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All The Strange Hours The Excavation of A Life
In All the Strange Hours, Eiseley turns his considerable powers of reflection and discovery on his own life to weave a compelling story, related with the modesty, grace, and keen eye for a telling anecdote that distinguish his work. His story begins with his childhood experiences as a sickly afterthought, weighed down by the loveless union of his parents. From there he traces the odyssey that led to his search for early postglacial man - and into inspiriting philosophical territory - culminating in his uneasy achievement of world renown. Eiseley crafts an absorbing self-portrait of a man who has thought deeply about his place in society as well as humanity's place in the natural world.
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First published January 1, 1975
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About the author
Loren Eiseley
50 books314 followersLoren Corey Eiseley (September 3, 1907 – July 9, 1977) was a highly respected anthropologist, science writer, ecologist, and poet. He published books of essays, biography, and general science in the 1950s through the 1970s.
Eiseley is best known for the poetic essay style, called the "concealed essay". He used this to explain complex scientific ideas, such as human evolution, to the general public. He is also known for his writings about humanity's relationship with the natural world; these writings helped inspire the modern environmental movement.
Eiseley is best known for the poetic essay style, called the "concealed essay". He used this to explain complex scientific ideas, such as human evolution, to the general public. He is also known for his writings about humanity's relationship with the natural world; these writings helped inspire the modern environmental movement.
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February 26, 2018
Sometimes I think Loren Eiseley must have been the saddest American that ever lived, but he found consolation in places most others would fail to uncover it.
His mother was deaf and mentally ill, his father a failed stage actor who earned a scant living as a salesman. They were a family of outsiders with few friends and connections, always moving from the edge of one town to the edge of another. Eiseley fled as soon as he was able, riding the rails as a young man through the Great Depression, living hand-to-mouth and at the mercy of strangers. He nearly died of tuberculosis in his early twenties.
Somehow he managed to get an education and become an anthropologist. He found his peace working alone in the empty places of the High Plains or at the foot of the Rockies, scraping at the exposed strata of ancient streambeds to unbury the lingering remains of the great Ice Ages: the bones of forgotten nomads and species long extinct. He found his peace, too, in books. Few men of science have ever been so well read.
Eiseley seems to have harbored doubts about his calling. He might have been a poet, or a philosopher. He was distracted by wonder, overwhelmed with a feeling “as though the universe were too frighteningly queer to be understood by minds like ours.”
As a scientist he knew that “one is supposed to flourish Occam’s razor and reduce hypotheses about a complex world to human proportions. Certainly I try,” he said. "Mostly I come out feeling that whatever else the universe may be, it’s so-called simplicity is a trick… We have learned a lot, but the scope is too vast for us. Every now and then if we look behind us, everything has changed. It isn’t precisely that nature tricks us. We trick ourselves with our own ingenuity.”
For sentiments like these, which appear in all his books, Eiseley was sometimes called a bad scientist by his more self-assured colleagues. He lacked the necessary professional hubris and was too willing to grant that the truly big questions were still wide open. He could never be satisfied with inflexible materialism:
“In the world there is nothing to explain the world,” he said. “Nothing to explain the necessity of life, nothing to explain the hunger of the elements to become life, nothing to explain why the stolid world of rock and soil and mineral should diversify itself into beauty, terror, and uncertainty… In the world there is nothing below a certain depth that is truly explanatory. It is as if matter dreamed and muttered in its sleep. But why, and for what reason it dreams, there is no evidence.”
Faithless, Eiseley had the soul of a believer. Imprisoned since childhood by an unbreachable spiritual isolation, he nonetheless kept company with a something (a Someone, perhaps) that hid always beyond the range of his sight but was present, indefinably, in the thousand shifting shapes of the life principle. “Those who love its endless manifestations may be accused of a submerged form of worship,” he granted.
This, at least, is my own key to Eiseley: He was utterly devout in adoration of a presence he could not see and that promised a communion he could never quite believe was offered to him.
There's an illustrative passage from Thomas Traherne, the seventeenth-century Christian mystic whom Eiseley himself occasionally quoted:
“As iron at a distance is drawn by the lodestone, there being some invisible communications between then, so there is in us a world of Love to somewhat, though we know not what in the world that should be. There are invisible ways of conveyance by which some great thing doth touch our souls, and by which we tend to it.”
His mother was deaf and mentally ill, his father a failed stage actor who earned a scant living as a salesman. They were a family of outsiders with few friends and connections, always moving from the edge of one town to the edge of another. Eiseley fled as soon as he was able, riding the rails as a young man through the Great Depression, living hand-to-mouth and at the mercy of strangers. He nearly died of tuberculosis in his early twenties.
Somehow he managed to get an education and become an anthropologist. He found his peace working alone in the empty places of the High Plains or at the foot of the Rockies, scraping at the exposed strata of ancient streambeds to unbury the lingering remains of the great Ice Ages: the bones of forgotten nomads and species long extinct. He found his peace, too, in books. Few men of science have ever been so well read.
Eiseley seems to have harbored doubts about his calling. He might have been a poet, or a philosopher. He was distracted by wonder, overwhelmed with a feeling “as though the universe were too frighteningly queer to be understood by minds like ours.”
As a scientist he knew that “one is supposed to flourish Occam’s razor and reduce hypotheses about a complex world to human proportions. Certainly I try,” he said. "Mostly I come out feeling that whatever else the universe may be, it’s so-called simplicity is a trick… We have learned a lot, but the scope is too vast for us. Every now and then if we look behind us, everything has changed. It isn’t precisely that nature tricks us. We trick ourselves with our own ingenuity.”
For sentiments like these, which appear in all his books, Eiseley was sometimes called a bad scientist by his more self-assured colleagues. He lacked the necessary professional hubris and was too willing to grant that the truly big questions were still wide open. He could never be satisfied with inflexible materialism:
“In the world there is nothing to explain the world,” he said. “Nothing to explain the necessity of life, nothing to explain the hunger of the elements to become life, nothing to explain why the stolid world of rock and soil and mineral should diversify itself into beauty, terror, and uncertainty… In the world there is nothing below a certain depth that is truly explanatory. It is as if matter dreamed and muttered in its sleep. But why, and for what reason it dreams, there is no evidence.”
Faithless, Eiseley had the soul of a believer. Imprisoned since childhood by an unbreachable spiritual isolation, he nonetheless kept company with a something (a Someone, perhaps) that hid always beyond the range of his sight but was present, indefinably, in the thousand shifting shapes of the life principle. “Those who love its endless manifestations may be accused of a submerged form of worship,” he granted.
This, at least, is my own key to Eiseley: He was utterly devout in adoration of a presence he could not see and that promised a communion he could never quite believe was offered to him.
There's an illustrative passage from Thomas Traherne, the seventeenth-century Christian mystic whom Eiseley himself occasionally quoted:
“As iron at a distance is drawn by the lodestone, there being some invisible communications between then, so there is in us a world of Love to somewhat, though we know not what in the world that should be. There are invisible ways of conveyance by which some great thing doth touch our souls, and by which we tend to it.”
February 15, 2019
A non-reading friend refers to Carlos Castaneda. When he mentions images from Don Juan, I wonder if Eiseley might share the some of the shaman's frequency for him.
Journey to Ixtlan
***
All the Strange Hours captured me, resonates on some level.
***
To start, he quotes The Odyssey
"There is nothing worse for mortal men than wandering."
One. DAYS OF A DRIFTER
1. The Rat That Danced
2. The Life Machine
3. The Running Man
4. The Desert
5. The Trap
6. Toads and Men
7. The Most Perfect Day in the World
Two. DAYS OF A THINKER
8. The Laughing Puppet
9. The Badlands and the School
...
Three. DAYS OF A DOUBTER
21. The Blue Worm
22. The Talking Cat
23. The Coming of the Giant Wasps
24. The Time Traders
25. The Other Players.
Chapter 1 The Rat That Danced
"When my aunt died I found among her effects a beautiful silver-backed Victorian hand mirror. It had been one of a twin pair my maternal grandfather had given to his girls. The last time I had seen my mother's mirror it had been scarred by petulant violence and the handle had been snapped off. It had marked the difference between the two girls--their care of things, perhaps their lives. I had looked into the mirror as a child, admiring the scrollwork on the silver. Mostly things like that did not exist in our house. Finally it disappeared. The face of a child vanished with it, my own face. Without the mirror I was unaware when it departed.
