The Fifth Planet
I
"It isn't there any more," he said. He was the only man I ever knew who hunted for bones in the stars, and I remember we were standing out among his sheep in the clear starshine when he said it. "It isn't there any more," he repeated. And innocently enough I asked, "What isn't?" -- not really thinking at all but just making conversation and watching the silver light drifting over the gray backs of the sheep.
"The fifth planet," he answered. I thought a minute and counted in my head twice over to make sure, and then I said a little soothingly, as one talks to a confused child, "But the fifth planet is Jupiter. There it is over there. All you have to do is swing the tripod around and you'l1pick it up al1right. Planets don't disappear that easy, thank God."
"The fifth one did all the same," he said. But he shifted the tripod and took a sight toward Jupiter, and the sheep went on munching. I decided I hadn't heard him correctly. After all there is a good deal of wind in those high valleys, and even the frost made little pinging sounds cracking the stones.
We might have been standing on the moon ourselves, it was so cold. I wanted badly to go in and sit by the fire, but it was like this night after night, and nothing for me to do about it if I wanted companionship. He was a bone hunter like myself, in a kind of way. There aren't many of us, nor enough help to stand by, so I couldn't let him down even though I knew he was crazy as hell. If I was playing a hundred-to-one shot when I looked for bones around his ranch by day, he was playing it a million to one at night. That just doesn't make sense. Your life isn't long enough to fool with odds like that. Just the same, there we were out with those sheep and pointing his little telescope looking for bones in the sky.
I suppose that was the thing that intrigued me the first season we met. I'm not a star hunter, though like most people who work with the earth and its past, I have my normal share of curiosity about the universe. It was a far-off interest, though, and besides I was nearsighted from too much peering at the ground. Radnor was different. He already had a squint when I met him, from straining over that telescope, and he was the sort of chap who generally ends up in a cistern or a cesspool while marching around after the stars.
He wasn't a professional. That kind never is. He was a pure bona fide amateur, and part of the lunatic fringe. He got into this thing by accident, and like most such people, he didn't know when to stop. It began with Williams and a flight of meteors. It ended with -- well that's the story. But this is how it began.
II
Williams came up there on the hunt for a meteor. Not an ordinary one, you understand, but the real stuff. A twenty-tonner heard and seen passing over three states. I knew Williams quite well -- we worked at the same institution once -- and I knew there wasn't a keener eye for a starfall and where it was going.
He'd plotted it all out from the reports, triangulated, and headed up there into that high tableland. Of course he ran into Radnor. He would have to in order to operate in there at all. It was Radnor's ranch and Radnor that helped him. They were lucky, sure. A ranch hand had seen the hole where it struck. They got it, and it was quite a feather in Williams's cap. In any sane place in the world they would have packed it off posthaste to a museum, with a few drinks for the local boys, and things would have gone back to normalcy fast.
The trouble was that nothing up there was normal. In the first place, digging out that big chunk of iron took time, equipment, and all sorts of supplies. Williams stayed at Radnor's place for weeks, and knowing' Williams as I did it was easy to guess what happened: Williams simply took the malleable clay of Jim Radnor, sheepman, and made a star hunter out of him. That might have been all right, in a nice amateur sort of way, if they had kept it to the front porch on a Sunday evening, but that wasn't how Williams did things.
He was a born teacher -- if he wasn't an astronomer I'd have said preacher and been closer to the truth -- and he set out to convert Radnor. He aimed to convince Radnor of the importance of meteorite observation, which might have been all right too -- there's no real harm in it if your mind runs that way -- but then he added that last devilish touch that only a fanatic like Williams would have used to corrode the soul of a good sheepman.
It was unethical, to my mind, immoral really, because it is the kind of thing which the innocent amateur isn't ready to withstand. He hasn't built up to it with the necessary preparation. You take him, addlepated and open-mouthed, and let him look into space until his brain is reeling. Then you whisper over his shoulder something about life out there in that void, and the only way we can ever learn if it exists. And you speak -- oh, I knew old Williams well, you know -- of the freezing dark that surrounds us and the loneliness that comes to the astronomer in that room under the slit dome. You speak of the suns going by, and the great fires roaring in the solitude of space. You speak of endless depths, great distances all cold and still and empty of the life of man. And then far off, like an insect singing, you begin to whisper the hope of life on other planets, and whether it is true or untrue, and whether there has ever been or will be things like ourselves out there to share our loneliness. And then you tell again how the secret may be found.
