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.
Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts
Thursday, August 10, 2017
Friday, September 7, 2012
Stanley G. Weinbaum: The New Adam
Stanley G. Weinbaum was born on April 4, 1902 and died on December 14, 1935, when he was only 33. He's one of those writers, composers, or artists about whom any conversation always turns to wondering what he would have accomplished if he had lived another decade or two or three. He published his first SF short story in July 1934 and died about 18 months later. That short story was "A Martian Odyssey," which, in 1970, was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the top three short stories of all time. Only Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall" got more votes, and Weinbaum's story beat out Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon" for the second spot. I have read a collection of his short works, The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum, but this is the first novel I have read by him. I think I will search out his other two novels.
Edmond Hall is The New Adam. Aside from his extraordinarily high intelligence, he has two unique features. The first is an extra joint in his fingers and toes. This, of course, posed some problems for him while growing up. The second wasn't noticeable, and he only told a very few people about it. He had a double mind, each of which could be working on a separate track. And, when he wished, he could bring them together to have a conversation, each developing a different solution to a problem. He thought everybody was like this, until in school one day, a teacher told him to pay attention to class because nobody could do two things at once. By this time, he had learned that it was best not to argue with adults.
Weinbaum's novel is a unique treatment of the subject. It reads more like a 19th century biography than the typical SF novel of the theme. This is not the usual tale of a superman forced to go into hiding while defeating or at least eluding his enemies with his superpowers or his ability to create high-tech weapons and various other almost magical devices. Instead, we are given the story of an individual who is the classic outsider, one who doesn't fit in society. Therefore there is no crowd of enraged or frightened standard humans out for his blood. The government is unaware of his true nature, and as long as he doesn't break any laws, it will ignore him as it will any law-abiding citizen.
Edmond Hall is the first person to appear in the further evolutionary development of homo sapiens. He is seen as a bright boy and a genius when he matures into an adult. But., nobody suspects that Hall is the next evolutionary step in the development of homo sapiens.
For a story to work, there must be conflict, and conflict there is. Only it's the typical conflicts faced by every child during the process of growing up: making friends, getting along with fellow students at school, or placating one's parents or relatives while striving for independence. Nothing stands out that would identify Edmond Hall as being other than a very bright boy. But, inside his head, there are two minds working.
Once Hall is an adult, he has to decide on a career. First he tries science and invents some gadgetry that brings in enough money so that he does not have to work. He is now free to experiment: science, political power, the arts. But, he can find nothing that satisfies him.
His intellectual superiority wasn't a problem while he was maturing, for he could communicate with highly intelligent adults. But, as he matured the number of adults who who were at his intellectual level dwindled until he found himself alone. He searches for others like him but finds no evidence to suggest there are others who could be equals. He is like a standard human marooned on an island with only dogs for companionship..
Finally he discovers love. There is just one problem: Vanny is a normal human being. He is attracted to her physically, but she cannot come close to him on an intellectual level. It is then that he discovers there are a few others like him, a woman and two men. With Sarah, he finds the opposite problem: he feels nothing for her, but at last he has found his intellectual equals.
The conclusion, in keeping with the rest of the novel, is not the standard ending found in most works that focus on homo superior, but it is appropriate and satisfying, if unexpected.
If you are looking for a unique treatment of this theme, I recommend The New Adam.
Edmond Hall is The New Adam. Aside from his extraordinarily high intelligence, he has two unique features. The first is an extra joint in his fingers and toes. This, of course, posed some problems for him while growing up. The second wasn't noticeable, and he only told a very few people about it. He had a double mind, each of which could be working on a separate track. And, when he wished, he could bring them together to have a conversation, each developing a different solution to a problem. He thought everybody was like this, until in school one day, a teacher told him to pay attention to class because nobody could do two things at once. By this time, he had learned that it was best not to argue with adults.
Weinbaum's novel is a unique treatment of the subject. It reads more like a 19th century biography than the typical SF novel of the theme. This is not the usual tale of a superman forced to go into hiding while defeating or at least eluding his enemies with his superpowers or his ability to create high-tech weapons and various other almost magical devices. Instead, we are given the story of an individual who is the classic outsider, one who doesn't fit in society. Therefore there is no crowd of enraged or frightened standard humans out for his blood. The government is unaware of his true nature, and as long as he doesn't break any laws, it will ignore him as it will any law-abiding citizen.
Edmond Hall is the first person to appear in the further evolutionary development of homo sapiens. He is seen as a bright boy and a genius when he matures into an adult. But., nobody suspects that Hall is the next evolutionary step in the development of homo sapiens.