"Make no mistake. Everything in the mind is in rat's country. It doesn't die. They are merely carried, these disparate memories, back and forth in the desert of a billion neurons, set down, picked up, and dropped again by mental pack rats ...
" ... I had flown two thousand miles to make a speech, not my kind of speech, but the kind they had insisted they wanted ... looking into the mouthpiece with the qualms of experience, but I needed the money ...
"The stage was vast and made for greater things than myself. It was an enormous cavern with only the small yellow glow of a light on the podium ... I was talking about time--time as it had existed in five great civilizations ...
"At this moment the press chose to make its appearance. From out of the dark cavern a stealthy figure crept along the edge of my vision. Suddenly from his hands emerged a light so blinding I almost staggered. Under its impact I was falling backward across decades. I clung to the podium as to a door being ruthlessly forced open against my will. Where was I? Into that ...
"The light on the stage faded though the afterimage stayed. The audience seemed insubstantial, vaporous. I tried again ...
"I broke off. The light had come again, this time a red glow at the stage edge. I was back by a switchlight in Sacramento opening a letter ... the summons that had come ...
"A spatter of applause was sweeping my audience. I was still clutching podium as I had clung to the flying train. Looking around I tried to determine what I had said. I felt as battered as on that night of fifty years ago.
"'Did you see him, did you see him?' exclaimed someone from the audience, rushing forward.
"'No, what?' I said, still returning from the glow of a long-vanished fire and drawing a fist down my face.
"'The rat,' explained the man, whose features now registered in my mind as a former and distinguished student.
"'Nice to see you, Dick,' I said weakly. 'A rat, you say?' Others were grinning.
"'The spotlight,' It caught him right out of the dark. He tumbled, he ran, he played, he danced. It was fantastic, you should have seen it. Imagine, in a big municipal auditorium.'
" ... So that was the reason for the ironic applause. My speech ... had become increasingly incoherent in the white glare that blinded me. The applause was not for me. It was for the rat, the rat that danced."
" ... Wasn't it I who had once written that there was a trickster in every culture who humbles what are supposed to be our greatest moments? The trickster who reduces pride, Old Father Coyote who makes and unmakes the world in a long cycle of stories and, incidentally, gets his penis caught in a cleft pine for his pains.
"I had summoned a rat who danced ... The rat cycle ... Something for Texas ... Only one of my own students would have caught the irony. Good old Dick who knew the ways of the Havasupai ..."
***
"'No,' I began, 'it was the same year as the Titanic sinking. He blew the gates with nitroglycerin. I was 5 years old, like you.' Then I paused, considering the time. 'You are right,' I admitted hesitantly. 'I was already old enough to know one should flee from the universe but I did not know where to run.'"
“ … the brain has become a kind of unseen artist's loft. There are pictures that hang askew, pictures with outlines barely chalked in, pictures torn, pictures the artist has striven unsuccessfully to erase, pictures that only emerge and glow in a certain light ... They can be pulled about on easels, examined within the mind itself ... The writer ... cannot obliterate them. He can only drag them about, magnify or reduce them as his artistic sense dictates, or juxtapose them in order to enhance a pattern ..."
***
page 32 -
"Even today, as though in a far-off crystal, I can see my running, gesticulating mother and her distorted features cursing us. And they laughed, you see, my companions. Perhaps I, in anxiety to belong, did also. That is what I could not tell Auden. Only an unutterable savagery, my savagery at myself, scrawls it once and once only on this page."
***
page 73 -
"Like a wolf on an invisible chain I padded endlessly around and around the shut doors of knowledge. I learned, but not enough. I ran restlessly from one scent to another. Sometimes I gave up and disappeared into the dark underworld of wandering men. Or I worked at menial tasks and convinced myself I would have been content if one of them had lasted."
***
page 152 -
"I have never chanced to meet another adult who has a childhood woodpecker almost audibly rapping in his skull. ... why should my dance with a crane supersede in vividness years of graduate study?"
***
page 155 -
" we, mankind, arose amidst the wandering of the ice and marched with it. We are in some sense shaped by it, as it has shaped the stones. Perhaps our very fondness for the building of stone alignments, dolmens, and pyramids reveals unconsciously an ancient heritage from the ice itself, the earth shaper. Like the ice, we have been cruel to the face of the planet and the life upon it. A chill wind lingers about us."
***
page 262 -
"'There is only one,' said the remorseless gamester.
"'You have not learned its meaning. It is mentioned in your Bible. It is called the count of days toward wisdom.'
"'And this is where it ends?' We were whispering now.
"'Yes, this is where it ends.'
...
"'But I won,' I cried after him. 'Remember, remember, that I played.' It dawned suddenly morning in the harsh sunlight of Mexico, three decades back.
"'That, too, is part of the wisdom,' the voice came back to me.
"'You played. That is part of the counting. And this is where the kind of time that bewitched you began. Remember? Behind nothing, before nothing. This is the country of vertical time. I will leave you to add the zeros. The gods always carried them here."
...
" ... I was tired and I slept on the steps of a ruined temple. I cared no longer in what age I might awake."
... The wisdom could take care of itself. It was beyond me. It was beyond every man. But for all that the counting mattered."
"Make no mistake, I will dream again, but further, further back. The rifles will be silenced, the dice at last unshaken. I feel my hour coming. I am anxious to press on. They wait for me, the dog Wolf and the Indian, muffled in snow upon the altiplano."
***
Journey to Ixtlan
***
All the Strange Hours captured me, resonates on some level.
***
To start, he quotes The Odyssey
"There is nothing worse for mortal men than wandering."
One. DAYS OF A DRIFTER
1. The Rat That Danced
2. The Life Machine
3. The Running Man
4. The Desert
5. The Trap
6. Toads and Men
7. The Most Perfect Day in the World
Two. DAYS OF A THINKER
8. The Laughing Puppet
9. The Badlands and the School
...
Three. DAYS OF A DOUBTER
21. The Blue Worm
22. The Talking Cat
23. The Coming of the Giant Wasps
24. The Time Traders
25. The Other Players.
Chapter 1 The Rat That Danced
"When my aunt died I found among her effects a beautiful silver-backed Victorian hand mirror. It had been one of a twin pair my maternal grandfather had given to his girls. The last time I had seen my mother's mirror it had been scarred by petulant violence and the handle had been snapped off. It had marked the difference between the two girls--their care of things, perhaps their lives. I had looked into the mirror as a child, admiring the scrollwork on the silver. Mostly things like that did not exist in our house. Finally it disappeared. The face of a child vanished with it, my own face. Without the mirror I was unaware when it departed.
"Make no mistake. Everything in the mind is in rat's country. It doesn't die. They are merely carried, these disparate memories, back and forth in the desert of a billion neurons, set down, picked up, and dropped again by mental pack rats ...
" ... I had flown two thousand miles to make a speech, not my kind of speech, but the kind they had insisted they wanted ... looking into the mouthpiece with the qualms of experience, but I needed the money ...
"The stage was vast and made for greater things than myself. It was an enormous cavern with only the small yellow glow of a light on the podium ... I was talking about time--time as it had existed in five great civilizations ...
"At this moment the press chose to make its appearance. From out of the dark cavern a stealthy figure crept along the edge of my vision. Suddenly from his hands emerged a light so blinding I almost staggered. Under its impact I was falling backward across decades. I clung to the podium as to a door being ruthlessly forced open against my will. Where was I? Into that ...
"The light on the stage faded though the afterimage stayed. The audience seemed insubstantial, vaporous. I tried again ...
"I broke off. The light had come again, this time a red glow at the stage edge. I was back by a switchlight in Sacramento opening a letter ... the summons that had come ...
"A spatter of applause was sweeping my audience. I was still clutching podium as I had clung to the flying train. Looking around I tried to determine what I had said. I felt as battered as on that night of fifty years ago.
"'Did you see him, did you see him?' exclaimed someone from the audience, rushing forward.
"'No, what?' I said, still returning from the glow of a long-vanished fire and drawing a fist down my face.
"'The rat,' explained the man, whose features now registered in my mind as a former and distinguished student.
"'Nice to see you, Dick,' I said weakly. 'A rat, you say?' Others were grinning.
"'The spotlight,' It caught him right out of the dark. He tumbled, he ran, he played, he danced. It was fantastic, you should have seen it. Imagine, in a big municipal auditorium.'