III
It's not my secret. I won't vouch for it, you understand. It's Williams's field, not mine, but I know what he is capable of and the kind of kinks he can tie in people's heads. I've heard that wistful insect singing too, down another dimension -- time -- which is why I go on bone hunting. Well, he must have done it to Radnor. When I dropped in, a year later, the man had all the symptoms.
I've never known a nicer fellow than Jim. One of those odd, big-handed, practical fellows with a streak of romance that had lain dormant till Williams touched it off. Unmarried, too. Probably a wife could have handled him, or driven Williams away before the damage was done, but he had had no protection, so there he was with the little telescope Williams had gotten for him, and nothing on his mind but stars.
He had a bunch of file cards in boxes all over his bedroom. I've never seen anything like it. There was no system, no alphabet, but all observations on meteorites and things pertaining to them filed in a colossal jumble. It made him feel scientific, I guess. He told me about the boxes and said he had "facts" in them.
"Now, Jim," I said, for I knew him well, having been in and out of that country before on a mission concerning a small mouselike animal a million years deceased, "now, Jim, what in the name of God are you looking for? One crank in this country is bad enough. I don't like competition."
"Bones," he said.
"What?" I exclaimed.
"Bones," he repeated.
"I don't get you," I said. "You've got a nice little telescope that Williams gave you. You've card files full of stuff on meteorites. You're mumbling to me about the Doppler effect and the red shift. What has all that to do with bones? You're in astronomy."
''I'm hunting for interplanetary bones," he said then. He looked at his shoes, and I guess he thought I wouldn't like it very well, being in bones myself. He needn't have worried. I saw where Williams had led him, and I had no intention of following.
"Oh!" I said. And then I just remarked casually I'd be off for the hills in the morning. I knew what Williams could do to a man. He might have done it to me once, if I hadn't been near-sighted. Williams was a fanatic. It wasn't that there was basically anything wrong with his theory, if he'd been content to leave it at that. You'll find it all there in the books. Where the fanaticism came in was in his utter ruthlessness, and his power over people. He knew his theory was a million-to-one shot -- a twice-ten-million-to-one shot. And his idea of shortening the odds was to get twenty thousand jug-headed enthusiasts to waste their lives looking for the proof.
The proof, of course, was bones, interplanetary fossils. Nobody had ever found them and nobody ever -- well, I don't know now. The older you get the less you know. At the last Radnor had his say, but he never showed me anything. That isn't science, you know.
It was meteorites that were the key. The theory runs that they, or some of them, are the products of a smash-up in space, the fragments of a lost planetary body. The chemical composition suggests it. Some are heavy metal such as we expect at our own earth's core; others resemble rocks at the earth's surface. The variation suggests that some of them, at least, originated at different depths in another planet. A planet blown to hell and gone. Just here is where Williams got in his play. Instead of sitting quietly in a good club with his drink and the meteorites, he takes the next impossible step.
The meteorites, he says, keep coming in -- big ones and little ones, raining in with the earth's attraction. Okay then, keep looking, keep watching. Some day you'll get an unconsumed mass of sedimentary rock off that vanished planet. Sedimentary rock, mind you; fossil-bearing rock. Get it and you've got the secret of the galaxies. One fossil speeding in from outer space, one bit of fossil life unknown to this planet, one skull from a meteor's heart, and space out there -- I remember Williams's gesture at that point of his talk -- becomes alive. Man is no longer lonely. Life is no longer a unique and terrible accident. It, too, holds its place with the spinning suns.
My God, when I was younger Williams could make the hair stand up along my neck. Think of it! To know if life was out there, or even had been out there. To know whether there were interplanetary parallelisms, perhaps even men -- beings, anyhow. To know and to find it all in a whirling piece of rock coming down from the night sky.
