Loren Eiseley: The Long Loneliness (from The Star Thrower)

Loren Eiseley
"The Long Loneliness"
an essay in The Star Thrower

The first two paragraphs of "The Long Loneliness,"  one of the essays in  The Star Thrower.


There is nothing more alone in the universe than man.  He is alone because he has the intellectual capacity to know that he is separated by a vast gulf of social memory and experiment from the lives of his animal associates.  He has entered into the strange world of history, of social and intellectual change, while his brothers of the field and forest remain subject to the invisible laws of biological evolution.  Animals are molded by natural forces they do not comprehend.  To their minds there is no past and no future.  There is only the everlasting present of a single generation--its trails in the forest,  its hidden pathways of the air and in the sea.   

Man, by contrast, is alone with the knowledge of his history until the day of his death.  When we were children we wanted to talk to animals and struggled to understand why this was impossible.  Slowly we gave up the attempt as we grew into the solitary world of human adulthood, the rabbit was left on the lawn, the dog was relegated to his kennel.  Only in acts of inarticulate compassion, in rare and hidden moments of communion with nature, does man briefly  escape his solitary destiny.  Frequently in science  fiction he dreams of world with creatures whose communicative power is the equivalent of his own.

Later in the essay, he introduces  the research of Dr. John Lily and his studies on the porpoise.  So far, we haven't been able to determine whether porpoises actually communicate as we do or whether they have simply evolved a complex signaling system with little or no flexibility.   Maybe, some day,  we will find that we aren't as alone as we think. What will it be like to encounter another sentient species in the universe?

I wonder if this sense of isolation has anything to do with the prevalence of talking animals and fairies and trolls and dragons and all sorts of talking creatures that don't exist.  Most cultures have myths and legends and tales filled with talking animals, some of whom actually exist,  while others are products of creative and imaginative minds..  Tradition has it that King Solomon owned a ring of power that enabled him to understand and communicate with animals.  


Eiseley's comments also resonate with much of SF.  Stories about aliens are very common in SF, and there's even a subgenre called "First Contact."    How will we communicate with them?  Or, can we?   And, what is behind the belief in UFOs so prevalent today?  Is that another sign of that loneliness?


In many SF tales of contact with aliens, it is often observed by someone in the story that this will be the most important event in human history.  Is it and why?

It seems to me that we as a species spend a considerable amount of time fantasizing about   communicating with other species, real or imagined.  In addition we also spend a lot of time trying to communicate with other species here on this planet and attempting to detect signs of communication out there among the stars.

Eiseley states, There is nothing more alone in the universe than man.  Is he right? 

Loren Eiseley: "The Innocent Fox"

This is an excerpt from an essay in Loren Eiseley's collection, The Star Thrower.  The essay is titled "The Innocent Fox."   Perhaps it could have been called "The Innocent Fox and the Innocent Human"?


The episode occurred upon an unengaging and unfrequented shore,  It began in the late afternoon of a day devoted at the start to ordinary scientific purposes.  There was the broken prow of a beached boat subsiding in heavy sand, left by the whim of ancient currents a long way distant from the shifting coast.  Somewhere on the horizon wavered the tenuous outlines of a misplaced building, growing increasingly insubstantial in the autumn light. 


A fog suddenly moved in, and he is trapped.  Rather than wander about, he decides to stay by the beached boat until the fog lifts or morning comes.


. . . It was then I saw the miracle.  I saw it because I was hunched at ground level smelling rank of fox, and no longer gazing with upright human arrogance upon the things of this world.  

I did not realize at first what it was that I looked upon.  As my wandering attention centered, I saw nothing but two small projecting ears lit by the morning sun.  Beneath them, a small neat face looked shyly up at me.  The ears moved at every sound, drank in a gull's cry and the far horn of a ship.  They crinkled, I began to realize, only with curiosity, they had not learned to fear.  The creature was very young.  He was alone in a dread universe.  I crept on my knees around the prow and crouched beside him  It was a small fox pup from a den under the timbers who looked up at me.  God knows what had become of his brothers and sisters.  His parent must not have been home fro hunting.

He innocently selected what I think was a chicken bone from an untidy pile of splintered rubbish and shook it at me invitingly.   There was a vast and playful humor in his face.  "If there was only one fox in the world and I could kill him. I would do."  The words of a British poacher in a pub rasped in my ears. I dropped even further and painfully away from human stature.  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.

Yet here was the thing in the midst of the bones, the wide-eyed, innocent fox inviting me to play, with the innate courtesy of it two forepaws placed appealingly together, along with a mock shake of the head.  The universe was swinging in some fantastic fashion around to present its face, and the face was so small that the universe itself was laughing.

