himself, saying "I am a man who has spent a great deal of his life on his knees, though not in prayer," and, finally, poet.

Time for but one illustration of these special qualities of vision and voice that characterized Loren's work, and I choose the one I know best because it worked in me and led on to the poem I spoke of at first that in turn led on to our meeting and too-brief years of friendship.

Years before, I saw a bunch of moths hatched out on an unseasonably mild day on the leading edge of winter. And I wanted them to get over into a poem, only they wouldn't; the best they yielded to my on and off attention over about seven years was on the order of "O you poor buggers, you don't know what you've got into."

But it then chanced that I began reading what became my favorite—a difficult choice—of Loren's essays, a great compound of autobiography and speculation with the mysterious title, as appealing as appalling, of "The Mind as Nature"; where he speaks to start with, as a model for his own early life, of "the dichotomy present in the actual universe, where one finds, behind the ridiculous, wonderful tent-show of woodpeckers, giraffes, and hoptoads, some kind of dark, brooding, but creative void out of which these things emerge—some antimatter universe, some web of dark tensions running beneath and creating the superficial show of form that so delights us." And he goes on to speak, by anecdote and saying, of "that vast sprawling emergent, the universe, and its even more fantastic shadow, life," coming presently to a passage that, among its other effects, put my moths once and for all in place, speaking of "a wonderful analogy… between the potential fecundity of life in the universe and those novelties which natural selection in a given era permits to break through the living screen, the biosphere, into reality," and of a hidden world "of possible but nonexistent futures" as "a constant accompaniment, a real but wholly latent twin, of the nature in which we have our being."

The poem thus evoked out of nature and Loren Eiseley's thought was dedicated to him, and may now properly be part of this memorial; it is called "The Rent in the Screen."

Sweet mildness of the late December day
Deceives into the world a couple of hundred
Cinnamon moths, whose cryptic arrow shapes
Cling sleeping to a southward-facing wall
All through the golden afternoon, till dusk
And coming cold arouse them to their flight
Across the gulf of night and nothingness,
The falling snow, the fall, the fallen snow,
World whitened to dark ends. How brief a dream.

Loren was a man of thought and the sayings of thought, and of the loneliness that goes with the life of thought. Of his many wonderful sayings I would end for epitome on one out of his autobiography All The Strange Hours, the half despairing, half hoping plea of the ever-only-temporarily defeated Platonist: "In the world there is nothing to explain the world."