No, Williams never told me the chances; I learned of them from other men. I learned that meteorites of sedimentary rock have never been found. I learned that the surface layers of a planet form such a small proportion of its actual bulk that, dispersed in outer space, the number of such fragments coming in, if they came at all, would be infinitesimal. The fossil-bearing rocks of a planet would be in about the same proportion as dirt on the surface of a suddenly exploded golf ball to the substance of the ball itself. The odds were too great, you see, too great for a short-lived creature like man. The odds, those infernal odds!
But I have said that Williams was a fanatic. He was -- a cold madman. He tracked meteors everywhere. He organized societies of meteor enthusiasts. He lectured on meteors. He told his tale. He increased the watchers. I followed his progress for years. I saw him pile up meteors like iron junk in his rooms. All iron, no once-living stone that had felt air and known the sun. The fossils might be out there -- yes, they might -- but living men don't win on a million-to- one shot. Williams was getting old.
He was getting old when he came the long way up that mesa in pursuit of his last flaming disappointment. He was old when he met Radnor. And he took the last of his fury and his hunger and his eloquence and poured them into that romantic, stubborn, religious-minded man.
"It's a question of time, that's all," Radnor said to me later after I had come down from the hills for supplies. He said it with the assurance of one of those damned one-track amateurs that pull Pluto out of a hat after the professionals have gone home to bed.
I spat into the fire.
"All we need is watchers, more and more watchers. Then ... "
It was Williams all over again. But there was a difference. I could hear it at the back of his talk. "You will see. It will prove how small we are and how great, also. There will be signs, progress, evidence eventually of how high life can go, evidence from an older planet. Evidence of the Great Plan."
"All right, Jim," I said, seeing him eye the door. I was growing used to his routine. "All right," I said meekly, "we'll go out and watch." It was one of those periods of heavy star fall, but the heavy ones don't come often, not even high up where we were.
IV
I think it was on the third night that I heard him mention that fifth planet, and again the next night. I tried tactfully to correct him once more. Actually I was afraid the stuff was going to his head.
"Look, Radnor," I said, "what do you mean by the fifth planet? I tell you it's Jupiter."
He looked at me and I could see his stubborn, intense eyes back in their shadowy hollows. "Not by Bode's law," he contradicted, and mumbled some figures at me. I remembered his piles of cards, then, and the way Williams must have hammered him.
"Jupiter is the sixth planet," he went on, more to himself than me. "There's a gap between Mars and Jupiter -- something is missing there. There's a gap in the planet distances. The fifth planet isn't there."
"Pure accident," I grumbled, feeling out of my depth.
"No," said Radnor, and we both instinctively stared up at something we couldn't see. "There's something there, all right. You've forgotten the asteroids -- Ceres and the rest. They're moving where there should be a planet. It's the fifth one, and they're all that's left of it. Something went wrong there."
A meteor trailed high above us, dissolved, and vanished. "Of course," I said. "Stones, aren't they? Just fragments, I remember. Part of something bigger. No air, nothing but thousands of stones on a planet's pathway."
"The fifth planet," he said again. "It's part of the fifth planet that comes down here in little pieces. Williams was sure of it. He said--"
"It was beyond Mars," I conceded to humor him. "There might have been a chance for life there. Curious, what happened ... "
I turned away then. It was cold and our breath made little frost rings in the dark. "Come on," I urged, but he just stood there brooding as I went in. I left early the next morning. I won't say with relief, for I liked Radnor. But, after all, this was Radnor in a new phase. Later, in the smoker, as the train started to roll eastward, I thought briefly of Williams and his strange influence upon men of Radnor's type. I thought also of that wide and red-stoned plateau, and the things that came down upon it out of the dark. Then someone started a game of poker, and with the miles clicking off behind us, I forgot, a little deliberately perhaps, the whole episode. One has to live, you know, and I've always had a feeling that space was not in my line.