It was not a time for human dignity. It was a time only for the careful observance of amenities written behind the stars.  Gravely I arranged my forepaws while the puppy whimpered with ill-concealed excitement.  I drew the breath of a fox's den into my nostrils. On impulse, I picked up clumsily a whiter bone and shook it in teeth that had not entirely forgotten their original purpose.  Round and round we tumbled for one ecstatic moment.  We were the innocent thing in the midst of the bones, born in the egg, born in the den, born in the dark cave with the stone ax close to hand, born at last in human guise to grow coldly remote in the room with the rifle rack upon the wall.

But, I had seen my miracle.  I had seen the universe as it begins for all things.  It was, in reality, a child's universe, a tiny and laughing universe.  I rolled the pup on his back and ran, literally ran for the neared ridge.  The sun was half out of the sea, and the world was swinging back to normal.  The adult foxes would be already trotting home.

A little farther on, I passed one on a ridge who knew well I had no gun, for it swung by quite close, stepping delicately with brush and head held high.  Its face was watchful but averted,  It did not matter.  It was what I had experienced and the fox had experienced, what we had all experienced in adulthood.   We passed carefully on our separate ways into the morning, eyes not meeting. 

.   .   .   .   .

For just a moment I had held the universe at bay by the simple expedient of sitting on my haunches before a fox den and tumbling about with a chicken bone.  It is the gravest, most meaningful act I shall ever accomplish, but, as  Thoreau once remarked of some peculiar errand of his own, there is no use reporting it to the Royal Society.




Perhaps we should, at times, forget our status as lords of creation.  I read somewhere the creativity is strongest in those who have never quite completely grown up.  Something to think about anyway.




I suppose this will be seen by many as just a cute story, of little consequence and to be quickly forgotten or ignored.  I think it's very significant in that it tells us a lot about the type of person Loren Eiseley was and much about the way he saw the world.   I wonder how many other scientists would act as he did and also reveal it to their fellow scientists.   Eiseley had mentioned once or twice that some of his colleagues actually reprimanded him for his non-scientific outlook as expressed in his essays and poetry.

I am reminded of many SF stories I had read in the past that pushed the idea that the world would be a better place, a more open and tolerant world if run by scientists and technologists, for they were free of prejudice and would be more willing to forgo past ways of thinking and rely on evidence.   I don't see much of that anymore in SF.  Perhaps SF writers have also read the accounts of the difficulties that new ideas, in spite of the evidence, had in being accepted.  As usual, it's a case of yesterday's heresies are today's truths and will be tomorrow's dogmatic barrier to new ideas.

Loren Eiseley: The Star Thrower

The blurb on the back page says it better than I can:

Long admired for his compassionate, probing meditations on the natural world, Loren Eiseley completed this volume of his favorite writings shortly before his death in 1977.  In includes many selections never before published in book form and spans Eiseley's entire writing career--from his early poems through The Immense Journey and The Unexpected Universe to his most recent essays--providing a superb sampling of the author as naturalist, poet, scientist, and humanist. 

 If there is an overriding theme in the twenty-three essays and ten poems that comprise this work, it is that the facts and data elicited by science are not the final statement  of our view of the natural world.  Those facts are the frontiers that we must go beyond in our study of the natural world.  His essays show us just what this means if we are to gain a fuller understanding, even if it is only a limited understanding of the natural world.




The Judgment of the Birds  

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. If he is of the proper  sort, he will return with a message.  It may not be a message from the god he set out to seek, but even if he has failed in that particular, he will have had a vision or seen a marvel, and these are always worth listening to and thinking about.

The world, I have come to believe, is a very queer place, but we have been part of this queerness for so long that we tend to take it for granted.  We rush to and fro like Mad Hatters upon our peculiar errands, all the time imagining our surroundings to be dull and ourselves to be quite ordinary creatures.  Actually, there is nothing in the world to encourage this idea, but such is the mind of man, and this is why he finds it necessary from time to time to send emissaries into the wilderness in the hope of learning of great events, or plans in store for him, that will resuscitate his waning taste for life.  His great news services, his worldwide radio network, he knows with a last remnant of healthy distrust will be of no use to him in this matter. No miracle can withstand a radio broadcast, and it is certain it would be no miracle if it could. One must seek, then, what only the solitary approach can give--a natural revelation.



The above are the opening paragraphs of some thoughts about several experiences  he had involving   ravens, pigeons, and various species of small birds in the countryside and from his room on the twentieth floor of a hotel in New York City.

Normally I don't bother with the back cover blurbs, except to wonder frequently whether the author(s) of the blurbs had actually read the work, but I have to quote another one:

This book will be read and cherished in the year 2001.  It will go to the MOON and MARS with future generations.  Loren Eiseley's work changed my life.  -- Ray Bradbury --

 
As I have said before, numerous times I believe, Loren Eiseley is an author who has been a major influence on my ideas, beliefs, and philosophy.  His works are those that would join me on that famous (infamous?) desert island.

The essays in   The Star Thrower  are too varied to try to summarize it, so I will limit myself to posting quotations from and brief commentaries on various essays in the book over the next few weeks or months.