" ... So that was the reason for the ironic applause. My speech ... had become increasingly incoherent in the white glare that blinded me. The applause was not for me. It was for the rat, the rat that danced."
" ... Wasn't it I who had once written that there was a trickster in every culture who humbles what are supposed to be our greatest moments? The trickster who reduces pride, Old Father Coyote who makes and unmakes the world in a long cycle of stories and, incidentally, gets his penis caught in a cleft pine for his pains.
"I had summoned a rat who danced ... The rat cycle ... Something for Texas ... Only one of my own students would have caught the irony. Good old Dick who knew the ways of the Havasupai ..."
***
"'No,' I began, 'it was the same year as the Titanic sinking. He blew the gates with nitroglycerin. I was 5 years old, like you.' Then I paused, considering the time. 'You are right,' I admitted hesitantly. 'I was already old enough to know one should flee from the universe but I did not know where to run.'"
“ … the brain has become a kind of unseen artist's loft. There are pictures that hang askew, pictures with outlines barely chalked in, pictures torn, pictures the artist has striven unsuccessfully to erase, pictures that only emerge and glow in a certain light ... They can be pulled about on easels, examined within the mind itself ... The writer ... cannot obliterate them. He can only drag them about, magnify or reduce them as his artistic sense dictates, or juxtapose them in order to enhance a pattern ..."
***
page 32 -
"Even today, as though in a far-off crystal, I can see my running, gesticulating mother and her distorted features cursing us. And they laughed, you see, my companions. Perhaps I, in anxiety to belong, did also. That is what I could not tell Auden. Only an unutterable savagery, my savagery at myself, scrawls it once and once only on this page."
***
page 73 -
"Like a wolf on an invisible chain I padded endlessly around and around the shut doors of knowledge. I learned, but not enough. I ran restlessly from one scent to another. Sometimes I gave up and disappeared into the dark underworld of wandering men. Or I worked at menial tasks and convinced myself I would have been content if one of them had lasted."
***
page 152 -
"I have never chanced to meet another adult who has a childhood woodpecker almost audibly rapping in his skull. ... why should my dance with a crane supersede in vividness years of graduate study?"
***
page 155 -
" we, mankind, arose amidst the wandering of the ice and marched with it. We are in some sense shaped by it, as it has shaped the stones. Perhaps our very fondness for the building of stone alignments, dolmens, and pyramids reveals unconsciously an ancient heritage from the ice itself, the earth shaper. Like the ice, we have been cruel to the face of the planet and the life upon it. A chill wind lingers about us."
***
page 262 -
"'There is only one,' said the remorseless gamester.
"'You have not learned its meaning. It is mentioned in your Bible. It is called the count of days toward wisdom.'
"'And this is where it ends?' We were whispering now.
"'Yes, this is where it ends.'
...
"'But I won,' I cried after him. 'Remember, remember, that I played.' It dawned suddenly morning in the harsh sunlight of Mexico, three decades back.
"'That, too, is part of the wisdom,' the voice came back to me.
"'You played. That is part of the counting. And this is where the kind of time that bewitched you began. Remember? Behind nothing, before nothing. This is the country of vertical time. I will leave you to add the zeros. The gods always carried them here."
...
" ... I was tired and I slept on the steps of a ruined temple. I cared no longer in what age I might awake."
... The wisdom could take care of itself. It was beyond me. It was beyond every man. But for all that the counting mattered."
"Make no mistake, I will dream again, but further, further back. The rifles will be silenced, the dice at last unshaken. I feel my hour coming. I am anxious to press on. They wait for me, the dog Wolf and the Indian, muffled in snow upon the altiplano."
***
April 21, 2012
Reading Loren Eiseley, you are a visitor in a world shaped by experiences that seldom have found a voice such as his. An isolated Nebraska childhood in the early decades of the 20th century, and an even more isolating experience riding the rails as a drifter during the Great Depression -- these are not auspicious beginnings for a respected writer or a scholar. His family was poor, and his deaf, deranged mother haunted his life. From early on, he was a loner, with a poet's sensibility, who learned to welcome the gifts of solitude and nature.
On fossil digs on the High Plains during his university summers, he developed a fascination for the evolution of life on planet Earth. He was at ease fathoming the great sweep of millennia in which this present era is hardly more than a brief moment. While very much a scientist of the mid-20th century, he regarded the Ice Age as a recent event. And this perspective colors his thoughts with a sense of wonder that modern day readers are not accustomed to finding in books on any topic.
Eiseley wrote as a scientist, but his vision was always personal, even when he was writing about vast subjects. As a writer, he had a remarkable ability to make his subject matter exciting and accessible to nonscientists. Though he was celebrated as a great nature writer, one of the best since Thoreau, his true subject is Time. In "All the Strange Hours" he looks back over his life of 75 years.
Not quite an autobiography, it is a collection of episodes that were key points in his life. Some are humorous, some poignant, some grimly sad, some angry. There are accounts of recovering his health in the Mojave of California, a trip to Tijuana, where his entire energy is spent keeping a drunken companion out of trouble, a "perfect day" drinking grape pop under a railway water tank with three other drifters.
He writes of academic politics, student unrest in the 60s, losing his hearing, stray dogs, wasps, dancing cranes, a cat that bows and another one that talks, ancient burial chambers, a jail break in a blizzard, and the impact of homo sapiens' discovery of fire. And there are fascinating accounts of dreams. As a writer, Eiseley has a wide ranging knowledge of many subjects, and the connections he makes between them are unpredictable and sometimes breath-taking.
On fossil digs on the High Plains during his university summers, he developed a fascination for the evolution of life on planet Earth. He was at ease fathoming the great sweep of millennia in which this present era is hardly more than a brief moment. While very much a scientist of the mid-20th century, he regarded the Ice Age as a recent event. And this perspective colors his thoughts with a sense of wonder that modern day readers are not accustomed to finding in books on any topic.
Eiseley wrote as a scientist, but his vision was always personal, even when he was writing about vast subjects. As a writer, he had a remarkable ability to make his subject matter exciting and accessible to nonscientists. Though he was celebrated as a great nature writer, one of the best since Thoreau, his true subject is Time. In "All the Strange Hours" he looks back over his life of 75 years.
Not quite an autobiography, it is a collection of episodes that were key points in his life. Some are humorous, some poignant, some grimly sad, some angry. There are accounts of recovering his health in the Mojave of California, a trip to Tijuana, where his entire energy is spent keeping a drunken companion out of trouble, a "perfect day" drinking grape pop under a railway water tank with three other drifters.
He writes of academic politics, student unrest in the 60s, losing his hearing, stray dogs, wasps, dancing cranes, a cat that bows and another one that talks, ancient burial chambers, a jail break in a blizzard, and the impact of homo sapiens' discovery of fire. And there are fascinating accounts of dreams. As a writer, Eiseley has a wide ranging knowledge of many subjects, and the connections he makes between them are unpredictable and sometimes breath-taking.
March 27, 2018
Books read late at night invite the mind to wander. This winter, reading some book I’ve forgotten, the name of Loren Eiseley slipped across my thoughts, a writer I hadn’t read since college. Hunting on Amazon I came across this memoir with its intriguing title. For a couple months I read a few pages before sleep, in no hurry to finish it. What caught me from the first page was the desolation at the heart of this life, the loneliness Eiseley made no attempt to disguise or lighten, the hardscrabble childhood and sometimes terrifying wanderings of a solitary man – painfully unlike the elegant musings on science and time I remembered from The Star Thrower and The Night Country. Writing this book toward the end of his life, Eiseley echoes Thomas Hardy or Du Fu.
I can only put it that this is the human autumn before the snow. It is the individual’s last attempt to order the meaning of his life before a spring breaks in the rusted heart and the dreams, the memories, and the elusive chemical domain that contains them fly apart in irreparable ruin. Oncoming age is to me a vast wild autumn country strewn with broken seedpods, hurrying cloud wrack, abandoned farm machinery, and circling crows. A place where things were begun on too grand a scale to complete.In the introduction (which I’m glad I read as an epilogue because it foretells too much), we learn that Eiseley’s biographer compares All the Strange Hours to a surrealist painting; a friend considers himself misrepresented; another wonders at his absence. “It’s as if I didn’t exist.” Even Eiseley’s wife barely appears. Instead the book is haunted by his broken, mad mother and his vanished father; the troubled flashbacks of an abandoned child; and a youth spent among hobos or surviving alone in the desert. His later fame and success as a professor and writer seems to matter hardly at all. Too much had been lost at the start. Yet there are a few uncanny grace notes, one of which is a talking cat he hears complaining in the snow on Christmas Eve. He coaxes it out from the shrubbery.