V
I don't think, as things turned out, that it was in Radnor's line either. Men of his religious nature get centered on a symbol, finally. With some of them it may be gold tablets buried on a mountain, or a book with cryptic inscriptions. Or it may be just a voice in the woods that they alone can hear. With Radnor I guess it was the fifth planet, and I should have known it when I left him out there in the frost that night.
I never expected to see him again. In a job like mine you go many places, have casual contacts with any number of people, and are apt never to turn up in the same spot twice. As it happens in this case, I wish I never had, but I did.
It was a small matter -- a question of the proper zoning of a new fossil -- but it brought me back two thousand miles, and two years later. I thought of Radnor, of course. I even went to the trouble of clipping a couple of astronomical articles out of the science section of the New York Times for him. I figured he'd like them for those overloaded fact boxes he kept.
Things never change in a country like that. There were the same little desert owls flitting from fence post to fence post as when I went away. The road unwound into the same red distance. It was evening when I got to the ranch, and Radnor received me hospitably enough. I must say he had aged a bit, and his eyes seemed apathetic, but after all, none of us gets any younger.
After supper we talked sheep for a while. It seemed safe, and I was not unskilled at it, but after a time a silence fell between us. It was then I drew out the clippings.
He read the first one without comment and dropped it on the white tablecloth. I handed him the second. I remember it had something to do with a recent discovery about the Martian atmosphere and gave strong support to the theory that there might be life on that planet. Knowing Radnor as I had, I expected this one to be good for an evening's conversation. He looked at the headline with an expression of mingled indifference and dislike. "They shouldn't publish that sort of thing," he said.
"I thought you might like it for those big files of yours," I countered uneasily. He raised his head and looked through me the way that little black telescope of his used to pick up holes in space. "I burned them," he said flatly.
It was awkward, and the whole thing was beginning to get on my nerves. I wanted to get up, and I did. I lit a cigar and studied his face over it. I made one more effort. "How about the scope?" I suggested. "It's a clear night and I reckon you can show me a lot now." Then I started moving for the door.
He pulled himself together with a visible effort and followed me out. For all his peculiarities he was a courteous man, and I had been his friend. On the porch he halted me. There was a high, thin starlight, I remember, and it did odd things to his face.
"I don't look any more," he said, and then repeated it. I dropped into a chair and he sat uneasily facing me on the porch railing. A sort of tension was building up steadily between us.
"I don't look any more because I know," he said. "I know about it already. 'Seek and you shall find: the Book says. It doesn't say what you will find, it just says you will find. Up here there are ways. Williams knew them."
I looked past him into the night. There was nowhere else to look except out on that great windswept plateau. A long streamer of green light shot across the horizon. The stones are still coming in, I thought wearily, but with the other part of my mind I said to Radnor, putting my words carefully together, "I don't follow you. Do you mean you found something?"
He ignored the interruption. "I believed in the Plan:' he said, "what some people call the Divine Plan. I believed in life. I believed it was advancing, rising, becoming more intelligent. I believed it might have been further along out there" -- he gestured mutely. "I believed it would give us hope to know."
I heard him, but I put the question bluntly. After all, it might be a matter for science and scientist is what I called myself. "What did you find," I asked, "specifically?"
"The Plan is not what you think," he said. His eyes in that strange light were alien and as cryptic as before. "The Plan is not what you think it is. I know about it now. And life--" He made another gesture, wide, indifferent, and final. There was a greater emptiness than space within him. I could feel it grow as we sat there.
I did not ask that question again. You can call me a fool, but you did not sit there as I did in that valley out of time, while star falls whispered overhead, and a fanatic talked icy insanity at your elbow. I tell you the man frightened me -- or maybe it was space itself. I got the feeling somehow that he wanted me to ask again what he had found. And by then I didn't want to hear. Why? Well, that kind of experience is painful, and you try to forget afterward, but I think he must have hit some weak spot in my psychology, probed unaware some unexpressed deep horror of my own. Anyhow I had a feeling that I might believe his answer, and I knew in the same clairvoyant instant of revulsion that I could not bear to hear him give it. "Have you got a match?" I said.
He sighed and came a long way back from somewhere. I thought I saw how it was with him then. Williams had finished him as he had finished others. Well, space is not my job. I checked my data in the hills next morning and talked a lot about sheep, and left -- maybe a little sooner than I normally would.