For a story to work, there must be conflict, and conflict there is. Only it's the typical conflicts faced by every child during the process of growing up: making friends, getting along with fellow students at school, or placating one's parents or relatives while striving for independence. Nothing stands out that would identify Edmond Hall as being other than a very bright boy. But, inside his head, there are two minds working.
Once Hall is an adult, he has to decide on a career. First he tries science and invents some gadgetry that brings in enough money so that he does not have to work. He is now free to experiment: science, political power, the arts. But, he can find nothing that satisfies him.
His intellectual superiority wasn't a problem while he was maturing, for he could communicate with highly intelligent adults. But, as he matured the number of adults who who were at his intellectual level dwindled until he found himself alone. He searches for others like him but finds no evidence to suggest there are others who could be equals. He is like a standard human marooned on an island with only dogs for companionship..
Finally he discovers love. There is just one problem: Vanny is a normal human being. He is attracted to her physically, but she cannot come close to him on an intellectual level. It is then that he discovers there are a few others like him, a woman and two men. With Sarah, he finds the opposite problem: he feels nothing for her, but at last he has found his intellectual equals.
The conclusion, in keeping with the rest of the novel, is not the standard ending found in most works that focus on homo superior, but it is appropriate and satisfying, if unexpected.
If you are looking for a unique treatment of this theme, I recommend The New Adam.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Loren Eiseley: humanization and evolution
In discussions about evolution, usually three factors are brought in as the selective forces behind the development of species: climatic, geological, and competition for survival needs. Loren Eiseley here suggests that there may be a fourth factor in the evolution of the human species.
"Although there is still much that we do not understand, it is likely that the selective forces working upon the humanization of man lay essentially in the nature of the sociocultural world itself. Man, in other words, once he had "crossed over" into this new invisible environment, was being as rigorously selected for survival within it as the first fish that waddled up the shore on its fins. I have said that the new world was "invisible." I do so advisedly. It lay, not so much in his surroundings as in man's brain, in his way of looking at the world around him and at the social environment he was beginning to create in his tiny human groupings.
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 future. The unseen gods, the powers behind the world of phenomenal appearance, began to stalk through his dreams.
Nature, one might say, through the powers of this mind, grossly superstitious though it might be in its naive examination of wind and water, was beginning to reach out into the dark behind itself. Nature was beginning to evade its own limitations in the shape of this strange, dreaming and observant brain. It was a weird multiheaded universe, going on, unseen and immaterial save as its thoughts smoldered in the eyes of hunters huddled by night fires, or were translated into pictures upon cave walls, or were expressed in the trappings of myth or ritual. The Eden of this eternal present that the animal world had known for ages was shattered at least. Through the human mind, time and darkness, good and evil, would enter and possess the world."
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Immense Journey
I wonder what Loren Eiseley would say about cyberspace: is it a further development of the "invisible world," the universe inside the brain, or is it something entirely new? Since Eiseley frequently maintained that evolution had not stopped, he might well speculate about the effect that life in cyberspace could have on the evolution of the human species in the future. I wish I could ask him.
"Although there is still much that we do not understand, it is likely that the selective forces working upon the humanization of man lay essentially in the nature of the sociocultural world itself. Man, in other words, once he had "crossed over" into this new invisible environment, was being as rigorously selected for survival within it as the first fish that waddled up the shore on its fins. I have said that the new world was "invisible." I do so advisedly. It lay, not so much in his surroundings as in man's brain, in his way of looking at the world around him and at the social environment he was beginning to create in his tiny human groupings.
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 future. The unseen gods, the powers behind the world of phenomenal appearance, began to stalk through his dreams.
Nature, one might say, through the powers of this mind, grossly superstitious though it might be in its naive examination of wind and water, was beginning to reach out into the dark behind itself. Nature was beginning to evade its own limitations in the shape of this strange, dreaming and observant brain. It was a weird multiheaded universe, going on, unseen and immaterial save as its thoughts smoldered in the eyes of hunters huddled by night fires, or were translated into pictures upon cave walls, or were expressed in the trappings of myth or ritual. The Eden of this eternal present that the animal world had known for ages was shattered at least. Through the human mind, time and darkness, good and evil, would enter and possess the world."
-- Loren Eiseley --
from The Immense Journey
I wonder what Loren Eiseley would say about cyberspace: is it a further development of the "invisible world," the universe inside the brain, or is it something entirely new? Since Eiseley frequently maintained that evolution had not stopped, he might well speculate about the effect that life in cyberspace could have on the evolution of the human species in the future. I wish I could ask him.