The cat ran directly to me and rolled over on its back in a gesture of trust. I dropped to my knees. The cat, a beautiful young male, rolled from one side to the other while I stroked his stomach. He made some further remarks about the cold and being hungry. I felt the dust of travel in his fur. He had come far. He also talked about the dependency of cats upon humankind. He retained faith in them. I shuddered but it was not in me to disillusion him.He will not desert this cat, he declares to his wife. “I spoke my ultimatum to a room where we had lived for a quarter of a century. ‘if it becomes necessary we shall move, so help me.’” As it turns out, he finds the cat a home but not before giving him a name: Night Country.
January 20, 2016
I have long admired Loren Eiseley and especially have been inspired by The Immense Journey and The Star Thrower. He is one of my guides in life, along with some other naturalist/philosophers such as Carl Sagan and Annie Dillard. I knew that Eiseley was a respected professor of anthropology, but I was unprepared for how affected I would be by this autobiography, All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life.
I was overwhelmed by his first two paragraphs, and knew instantly that this autobiography would be unique. Here's that amazing opening:
"When my aunt died I found among her effects a beautiful silver-backed Victorian hand mirror. It had been one of a twin pair my maternal grandfather had given to his girls. The last time I had seen my mother's mirror it had been scarred by petulant violence and the handle had been snapped off. It had marked the difference between the two girls--their care of things, perhaps their lives. I had looked into the mirror as a child, admiring the scrollwork on the silver. Mostly things like that did not exist in our house. Finally it disappeared. The face of a child vanished with it, my own face. Without the mirror I was unaware when it departed.
Make no mistake. Everything in the mind is in rat's country. It doesn't die. They are merely carried, these disparate memories, back and forth in the desert of a billion neurons, set down, picked up, and dropped again by mental pack rats. Nothing perishes, it is merely lost till a surgeon's electrode starts the music of an old piano player whose scrolls are dust. Or you yourself do it, tossing in the restless nights, or even in the day on a strange street when a hurdy-gurdy plays. Nothing is lost, but it can never be again as it was. You will only find the bits and cry out because they were yourself. Nothing can begin again and go right, but still it is you, your mind, picking endlessly over the splintered glass of a mirror dropped and broken long ago."
My book is so filled with sticky notes--how this man ever overcame the challenges he did is a lesson to all of us. As the above opening shows, his strongest childhood reaction was to his deaf, mentally ill mother; because of her, he chose to never have children, fearing her condition might be passed on. And in the last chapter of the book, he returns to that mirror, saying: "I am coming to the end--the end of which I spoke in the beginning--the shattered mirror which can never be repaired but which lies in bits in the hallways of the mind itself."
The book is divided into three sections: "Days of a Drifter" with 7 chapters, "Days of a Thinker" with 13 chapters, and "Days of a Doubter" with 5 chapters. He overcame so much--dropping out of high school, riding the rails, tuberculosis--and then embarked on an academic career that resulted in many awards, none of which really mattered to him. As an anthropologist, he knew that we are all dust in the end.
I'll only include a few quotations; reading Eiseley is the best proof that science and poetry are sisters. What I most appreciate is his sincerity--this is not a man who would waste his time on shallow humor or sarcasm.
On p. 29, Eiseley tells of his childhood fascination with making tiny crosses and painting them gold, to be placed over small dead creatures--and of his sense of loss when a man with a scythe destroyed them. These crosses reappear throughout the book, most noticeably for me in chapter 10, "The Crevice and the Eye", p. 98:
"I have told of the miniature gold crosses that were hidden in the weeds next to my home and that were stolen by a callous reaper. Perhaps they symbolize in a way the conflict at the root of my being. Always, standing above excavations, I have been both excited about what the shovel would reveal and disconsolate and stricken at the sacrilege done to the dead." He goes on to tell of finding the small, wrapped body of a child from early times; "I could have spent a day up there on the great range just listening to the wind and talking to the child, murmuring to it across the centuries." But the leader of the dig turns the remains over to a local museum. He goes on to tie his experience to another man, digging in Eygpt, who finds a miniature chamber, 40 centuries old--and that same sense of conflict arises: to leave the dead where they were meant to be by their loved ones or to pursue curiosity about the past.
p. 150: Eiseley had a special affinity for dogs, and was appalled at their use in medical experiments. He knew many came from the shelters, and says, when seeing stray animals, "I have never called a humane society because I, too, am an ex-wanderer who would have begged for one more hour of light, however dismal."
Perhaps the most telling of Eiseley's musings is his realization that to be fascinated by the past is to risk the danger of being pulled away from the present. On p. 95, he mentions a story by Algernon Blackwood that tells of a man consumed by his work in Egypt, and wonders if he himself will be like that. I took the time to find the Blackwood story, "A Descent Into Egypt", which can be read as an online pdf here:
http://algernonblackwood.org/Z-files/...
I'm finding it hard to come "back to earth" after reading this book--as if Eiseley has guided me into considering all the vast expanses of time that filled his mind. That trip is not always comfortable--but it's an important journey to take in this world of trivia and busyness.
I was overwhelmed by his first two paragraphs, and knew instantly that this autobiography would be unique. Here's that amazing opening:
"When my aunt died I found among her effects a beautiful silver-backed Victorian hand mirror. It had been one of a twin pair my maternal grandfather had given to his girls. The last time I had seen my mother's mirror it had been scarred by petulant violence and the handle had been snapped off. It had marked the difference between the two girls--their care of things, perhaps their lives. I had looked into the mirror as a child, admiring the scrollwork on the silver. Mostly things like that did not exist in our house. Finally it disappeared. The face of a child vanished with it, my own face. Without the mirror I was unaware when it departed.
Make no mistake. Everything in the mind is in rat's country. It doesn't die. They are merely carried, these disparate memories, back and forth in the desert of a billion neurons, set down, picked up, and dropped again by mental pack rats. Nothing perishes, it is merely lost till a surgeon's electrode starts the music of an old piano player whose scrolls are dust. Or you yourself do it, tossing in the restless nights, or even in the day on a strange street when a hurdy-gurdy plays. Nothing is lost, but it can never be again as it was. You will only find the bits and cry out because they were yourself. Nothing can begin again and go right, but still it is you, your mind, picking endlessly over the splintered glass of a mirror dropped and broken long ago."
My book is so filled with sticky notes--how this man ever overcame the challenges he did is a lesson to all of us. As the above opening shows, his strongest childhood reaction was to his deaf, mentally ill mother; because of her, he chose to never have children, fearing her condition might be passed on. And in the last chapter of the book, he returns to that mirror, saying: "I am coming to the end--the end of which I spoke in the beginning--the shattered mirror which can never be repaired but which lies in bits in the hallways of the mind itself."
The book is divided into three sections: "Days of a Drifter" with 7 chapters, "Days of a Thinker" with 13 chapters, and "Days of a Doubter" with 5 chapters. He overcame so much--dropping out of high school, riding the rails, tuberculosis--and then embarked on an academic career that resulted in many awards, none of which really mattered to him. As an anthropologist, he knew that we are all dust in the end.
I'll only include a few quotations; reading Eiseley is the best proof that science and poetry are sisters. What I most appreciate is his sincerity--this is not a man who would waste his time on shallow humor or sarcasm.
On p. 29, Eiseley tells of his childhood fascination with making tiny crosses and painting them gold, to be placed over small dead creatures--and of his sense of loss when a man with a scythe destroyed them. These crosses reappear throughout the book, most noticeably for me in chapter 10, "The Crevice and the Eye", p. 98:
"I have told of the miniature gold crosses that were hidden in the weeds next to my home and that were stolen by a callous reaper. Perhaps they symbolize in a way the conflict at the root of my being. Always, standing above excavations, I have been both excited about what the shovel would reveal and disconsolate and stricken at the sacrilege done to the dead." He goes on to tell of finding the small, wrapped body of a child from early times; "I could have spent a day up there on the great range just listening to the wind and talking to the child, murmuring to it across the centuries." But the leader of the dig turns the remains over to a local museum. He goes on to tie his experience to another man, digging in Eygpt, who finds a miniature chamber, 40 centuries old--and that same sense of conflict arises: to leave the dead where they were meant to be by their loved ones or to pursue curiosity about the past.
p. 150: Eiseley had a special affinity for dogs, and was appalled at their use in medical experiments. He knew many came from the shelters, and says, when seeing stray animals, "I have never called a humane society because I, too, am an ex-wanderer who would have begged for one more hour of light, however dismal."