I had a card once from Radnor afterward. It was five years later, and I remember it well, because it came a week after Hiroshima. There was nothing on the card but one line, as though it had been hanging in the air all that time and had just caught up to me. "The Plan is not what you think it is," it read. "Do you see now?"
For a time I puzzled over it, unsure that I did. But after Nagasaki the thing began to be a tune in my head like the little songs the wind makes under telegraph wires. It just went on sighing, "You see? You see?" Of course I knew he was crazy, but just the same he was right about one thing. The fifth planet is gone. And maybe I see.
The Star Thrower, by Loren Eiseley
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Re: Starthrower, by Loren Eiseley
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Re: Starthrower, by Loren Eiseley
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The Last Neanderthal
It has long been the thought of science, particularly in evolutionary biology, that nature does not make extended leaps, that her creatures slip in slow disguise from one shape to another. A simple observation will reveal, however, that there are rocks in deserts that glow with heat for a time after sundown. Similar emanations may come from the writer or the scientist. The creative individual is someone upon whom mysterious rays have converged and are again reflected, not necessarily immediately, but in the course of years. That all of this wispy geometry of dreams and memories should be the product of a kind of slow-burning oxidation carried on in an equally diffuse and mediating web of nerve and sense cells is surprising enough, but that the emanations from the same particulate organ, the brain, should be so strikingly different as to disobey the old truism of an unleaping nature is quite surprising, once one comes to contemplate the reality. The same incident may stand as a simple fact to some, an intangible hint of the nature of the universe to others, a useful myth to a savage, or any number of other things. The receptive mind makes all the difference, shadowing or lighting the original object. I was an observer, intent upon my own solitary hieroglyphics.
It happened a long time ago at Curacao, in the Netherlands Antilles, on a shore marked by the exposed ribs of a wrecked freighter. The place was one where only a student of desolation would find cause to linger. Pelicans perched awkwardly on what remained of a rusted prow. On the edge of the littered beach beyond the port I had come upon a dead dog wrapped in burlap, obviously buried at sea and drifted in by the waves. The dog was little more than a skeleton but still articulated, one delicate bony paw laid gracefully -- as though its owner merely slept, and would presently awaken -- across a stone at the water's edge. Around his throat was a waterlogged black strap that showed he had once belonged to someone. This dog was a mongrel whose life had been spent among the island fishermen. He had known only the small sea-beaten boats that come across the strait from Venezuela. He had romped briefly on shores like this to which he had been returned by the indifferent sea.
I stepped back a little hesitantly from the smell of death, but still I paused reluctantly. Why, in this cove littered with tin cans, bottles, and cast-off garments, did I find it difficult, if not a sacrilege, to turn away? Because, the thought finally came to me, this particular tattered garment had once lived. Scenes on the living sea that would never in all eternity recur again had streamed through the sockets of those vanished eyes. The dog was young, the teeth in its jaws still perfect. It was of that type of loving creature who had gamboled happily about the legs of men and striven to partake of their endeavors.
Someone had seen crudely to his sea burial, but not well enough to prevent his lying now where came everything abandoned. Nevertheless, vast natural forces had intervened to clothe him with a pathetic dignity. The tide had brought him quietly at night and placed what remained of him asleep upon the stones. Here at sunrise I had stood above him in a light he would never any longer see. Even if I had had a shovel the stones would have prevented his burial. He would wait for a second tide to spirit him away or lay him higher to bleach starkly upon coral and conch shells, mingling the little lime of his bones with all else that had once stood upright on these shores.
As I turned upward into the hills beyond the beach I was faintly aware of a tracery of lizard tails amidst the sand and the semi-desert shrubbery. The lizards were so numerous on the desert floor that their swift movement in the bright sun left a dizzying impression, like spots dancing before one's eyes. The creatures had a tangential way of darting off to the side like inconsequential thoughts that never paused long enough to be fully apprehended. One's eyesight was oppressed by subtly moving points where all should have been quiet. Similar darting specks seemed to be invading my mind. Offshore I could hear the sea wheezing and suspiring in long gasps among the caverns of the coral. The equatorial sun blazed on my unprotected head and hummingbirds flashed like little green flames in the underbrush. I sought quick shelter under a manzanillo tree, whose poisoned apples had tempted the sailors of Columbus.