Monday, August 8, 2011
Loren Eiseley: from The Immense Journey
One of Loren Eiseley's recurring themes is that evolution has not stopped with us. Some evolutionists appear to resemble creationists in this: they have replaced the dictum that God has created us as the pinnacle of Its creation with Evolution has brought us forward as Its supreme achievement. The following is a quotation from the essay "The Snout" in The Immense Journey. The Snout is Eiseley's nickname for the creature who lived in water but was also able to travel for a short distance on land to reach another pond.
We teach the past, we see farther backward into time than any race before us, but we stop at the present, or, at best, we project far into the future idealized versions of ourselves. All that long way behind us we see, perhaps inevitably, through human eyes alone. We see ourselves as the culmination and the end, and if we do indeed consider our passing, we think that sunlight will go with us and the earth be dark. We are the end. For us continents rose and fell, for us the waters and the air were mastered, for us the great living web has pulsated an grown more intricate.
To deny this, a man once told me, is to deny God. This puzzled me. I went back along the pathway to the marsh. I went, not in the past, not by the bones of dead things, not down the lost roadway of the Snout. I went instead in daylight, in the Now, to see if the door was still there, and to see what things passed through.
I found that the same experiments were brewing, that up out of that ancient well, fins were still scrambling toward the sunlight. They were small things, and which of them presaged the future I could not say. I saw only the they were many and that they had solved the oxygen death in many marvelous ways, not always ours.
I found that there were modern fishes who breathed air, not through a lung but through their stomachs or through strange chambers where their gills should be, or breathing as the Snout once breathed. I found that some crawled in the fields at nightfall pursuing insects, or slept on the grass by pond sides and who drowned, if kept under water, as men themselves might drown.
. . . . . . .
Perpetually, now, we search and bicker and disagree. The eternal form eludes us -- the shape we conceive as ours. Perhaps the old road through the marsh should tell us. We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.
I remember reading once a commentary on Eiseley in which he was characterized as morose, depressing, pessimistic, etc. I have read much in Eiseley and disagree. The above quotation suggests, instead, an optimistic view of life.
Friday, September 3, 2010
Loren Eiseley: September 3, 1907--July 9, 1977
Perhaps more than any other writer, Loren Eiseley has impressed upon me certain truths about evolution that are both fascinating and frustrating. They aren't new or startling, but he made me grasp them as no other writer had before.
Evolution is not a thing, first of all. I can't hold it in my hand; evolution, instead, is a description of a type of interaction between living creatures and their environment, especially changes in the environment which result in adaptations by some living creatures which then affect the environment in new ways. And so the process continues. The web of life may be a cliche, but what else can one call it.
That's the second point Eiseley has impressed on me. The process continues. I have seen numerous charts that purport to show the evolutionary line that begins with the smallest and earliest living creatures on the one hand and which stretch across the millions of years to finally end with the human species. That's the problem: it doesn't end with the human species. We may be one of the latest, but we aren't the last. Eiseley makes the point again and again in his essays, in his own quiet way, with a story here and a small observation there, and in this way he has convinced me of this. And, that's the frustrating part, as Eiseley notes time and again.
On an expedition in one of the northern plains states, he uncovers a small skull, that of an early ancestor of a rodent. In an essay titled "The Slit," Eiseley says to himself that "the creature had never lived to see a man, and I, what was it I was never going to see?" That's the frustrating part.
Several pages later in the same essay, Eiseley further develops the point when he observes that "We cannot know all that has happened in the past, or the reason for all of these events, any more than we can with surety discern what lies ahead. We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know."
In an essay titled "The Snout," Eiseley, in spite of the ultimate futility of our dreams to know all, goes on to say "It gives one a feeling of confidence to see nature still busy with experiments, still dynamic, and not through nor satisfied because a Devonian fish managed to end as a two-legged character with a straw hat. There are other things brewing and growing in the oceanic vat. It pays to know this. It pays to know there is just as much future as there is past. The only thing that doesn't pay is to be sure of man's own part in it."
However, not everyone shares Eiseley's enthusiasm. Eiseley tells of a conversation he had with a friend, a member of the Explorers Club, who had just returned from a trek through northern Australia.
"'They fell out of the trees,' he said. 'Like rain. And into the boat.'
'Uh?' I said, noncommittally.
'They did so,' he protested, 'and they were hard to catch.'