Perhaps the most telling of Eiseley's musings is his realization that to be fascinated by the past is to risk the danger of being pulled away from the present. On p. 95, he mentions a story by Algernon Blackwood that tells of a man consumed by his work in Egypt, and wonders if he himself will be like that. I took the time to find the Blackwood story, "A Descent Into Egypt", which can be read as an online pdf here:
http://algernonblackwood.org/Z-files/...
I'm finding it hard to come "back to earth" after reading this book--as if Eiseley has guided me into considering all the vast expanses of time that filled his mind. That trip is not always comfortable--but it's an important journey to take in this world of trivia and busyness.
January 9, 2015
Eiseley in this autobiography writes," I who profess no religion find the whole of my life a religious pilgrimage." It at first seems an odd statement as Eiseley is not in any usual sense a conventional "religious" person. He is an anthropologist and writes evocatively and well of his youth , a difficult one and of his many excavations among the remains and ruins of people and civilizations which have receded into the past. But at the same time, he is never far from asking questions about the "meaning of it all."
It's these questions, I think, that lead him to see his life as a pilgrimage toward a meaning which is as he puts it, "I have come to believe that in the world there is nothing to explain the world. There is nothing in nature to separate the existent from the potential." He is an believer in evolution, and has written a scholarly work, DARIWN'S CENTJURY on Darwin's work, but as the same time, he simply cannot account for some of the life forms he has uncovered. The potential, in evolutionary terms, does not explain what actually exists.
.
In a key chapter he describes the giant wasps who have an incredibly complicated way of killing and devouring their prey. General evolution does not explain the intricacy of their behavior - they go far beyond what would be a much simpler way of behavior, one normally accounted for by evolution. What explains this "potential," this unusual, and even baroquely flamboyant, way, of instinctual behavior? Eiseley doesn't know, and that captures the title of third section of the book, "Days of a Doubter." He is filled with doubt and what he calls ignorance and leads him to think that it is vain illusion to think that science will discover all there is know about the universe. He feels dwarfed by the immensity of time and the infinitesimally small amount of his knowledge, of humanity's knowledge, and these are certainly aspects of religion, ordinarily evoked by the concept of "God."
The first and second sections of the book, "Days of a Drifter" and "Days of a Thinker" build toward the darker last section. In "Drifter" Eiseley begins with a epigraph from THE ODYSSEY, "There is nothing worse for mortal men than wandering," and in this section Eiseley wanders through the Depression years, most in the west of the United States. He describes his deaf and unstable mother, his depressed father, various jobs he had, the catching of rides on freight trains, the hoboes he met, his illnesses, and at times what he felt was his dead-end life. He metaphorically thinks of these memories, especially his eight years of drifting, as being like the debris that pack rats gather and put into their nests.
In "Thinker" Eiseley concentrates on his academic and professional career where he says he was always most at home in fieldwork where he was gathering specimens and doing excavation work of which always both excited and saddened him. Excited about what he would find, and saddened by the theft and pillage of spots which were at one time sacred. There is always a connection that Eisely says he felt toward outsiders, whether dispossessed humans from the past, or even animals that are taken for granted.
One of the humans was Willy, a black garage man who lived in the basement of an apartment house where Eiseley once lived. He used to see him, a man who was dying and yet in his last days used to lean on a fence and look at the "lights of the world." Why does he remember him, a man whose last name he never learned? He sees himself in him, a writer whose words are briefly noted and then mostly forgotten, and yet they continue to watch and observe.
In a chapter "The Ghost World," he writes about the silence that envelops him when he lost his hearing temporarily due to a serious infection. When it returns, he thinks of his ghost world when he observed people walking and talking, but making no sounds. Another personal variation on the experience of Willy.
There's a sense of melancholy in this book, and maybe it was just me, but I didn't find it depressing because, I think, his descriptions are always surprisingly interesting and that outweighed the melancholy. One reader said of him, aptly, that he is a scientist who writes like a poet.
It's these questions, I think, that lead him to see his life as a pilgrimage toward a meaning which is as he puts it, "I have come to believe that in the world there is nothing to explain the world. There is nothing in nature to separate the existent from the potential." He is an believer in evolution, and has written a scholarly work, DARIWN'S CENTJURY on Darwin's work, but as the same time, he simply cannot account for some of the life forms he has uncovered. The potential, in evolutionary terms, does not explain what actually exists.
.
In a key chapter he describes the giant wasps who have an incredibly complicated way of killing and devouring their prey. General evolution does not explain the intricacy of their behavior - they go far beyond what would be a much simpler way of behavior, one normally accounted for by evolution. What explains this "potential," this unusual, and even baroquely flamboyant, way, of instinctual behavior? Eiseley doesn't know, and that captures the title of third section of the book, "Days of a Doubter." He is filled with doubt and what he calls ignorance and leads him to think that it is vain illusion to think that science will discover all there is know about the universe. He feels dwarfed by the immensity of time and the infinitesimally small amount of his knowledge, of humanity's knowledge, and these are certainly aspects of religion, ordinarily evoked by the concept of "God."
The first and second sections of the book, "Days of a Drifter" and "Days of a Thinker" build toward the darker last section. In "Drifter" Eiseley begins with a epigraph from THE ODYSSEY, "There is nothing worse for mortal men than wandering," and in this section Eiseley wanders through the Depression years, most in the west of the United States. He describes his deaf and unstable mother, his depressed father, various jobs he had, the catching of rides on freight trains, the hoboes he met, his illnesses, and at times what he felt was his dead-end life. He metaphorically thinks of these memories, especially his eight years of drifting, as being like the debris that pack rats gather and put into their nests.
In "Thinker" Eiseley concentrates on his academic and professional career where he says he was always most at home in fieldwork where he was gathering specimens and doing excavation work of which always both excited and saddened him. Excited about what he would find, and saddened by the theft and pillage of spots which were at one time sacred. There is always a connection that Eisely says he felt toward outsiders, whether dispossessed humans from the past, or even animals that are taken for granted.
One of the humans was Willy, a black garage man who lived in the basement of an apartment house where Eiseley once lived. He used to see him, a man who was dying and yet in his last days used to lean on a fence and look at the "lights of the world." Why does he remember him, a man whose last name he never learned? He sees himself in him, a writer whose words are briefly noted and then mostly forgotten, and yet they continue to watch and observe.
In a chapter "The Ghost World," he writes about the silence that envelops him when he lost his hearing temporarily due to a serious infection. When it returns, he thinks of his ghost world when he observed people walking and talking, but making no sounds. Another personal variation on the experience of Willy.
There's a sense of melancholy in this book, and maybe it was just me, but I didn't find it depressing because, I think, his descriptions are always surprisingly interesting and that outweighed the melancholy. One reader said of him, aptly, that he is a scientist who writes like a poet.
February 22, 2016
The person that recommended this read describes it best. "The book is divided into three sections: "Days of a Drifter" with 7 chapters, "Days of a Thinker" with 13 chapters, and "Days of a Doubter" with 5 chapters. He overcame so much--dropping out of high school, riding the rails, tuberculosis--and then embarked on an academic career that resulted in many awards, none of which really mattered to him. As an anthropologist, he knew that we are all dust in the end."
I have never read any of Loren Eiseley's other books. I don't know if all authors are as influenced by their experiences in life as Eiseley had been but I bet all the great ones are. One day, during exam week at university he became very sick. After completeing his final exam he stumbled back to his room, passed out on the landing but noticed by no one. "With the secretiveness of a wounded animal I lay hidden all night in my room. It was the sort of behavior, I suppose, that had become habitual with me....Some of the black marks on my college record were products of the same suspicious fears shown by my deafened mother. Other students stumbling into the wrong course or instructors went to their advisors and legally dropped the subject. I simply walked away and there the record stands. Bureaucracy intimidated me. I merely wanted to be left alone, but still I felt this persistent urge toward books...." And his wide areas of learning....but there was no one to guide him. Although he dropped out of high school eventually he became an anthropologist, science writer, ecologist, and poet. He published books of essays, biography, and general science in the 1950s through the 1970s.
A wonderful story of life told by the perfect person to tell it. I look forward to reading more by him.