I suppose the apples really made the connection. Or perhaps merely the interior rustling of the lizards as I passed some cardboard boxes beside a fence brought the thing to mind. Or again, it may have been the tropic sun, lending its flames to life with a kind of dreadful indifference as to the result. At any rate, as I shielded my head under the leaves of the poison tree, the darting lizard points began to run together into a pattern.
Before me passed a broken old horse plodding before a cart laden with bags of cast-off clothing. discarded furniture. and abandoned metal. The horse's harness was a makeshift combination of straps mended with rope. The bearded man perched high in the driver's seat looked as though he had been compounded from the assorted junk heap in the wagon bed. What finally occupied the center of my attention. however, was a street sign and a year -- a year that scurried into shape with the flickering alacrity of the lizards. "R Street," they spelled, and the year was 1923.
By now the man on the wagon is dead, his cargo dispersed, never to be reassembled. The plodding beast has been overtaken by whatever fate comes upon a junkman's horse. Their significance upon that particular day in 1923 had been resolved to this, just this: The wagon had been passing the intersection between R and Fourteenth streets when I had leaned from a high-school window a block away, absorbed as only a sixteen-year-old may sometimes be with the sudden discovery of time. It is all going, I thought with the bitter desperation of the young confronting history. No one can hold us. Each and all, we are riding into the dark. Even living, we cannot remember half the events of our own days.
At that moment my eye had fallen upon the junk dealer passing his fateful corner. Now, I had thought instantly, now, save him, immortalize the unseizable moment. The junkman is the symbol of all that is going or is gone. He is passing the intersection into nothingness. Say to the mind, "Hold him, do not forget."
The darting lizard points beyond the manzanillo tree converged and tightened. The phantom horse and the heaped, chaotic wagon were still jouncing across the intersection upon R Street. They had never crossed it; they would not. Forty-five years had fled away. I was not wrong about the powers latent in the brain. The scene was still In process.
I estimated the lowering of the sun with one eye while at the back of my mind the lizard rustling continued. The blistering apples of the manzanillo reminded me of an inconsequential wild-plum fall far away in Nebraska. They were not edible but they contained the same, if a simpler, version of the mystery hidden in our heads. They were hoarding and dispersing energy while the inanimate universe was running down around us.
"We must regard the organism as a configuration contrived to evade the tendency of the universal laws of nature," John Joly the geologist had once remarked. Unlike the fire in a thicket, life burned cunningly and hoarded its resources. Energy provisions in the seed provided against individual death. Of all the unexpected qualities of an unexpected universe, the sheer organizing power of animal and plant metabolism is one of the most remarkable, but, as in the case of most everyday marvels, we take it for granted. Where it reaches its highest development, in the human mind, we forget it completely. Yet out of it history is made -- the junkman on R Street is prevented from departing. Growing increasingly archaic, that phantom would be held at the R Street intersection while all around him new houses arose and the years passed unremembered. He would not be released until my own mind began to crumble.
The power to free him is not mine. He is held enchanted because long ago I willed a miniature of history, confined to a single brain. That brain is devouring oxygen at a rate out of all proportion to the rest of the body. It is involved in burning, evoking, and transposing visions, whether of lizard tails, alphabets from the sea, or the realms beyond the galaxy. So important does nature regard this unseen combustion, this smoke of the planet's autumn, that a starving man's brain will be protected to the last while his body is steadily consumed. It is a part of unexpected nature.
In the rational universe of the physical laboratory this sullen and obstinate burning might not, save for our habit of taking the existent for granted, have been expected. Nonetheless, it is here, and man is its most tremendous manifestation. One might ask, Would it be possible to understand humanity a little better if one could follow along just a step of the evolutionary pathway in person? Suppose that there still lived ... but let me tell the tale, make of it what you will.