'Really--' I said.
'We were pushing a dugout up one of the tidal creeks in northern Australia and going fast when smacko we jam this mangrove bush and the things came tumbling down.
'What were they doing sitting up there in bunches? I ask you. It's no place for a fish. Besides that they had a way of sidling off with those popeyes trained on you. I never liked it. Somebody out to keep any eye on them.'
'Why?' I asked.
'I don't know why,' he said impatiently, running a rough, square hand through his hair and wrinkling his forehead. 'I just mean they make you feel that way, is all. A fish belongs in the water. It ought to stay here--just we live on land in houses. Things ought to know their place and stay in it, but those fish have got a way of sidling off. As though they had mental reservations and weren't keeping any contracts. See what I mean?'"
Later, still in the same essay, "The Snout", Eiseley sums up neatly: "The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore. . . . . . . There lies the hope of life. The old ways are exploited and remain, but new things come, new senses try the unfamiliar air. There are small scuttlings and splashings in the dark, and out of it come the first croaking, illiterate voices of the things to be, just as man once croaked and dreamed darkly in that tiny vesicular forebrain. . . We are one of the many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time."
The quotations are from several essays contained in the first book I read by Loren Eiseley--The Immense Journey. It is one of my "Desert Island" books.
Evolution is not a thing, first of all. I can't hold it in my hand; evolution, instead, is a description of a type of interaction between living creatures and their environment, especially changes in the environment which result in adaptations by some living creatures which then affect the environment in new ways. And so the process continues. The web of life may be a cliche, but what else can one call it.
That's the second point Eiseley has impressed on me. The process continues. I have seen numerous charts that purport to show the evolutionary line that begins with the smallest and earliest living creatures on the one hand and which stretch across the millions of years to finally end with the human species. That's the problem: it doesn't end with the human species. We may be one of the latest, but we aren't the last. Eiseley makes the point again and again in his essays, in his own quiet way, with a story here and a small observation there, and in this way he has convinced me of this. And, that's the frustrating part, as Eiseley notes time and again.
On an expedition in one of the northern plains states, he uncovers a small skull, that of an early ancestor of a rodent. In an essay titled "The Slit," Eiseley says to himself that "the creature had never lived to see a man, and I, what was it I was never going to see?" That's the frustrating part.
Several pages later in the same essay, Eiseley further develops the point when he observes that "We cannot know all that has happened in the past, or the reason for all of these events, any more than we can with surety discern what lies ahead. We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know."
In an essay titled "The Snout," Eiseley, in spite of the ultimate futility of our dreams to know all, goes on to say "It gives one a feeling of confidence to see nature still busy with experiments, still dynamic, and not through nor satisfied because a Devonian fish managed to end as a two-legged character with a straw hat. There are other things brewing and growing in the oceanic vat. It pays to know this. It pays to know there is just as much future as there is past. The only thing that doesn't pay is to be sure of man's own part in it."
However, not everyone shares Eiseley's enthusiasm. Eiseley tells of a conversation he had with a friend, a member of the Explorers Club, who had just returned from a trek through northern Australia.
"'They fell out of the trees,' he said. 'Like rain. And into the boat.'
'Uh?' I said, noncommittally.
'They did so,' he protested, 'and they were hard to catch.'
'Really--' I said.
'We were pushing a dugout up one of the tidal creeks in northern Australia and going fast when smacko we jam this mangrove bush and the things came tumbling down.
'What were they doing sitting up there in bunches? I ask you. It's no place for a fish. Besides that they had a way of sidling off with those popeyes trained on you. I never liked it. Somebody out to keep any eye on them.'
'Why?' I asked.
'I don't know why,' he said impatiently, running a rough, square hand through his hair and wrinkling his forehead. 'I just mean they make you feel that way, is all. A fish belongs in the water. It ought to stay here--just we live on land in houses. Things ought to know their place and stay in it, but those fish have got a way of sidling off. As though they had mental reservations and weren't keeping any contracts. See what I mean?'"
Later, still in the same essay, "The Snout", Eiseley sums up neatly: "The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore. . . . . . . There lies the hope of life. The old ways are exploited and remain, but new things come, new senses try the unfamiliar air. There are small scuttlings and splashings in the dark, and out of it come the first croaking, illiterate voices of the things to be, just as man once croaked and dreamed darkly in that tiny vesicular forebrain. . . We are one of the many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time."
The quotations are from several essays contained in the first book I read by Loren Eiseley--The Immense Journey. It is one of my "Desert Island" books.
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