I have never read any of Loren Eiseley's other books. I don't know if all authors are as influenced by their experiences in life as Eiseley had been but I bet all the great ones are. One day, during exam week at university he became very sick. After completeing his final exam he stumbled back to his room, passed out on the landing but noticed by no one. "With the secretiveness of a wounded animal I lay hidden all night in my room. It was the sort of behavior, I suppose, that had become habitual with me....Some of the black marks on my college record were products of the same suspicious fears shown by my deafened mother. Other students stumbling into the wrong course or instructors went to their advisors and legally dropped the subject. I simply walked away and there the record stands. Bureaucracy intimidated me. I merely wanted to be left alone, but still I felt this persistent urge toward books...." And his wide areas of learning....but there was no one to guide him. Although he dropped out of high school eventually he became an anthropologist, science writer, ecologist, and poet. He published books of essays, biography, and general science in the 1950s through the 1970s.
A wonderful story of life told by the perfect person to tell it. I look forward to reading more by him.
October 2, 2015
The stories of his early life and especially his mother are haunting, and you can tell as the book goes on that this is a thoughtful man's last gasp, at times petty and utterly human and at others expansive. It can be beautiful when someone's writing, their personal and intellectual life, informs and is informed by their more scientific career, how well they mesh. How even at a clinical remove he can still unearth the weight of smaller, daily tragedies.
August 24, 2014
It took a bit of jumping around to get this book, but the payoff was worth it. Eiseley's way of describing quirks in himself and the world around him is uplifting where it could have been cynical, yet mellow instead of romantic. For example, after recounting the improbably complex lifecycle of the Sphexe wasp, he spins it as something more than meaningless but less than supernatural:
I am an evolutionist. I believe my great backyard Sphexes have evolved like other creatures. But watching them in the October light as one circles my head in curiosity, I can only repeat my dictum softly: in the world there is nothing to explain the world. Nothing to explain the necessity of life, nothing to explain the hunger of the elements to become life, nothing to explain why the stolid realm of rock and soil and mineral should diversify itself into beauty, terror, and uncertainty. To bring organic novelty into existence, to create pain, injustice, joy, demands more than we can discern in the nature that we analyze so completely. Worship, then, like the Maya, the unknown zero, the procession of the time-bearing gods. The equation that can explain why a mere Sphex wasp contains in its minute head the ganglionic [nerve] centers of its prey has still to be written. In the world there is nothing below a certain depth that is truly explanatory. It is as if matter dreamed and muttered in its sleep. But why, and for what reason it dreams, there is no evidence.
I am an evolutionist. I believe my great backyard Sphexes have evolved like other creatures. But watching them in the October light as one circles my head in curiosity, I can only repeat my dictum softly: in the world there is nothing to explain the world. Nothing to explain the necessity of life, nothing to explain the hunger of the elements to become life, nothing to explain why the stolid realm of rock and soil and mineral should diversify itself into beauty, terror, and uncertainty. To bring organic novelty into existence, to create pain, injustice, joy, demands more than we can discern in the nature that we analyze so completely. Worship, then, like the Maya, the unknown zero, the procession of the time-bearing gods. The equation that can explain why a mere Sphex wasp contains in its minute head the ganglionic [nerve] centers of its prey has still to be written. In the world there is nothing below a certain depth that is truly explanatory. It is as if matter dreamed and muttered in its sleep. But why, and for what reason it dreams, there is no evidence.
January 5, 2020
Loren Eiseley's haunting, often enigmatic, autobiographical work. The great naturalist, essayist and poet applies his skills to examining his life, employing his signature technique of using anecdotes from his past to illuminate his points--in this case, trying to make sense of his own chaotic life journey and struggling to understand its meaning. At times it's painful to read; one is disturbed by the existential agonies Eiseley lived through, but as is true of most creative geniuses in all fields, we must be grateful because without the agonies we never would have had the beautiful creations of the man.
July 9, 2018
Like the late Carl Sagan, Loren Eiseley had the great gift of being able to express his thoughts in language that not only made his field of study more accessible to the rest of us, but to also do so in words that soared into the realm of poetic beauty.
In his remarkable autobiography – All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life – he relates his ascent from a childhood of poverty and loneliness – his mother was a victim of a profound mental illness that separated wife from husband and mother from son – through a young adulthood of struggles, including being judged unteachable in school and various wanderings around the United States by riding the rails during the Depression, to finding his love of nature and language.
Eiseley peers into – and thinks about – the deep; the depths of time and space, and the immense distances between the stars and within human hearts; the challenge of bridging eons with that of understanding and mastering ourselves.
Repeatedly, one comes upon a burst of prose that just explodes with a break-taking expression, a vision of what we usually describe in the most ordinary terms, as in mankind pursuing “...the towering cloudland of his dreams.” [As this quote reveals, Eiseley, who died in 1977, lived before more gender-neutral terminology came into standard use. Even though such can occasionally jar a modern reader, Eiseley was but using the language of his time, one which now seems so very long ago.]
Eiseley is a wonderful companion for our own troubled, often sordid, times. His eloquent phrases, so redolent in love of nature and the mysteries of life, offer the equivalent of a refreshing breeze or a cleansing shower. He is proof that we are capable of thinking and speaking like this! Unlike the club-bearing, guttural utterances of our pathetic “leaders” today, Eiseley wields words with both a poet’s and a surgeon’s precision; with him, you will venture deep into the storied past of our lovely and truly ancient planet. By staring into the vacant eyes of a long-buried skull, he will bring you face to face with the once-living creature and describe it and its environment in loving, wondrous detail.
Or you will find yourself catapulted into the star-field of galaxies that are themselves remnants of earlier beginnings. It is in these multiple immensities – of time, distance, and memory – that Eiseley consistently roams. His thoughts, really meditations, can sometimes veer sharply from one subject to another, but always with clear connectivity.
Always, his ultimate quest returns to humankind – this mysterious form of life that is miraculous and may be unique. Like Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play, he often seems to be holding a skull – our skull – and saying, “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.” Except Eiseley would add, not really that well at all.
It is not just the natural world and the forbidding reaches of the cosmos we little understand but, as our jealousies and wars reveal, it is also ourselves.
For Eiseley, we are the creatures who emerged from the long-ago muck, through a long line of evolving life-forms, and who are poised between heaven and earth, living all too brief lives and often pursuing the most ridiculous of things. He urges us – in his language, in his art, in his work – to listen to the music of the spheres, reading the writing etched on our hearts, and understand the longing of our souls if we would truly become the humans we could be.
After all, he reminds us, our time on this planet is really (in the geographic sense) short. Many, many creatures flourished far longer. We have no guarantee that we will continue.
It is almost certain that unless we learn to read our hearts and minds anew that we will not.
[The Library of America recently offered a superb two-volume collection of Eiseley’s major works entitled Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos that I highly recommend, as I suspect that most people, once they have begun reading him, will be loath to stop at just one book. However, there are still a good number of his single volumes in circulation, too, both in hardbound and paperback versions.]
In his remarkable autobiography – All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life – he relates his ascent from a childhood of poverty and loneliness – his mother was a victim of a profound mental illness that separated wife from husband and mother from son – through a young adulthood of struggles, including being judged unteachable in school and various wanderings around the United States by riding the rails during the Depression, to finding his love of nature and language.
Eiseley peers into – and thinks about – the deep; the depths of time and space, and the immense distances between the stars and within human hearts; the challenge of bridging eons with that of understanding and mastering ourselves.
Repeatedly, one comes upon a burst of prose that just explodes with a break-taking expression, a vision of what we usually describe in the most ordinary terms, as in mankind pursuing “...the towering cloudland of his dreams.” [As this quote reveals, Eiseley, who died in 1977, lived before more gender-neutral terminology came into standard use. Even though such can occasionally jar a modern reader, Eiseley was but using the language of his time, one which now seems so very long ago.]
Eiseley is a wonderful companion for our own troubled, often sordid, times. His eloquent phrases, so redolent in love of nature and the mysteries of life, offer the equivalent of a refreshing breeze or a cleansing shower. He is proof that we are capable of thinking and speaking like this! Unlike the club-bearing, guttural utterances of our pathetic “leaders” today, Eiseley wields words with both a poet’s and a surgeon’s precision; with him, you will venture deep into the storied past of our lovely and truly ancient planet. By staring into the vacant eyes of a long-buried skull, he will bring you face to face with the once-living creature and describe it and its environment in loving, wondrous detail.