II
Years after the experience I am about to describe, I came upon a recent but Neanderthaloid skull in the dissecting room -- a rare-enough occurrence, one that the far-out flitting of forgotten genes struggles occasionally to produce, as if life sometimes hesitated and were inclined to turn back upon its pathway. For a time, remembering an episode of my youth, I kept the indices of cranial measurement by me.
Today, thinking of that experience, I have searched vainly for my old notebook. It is gone. The years have a way of caring for things that do not seek the safety of print. The earlier event remains, however, because it was not a matter of measurements or anthropological indices but of a living person whom I once knew. Now, in my autumn, the face of that girl and the strange season I spent in her neighborhood return in a kind of hazy lesson that I was too young to understand.
It happened in the West, somewhere in that wide drought-ridden land of empty coulees that carry in sudden spates of flood the boulders of the Rockies toward the sea. I suppose that, with the outward flight of population, the region is as wild now as it was then, some forty years ago. It would be useless to search for the place upon a map, though I have tried. Too many years and too many uncertain miles lie behind all bone hunters. There was no town to fix upon a road map. There was only a sod house tucked behind a butte, out of the prevailing wind. And there was a little spring-fed pond in a grassy meadow -- that I remember.
Bone hunting is not really a very romantic occupation. One walks day after day along miles of frequently unrewarding outcrop. One grows browner, leaner, and tougher, it is true, but one is far from the bright lights, and the prospect, barring a big strike, like a mammoth, is always to abandon camp and go on. It was really a gypsy profession, then, for those who did the field collecting.
In this case, we did not go on. There was an eroding hill in the vicinity, and on top of that hill, just below sod cover, were the foot bones, hundreds of them, of some lost Tertiary species of American rhinoceros. It is useless to ask why we found only foot bones or why we gathered the mineralized things in such fantastic quantities that they must still lie stacked in some museum storeroom. Maybe the creatures had been immured standing up in a waterhole and in the millions of succeeding years the rest of the carcasses had eroded away from the hilltop stratum. But there were the foot bones, and the orders had come down, so we dug carpals and metacarpals till we cursed like an army platoon that headquarters has forgotten.
There was just one diversion: the spring, and the pond in the meadow. There, under the bank, we cooled our milk and butter purchased from the soddy inhabitants. There we swam and splashed after work. The country people were reserved and kept mostly to themselves. They were uninterested in the dull bones on the hilltop unenlivened by skulls or treasure. After all, there was reason for their reserve. We must have appeared, by their rural standards, harmless but undoubtedly touched in the head. The barrier of reserve was never broken. The surly farmer kept to his parched acres and estimated to his profit our damage to his uncultivated hilltop. The slatternly wife tended a few scrawny chickens. In that ever-blowing landscape their windmill largely ran itself.
Only a stocky barefoot girl of twenty sometimes came hesitantly down the path to our camp to deliver eggs. Some sixty days had drifted by upon that hillside. I began to remember the remark of an old fossil hunter who in his time had known the Gold Coast and the African veldt. "When calico begins to look like silk," he had once warned over a fire in the Sierras, "it is time to go home."
But enough of that. We were not bad young people. The girl shyly brought us the eggs, the butter, and the bacon and then withdrew. Only after some little time did her appearance begin to strike me as odd. Men are accustomed to men in their various color variations around the world. When the past intrudes into a modem setting, however, it is less apt to be visible, because to see it demands knowledge of the past, and the past is always camouflaged when it wears the clothes of the present.
The girl came slowly down the trail one evening, and it struck me suddenly how alone she looked and how, well, alien, she also appeared. Our cook was stoking up the evening fire, and as the shadows leaped and flickered I, leaning invisibly against a rock, was suddenly transported one hundred thousand years into the past. The shadows and their dancing highlights were the cause of it. They had swept the present out of sight. That girl coming reluctantly down the pathway to the fire was removed from us in time, and subconsciously she knew it as I did. By modem standards she was not pretty, and the gingham dress she wore, if anything, defined the difference.