Or you will find yourself catapulted into the star-field of galaxies that are themselves remnants of earlier beginnings. It is in these multiple immensities – of time, distance, and memory – that Eiseley consistently roams. His thoughts, really meditations, can sometimes veer sharply from one subject to another, but always with clear connectivity.
Always, his ultimate quest returns to humankind – this mysterious form of life that is miraculous and may be unique. Like Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play, he often seems to be holding a skull – our skull – and saying, “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well.” Except Eiseley would add, not really that well at all.
It is not just the natural world and the forbidding reaches of the cosmos we little understand but, as our jealousies and wars reveal, it is also ourselves.
For Eiseley, we are the creatures who emerged from the long-ago muck, through a long line of evolving life-forms, and who are poised between heaven and earth, living all too brief lives and often pursuing the most ridiculous of things. He urges us – in his language, in his art, in his work – to listen to the music of the spheres, reading the writing etched on our hearts, and understand the longing of our souls if we would truly become the humans we could be.
After all, he reminds us, our time on this planet is really (in the geographic sense) short. Many, many creatures flourished far longer. We have no guarantee that we will continue.
It is almost certain that unless we learn to read our hearts and minds anew that we will not.
[The Library of America recently offered a superb two-volume collection of Eiseley’s major works entitled Loren Eiseley: Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos that I highly recommend, as I suspect that most people, once they have begun reading him, will be loath to stop at just one book. However, there are still a good number of his single volumes in circulation, too, both in hardbound and paperback versions.]
October 14, 2024
As a graduate student in anthropology at Penn, I had some of my classes in a small room called “The Loren Eiseley Room” according to a plaque there. I never bothered to look up who he was and none of his work was on our course reading lists. In fact his style of humanistic anthropological writing seemed decidedly absent from the curriculum. Even though I didn’t know Eiseley, I was searching for a more engaging, integrative way to write about culture. So imagine my delight upon discovering All The Strange Hours 20 years later!
I discovered this memoir at my usual trough for great memoirs: Vivian Gornick’s wonderful The Situation and the Story. She’s never let me down, and this one doesn’t disappoint either.
This is a strange memoir by someone who was clearly an unusual academic and likely neurodiverse in some way. It is more of a series of essays, Eiseley’s preferred genre for all his work, than a straight up chronology through the book does move through his life to the end. Beautiful language, transcendent insights on time, “man’s” relationship to the natural world, power and poverty. My favorite sections are his bouts of communication with animals, especially cats. Utterly unique ways of thinking about and being with animals. I understood later from leaders of The Loren Eiseley Society (yes, it exists) that Eiseley was more of an animal rights thinker than a broad environmental activist, and his work is more philosophical than action-oriented.
I discovered this memoir at my usual trough for great memoirs: Vivian Gornick’s wonderful The Situation and the Story. She’s never let me down, and this one doesn’t disappoint either.
This is a strange memoir by someone who was clearly an unusual academic and likely neurodiverse in some way. It is more of a series of essays, Eiseley’s preferred genre for all his work, than a straight up chronology through the book does move through his life to the end. Beautiful language, transcendent insights on time, “man’s” relationship to the natural world, power and poverty. My favorite sections are his bouts of communication with animals, especially cats. Utterly unique ways of thinking about and being with animals. I understood later from leaders of The Loren Eiseley Society (yes, it exists) that Eiseley was more of an animal rights thinker than a broad environmental activist, and his work is more philosophical than action-oriented.
December 24, 2014
Eiseley had many adventures include the obvious but his life was just a little different. He launched his professional career at an older age after traveling the country by rail and foot during the Great Depression.
Once he began studying anthropology, he was hooked. He is a born writer and damn good at it but for a short while he acted in a provost and college administrator capacity. But back to his writing: he is a marvelous observer of man and also has the keenest of the thinkers in the scientific field. All his books are worth reading and I have done just that.
Once he began studying anthropology, he was hooked. He is a born writer and damn good at it but for a short while he acted in a provost and college administrator capacity. But back to his writing: he is a marvelous observer of man and also has the keenest of the thinkers in the scientific field. All his books are worth reading and I have done just that.
April 28, 2014
I heard of Eiseley through a recent book I read. And I wasn't disappointed. This was atmospheric, imaginative, and profound. I felt that I leaned in and listened closely to what he had to tell me. It took me everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It should me something about how to live as well as how to write about how we live.
August 9, 2008
This is largely an autobiography of Eiseley and it reveals much about him as a person but also about his life-long love of both science and writing. Great work.
February 6, 2024
"in all the questioning about what makes a writer, and especially perhaps the personal essayist, I have seen little reference to this fact; namely, that the brain has become a kind of unseen artists's loft. There are pictures that hang askew, pictures with outlines barely chalked in, pictures the artist has striven unsuccessfully to erase, pictures that only emerge and glow in a certain light. They all have been teleported, stolen, as it were, out of time. They represent no longer the sequential flow of ordinary memory. They can be pulled about on easels, examined within the mind itself. The act is not one of total recall like that of the professional mnemonist . Rather it is the use of things extracted from their context in such a way that they become the unique possession of a single life. The writer sees back to these transports alone, bare, perhaps few in number, but endowed with a symbolic life. He cannot obliterate them. He can only drag them about, magnify or reduce them as his artistic sense dictates, or juxtapose them in order to enhance a pattern. One thing he can not do. He can not destroy what will not be destroyed; he cannot determine in advance what will enter his mind." (156)
This is a perfect description of Eiseley's ars poetica. Not your typical cradle to near grave autobiogaphy but more like a collection of personal essays that reverberate with each other throughout the book. Many of them end with a reflection of such lyrical beauty and emotional wallop that I could not read more than per day. Though he does not refer much to specific examples of his writings, along the way, I found myself gaining a deeper appreciation for the source of his preoccupations, his obsessions, his haunted view of the past, in the essays, and he was quite haunted, particularly by his childhood and family. A tone of heavy melancholia pervades this book, sometimes to point of near emotional fatigue, but the book is not without its light moments, as well. If you've not read Eiseley, I would not recommend starting here; start with the essays, any of the six collections, though I'm rather partial to The Invisible Pyramid. If you're already a fan of Eiseley's work, then I think this book is a must read. If any of the essays inspire you to read more, I recommend the Library of America two volume set of his collected essays.
This is a perfect description of Eiseley's ars poetica. Not your typical cradle to near grave autobiogaphy but more like a collection of personal essays that reverberate with each other throughout the book. Many of them end with a reflection of such lyrical beauty and emotional wallop that I could not read more than per day. Though he does not refer much to specific examples of his writings, along the way, I found myself gaining a deeper appreciation for the source of his preoccupations, his obsessions, his haunted view of the past, in the essays, and he was quite haunted, particularly by his childhood and family. A tone of heavy melancholia pervades this book, sometimes to point of near emotional fatigue, but the book is not without its light moments, as well. If you've not read Eiseley, I would not recommend starting here; start with the essays, any of the six collections, though I'm rather partial to The Invisible Pyramid. If you're already a fan of Eiseley's work, then I think this book is a must read. If any of the essays inspire you to read more, I recommend the Library of America two volume set of his collected essays.
August 27, 2020
I've read several Eiseley books, maybe even this one, long ago when I was keenly interested in physical anthropology and nature. His essays used to leave me breathless, but this memoir disappointed my expectations, partly because I was appalled (especially in the current political climate) by the sheer weight of its masculine ethos which I had been too naive to recognize in his work before.
Although his deaf, hysterical mother gets a few begrudged pages, his wife merits far fewer, and most women are presented in term of beauty or lack thereof or their usefulness to him in times of illness. More or less in the age of Margaret Mead and only slightly in advance of animal behaviorists like Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey, Eiseley figures himself a man in a man's world, whether these men are drunks, tramps, acquaintances on a train journey, long-time friends, or sterling teachers. His unmistakable message is that the past, and his past in particular, is rife with male striving and violent emotions among the dinosaur bones.
He is (or was) a fine writer with an engrossing style and a deep love of nature, which I admire greatly. I enjoyed puttering about with him in the Furness Library and across the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, but his dream life features strongly throughout the memoir, which I find overly precious, in any case unappealing, and certainly less engaging than his early struggles to break out of the cycle of poverty and his shield of diffidence among scholarly peers.
I'm not sure anyone still reads about Eiseley's wonderful observations, and I wish I hadn't read this particular book last week but had picked up a book of his essays instead.
Although his deaf, hysterical mother gets a few begrudged pages, his wife merits far fewer, and most women are presented in term of beauty or lack thereof or their usefulness to him in times of illness. More or less in the age of Margaret Mead and only slightly in advance of animal behaviorists like Jane Goodall or Dian Fossey, Eiseley figures himself a man in a man's world, whether these men are drunks, tramps, acquaintances on a train journey, long-time friends, or sterling teachers. His unmistakable message is that the past, and his past in particular, is rife with male striving and violent emotions among the dinosaur bones.
He is (or was) a fine writer with an engrossing style and a deep love of nature, which I admire greatly. I enjoyed puttering about with him in the Furness Library and across the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, but his dream life features strongly throughout the memoir, which I find overly precious, in any case unappealing, and certainly less engaging than his early struggles to break out of the cycle of poverty and his shield of diffidence among scholarly peers.
I'm not sure anyone still reads about Eiseley's wonderful observations, and I wish I hadn't read this particular book last week but had picked up a book of his essays instead.
December 15, 2024
So I have this obsession with Loren Eiseley, a visionary anthropologist and, more relatably, an atheist mystic. As he tells this version of his life (piecemeal and coy) it seems he searches for what it's all intended to mean, without necessarily arriving at an answer. This isn't a biography where he says "in year X I married," rather he gives anecdotes of his past in the same manner as in his books of essays. As before, I felt as if I stood there with him, jumping onto train cars or struggling with weak breaths to recover in a Colorado cabin. I have been on the lonely Nebraska plains wrestling with death and the psychological inheritances of a damaged family. While he illuminated some of the things that made him who he is--from the challenges with school and formal institutions (unexpected for someone with 36 honorary degrees), to the time spent penniless and homeless, hopping trains through the Depression years, to the mishaps that occurred in his career when expected to fulfill roles that didn't always suit him--there is the sense that he is still searching after the essence of his own life, even as he knows he's reaching the end of it.
He makes me think of that line from Demian, a book representing the quintessence of youth:
Or, in Eiseley's own words, words to which I can profoundly relate:
He makes me think of that line from Demian, a book representing the quintessence of youth:
“I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.”
Or, in Eiseley's own words, words to which I can profoundly relate:
“Ironically, I who profess no religion find the whole of my life a religious pilgrimage.”
March 2, 2025
My mother gave and recommended this book to me in the '70s, not long after it came out. I stubbornly resist book recommendations, and this one has been reproaching me on my shelves for nearly 50 years. But recently I've come back to try some of my mom's books, and every one has been stellar, so I thought I'd finally give this a go. The first few pages suggested I'd made a mistake: Loren Eiseley is way too smart for me. This memoir is somehow poetic, philosophical, AND straightforward, even blunt. His life was harsh, from a transient childhood with a deaf and mentally ill mother and a father who was a disappointed actor who eked out a living as a salesman, to riding the rails during the Depression, contracting tuberculosis in his 20s, working on ranches and archaeological digs in the desert west, and then working his way through college and grad school. He eventually became a tenured professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and rose through the administration. Eiseley lost his hearing for a time, and started writing essays and books. I know, it all sounds bleak, but I was drawn in by Eiseley's continuing wonder at the world of nature and humans, by his appreciation for small but momentous events in his life, by his love for animals, and by his honesty and humility. It's a book unlike any other I've ever read, and I'm also glad I read it now, when I'm just a little older than he was when he wrote it.
March 26, 2018
This was a book that was on my mother's shelves (she died a few years ago at 95) and it was quite different from all the other quasi-religious Catholic theologian type material. So as I am currently coming to terms with my own life and the passing of my brother, I saw it again and picked it up. I found it surprisingly compelling, as a man who studies other dead men's bones and their habitats reflects on his own journey back to dust. There are of course mother issues and a twisted journey through academia. And although the prose is not particularly compelling, I found his doubly-linear structure really satisfying. I won't pretend to fully grasp his thesis, but clearly he feels connected with the natural world far more than he feels connected to people. But despite that, he is searching for the meaning of his life and not so much how he affected others, but how they have affected him.
July 3, 2017
The specter of death hovers nearby as Eiseley writes an account of his life, perhaps more frank than he might otherwise have done. Growing up the son of an overworked father and deaf distressed mother during the Depression, Eiseley recounts the time of his life riding the rails, and his isolation in the desert to recover from a lung condition. Eventually he studies anthropology and discovers his vocation as a writer and a teacher. But all the while, the specter appears now and again. There is a mystical quality to his life and his writing that both fascinated and puzzled me. I need to go back and read The Immense Journey (or did I never read it and just know about it). In any case, Eiseley proved his writerly creds to me in this autobiography.
January 17, 2020
Rarely have I been so enchanted by a book.
It draws simple yet detailed pictures of the world as seen through the eyes of one man. The pictures he paints with his words reached profound spaces in my past and created curious resonances in my body.
It’s highly recommended for anyone who might:
• enjoy storytelling and slow writing
• see history as manifested through analogies that span millennia,
• likes anthropology, and/or
• would like to, upon finishing the book, view the world with a renewed brightness, attention, and profundity
It draws simple yet detailed pictures of the world as seen through the eyes of one man. The pictures he paints with his words reached profound spaces in my past and created curious resonances in my body.
It’s highly recommended for anyone who might:
• enjoy storytelling and slow writing
• see history as manifested through analogies that span millennia,
• likes anthropology, and/or
• would like to, upon finishing the book, view the world with a renewed brightness, attention, and profundity
July 18, 2020
This is his story. It is almost as strange and miraculous as the tales told about his studies.
“Let the winds blow endlessly through those lost farmlands from which I came. What if our wars were spectral? We knew for what we fought. Life, life for the purposes of life, and is that then so small?”
I have my late mother’s copy of this book.
Eiseley writes, “I can hear the night frost split stones in deserts. Men are softer than stone, much softer.” My mother wrote below it, “And many fragment just as silently, and unobserved.”
“Let the winds blow endlessly through those lost farmlands from which I came. What if our wars were spectral? We knew for what we fought. Life, life for the purposes of life, and is that then so small?”
I have my late mother’s copy of this book.
Eiseley writes, “I can hear the night frost split stones in deserts. Men are softer than stone, much softer.” My mother wrote below it, “And many fragment just as silently, and unobserved.”
January 31, 2022
Unconventional in its structure and scope, this memoir makes for some engaging reading. Eisley’s storied life blends well with observations regarding the peculiarities of humanity. As the title indicates there are bizarre happenings: Eisley weaves his vivid imaginings and memories together to make a tapestry that one should savor. Pack rats who make off with his glasses, an unknown entity with whom he converses, an abandoned farmhouse where as a child he played with some discovered dice. Weird events rooted in a compelling narrative. Highly recommended.
February 17, 2024
Eiseley combines philosophy and science in a way that seems to often be lacking in the modern academic. A sense of wonder and of art gives important context to the otherwise neutral facts. He's got a breadth of interest and experience, but I found I occasionally lost the thread. This is a book that I want to enjoy more and that I would recommend to the right reader, but I still found it uneven.
October 3, 2018
Impressive writer, impressive thinker. Spent formative years on the rails out west during the early part of the Depression. Lived a wide-ranging, curiosity-driven life.
Borrowed this book from a friend, but determined that this is one book I have to obtain for my own bookshelf. I couldn't use the yellow highlighter on someone else's copy.
Borrowed this book from a friend, but determined that this is one book I have to obtain for my own bookshelf. I couldn't use the yellow highlighter on someone else's copy.
October 22, 2020
Loren Eiseley's writing is consistently brilliant. Having read several of his essay collections, I turned to this autobiography to learn more about the man himself. His childhood and youth were unusual and at times fraught with peril, and his perceptions of how these things shaped his later career and views of life are both insightful and inspiring.
December 1, 2017
Long one of my favorite authors/essayists, Eiseley is an unusual combination of elegance and beauty and wonder as writer and thinker. This is one of the most thoughtfully revealing autobiographies I have ever read.
October 28, 2021
I was fascinated, saddened, enthralled, until I wasn't. He was a briliant man and, based on others of his books, writer. But I think about 2/3 way through this he seemed to be caught in his theme and in his framework, and lost the heart of his story.
March 12, 2021
Painful for me to attempt to read. Could not finish.
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