Short, thickset, and massive, her body was still not the body of a typical peasant woman. Her head, thrust a little forward against the light, was massive-boned. Along the eye orbits at the edge of the frontal bone I could see outlined in the flames an armored protuberance that, particularly in women, had vanished before the close of the Wurmian ice. She swung her head almost like a great muzzle beneath its curls, and I was struck by the low bun-shaped breadth at the back. Along her exposed arms one could see a flash of golden hair.
No, we are out of time, I thought quickly. We are each and every one displaced. She is the last Neanderthal, and she does not know what to do. We are those who eliminated her long ago. It is like an old scene endlessly re-enacted. Only the chipped stones and the dead game are lacking.
I came out of the shadow then and spoke gently to her, taking the packages. It was the most one could do across that waste of infinite years. She spoke almost inaudibly, drawing an unconscious circle in the dust with a splayed bare foot. I saw, through the thin dress, the powerful thighs, the yearning fertility going unmated in this lone- some spot. She looked up, and a trick of the fire accentuated the cavernous eye sockets so that I saw only darkness within. I accompanied her a short distance along the trail. "What is it you are digging for?" she managed to ask.
"It has to do with time," I said slowly. "Something that happened a long time ago."
She listened incuriously, as one at the morning of creation might do.
"Do you like this?" she persisted. "Do you always just go from one place to another digging these things? And who pays for it, and what comes of it in the end? Do you have a home?" The soddy and her burly father were looming in the dusk. I paused, but questions flung across the centuries are hard to answer.
"I am a student," I said, but with no confidence. How could I say that suddenly she herself and her ulnar-bowed and golden-haired forearms were a part of a long reach backward into time?
"Of what has been, and what will come of it we are trying to find out. I am afraid it will not help one to find a home," I said, more to myself than her. "Quite the reverse, in fact. You see--"
The dark sockets under the tumbled hair seemed somehow sadly vacant. "Thank you for bringing the things," I said, knowing the customs of that land. "Your father is waiting. I will go back to camp now." With this I strode off toward our fire but went, on impulse, beyond it into the full-starred night.
This was the way of things along the Wild Cat escarpment. There was sand blowing and the past mingling with the present in more ways than professional science chose to see. There were eroded farms no longer running cattle and a diminishing population waiting, as this girl was waiting, for something they would never possess. They were, without realizing it, huntsmen without game, women without warriors. Obsolescence was upon their way of life.
But about the girl lingered a curious gentleness that we know now had long ago touched the vanished Neanderthals she so resembled. It would be her fate to marry eventually one of the illiterate hard-eyed uplanders of my own kind. Whatever the subtle genes had resurrected in her body would be buried once more and hidden in the creature called sapiens. Perhaps in the end his last woman would stand unwanted before some fiercer, brighter version of himself. It would be no more than justice. I was farther out in the deep spaces than I knew, and the fire was embers when I returned.
The season was waning. There came, inevitably, a time when the trees began to talk of winter in the crags above the camp. I have repeated all that can be said about so fragile an episode. I had exchanged in the course of weeks a few wistful, scarcely understood remarks. I had waved to her a time or so from the quarry hilltop. As the time of our departure neared I had once glimpsed her shyly surveying from a rise beyond the pond our youthful plungings and naked wallowings in the spring-fed water. Then suddenly the leaves were down or turning yellow. It was time to go. The fossil quarry and its interminable foot bones were at last exhausted.
But something never intended had arisen for me there by the darkening water -- some agonizing, lifelong nostalgia, both personal and, in another sense, transcending the personal. It was -- how shall I say it? -- the endurance in a single mind of two stages of man's climb up the energy ladder that may be both his triumph and his doom.
Our battered equipment was assembled in the Model T's, which, in that time, were the only penetrators of deep-rutted upland roads. Morose good-byes were expressed; money was passed over the broken sod cover on the hilltop. Hundreds of once galloping rhinoceros foot bones were stowed safely away. And that was it. I stood by the running board and slowly, very slowly, let my eyes wander toward that massive, archaic, and yet tragically noble head -- of a creature so far back in time it did not know it represented tragedy. I made, I think, some kind of little personal gesture of farewell. Her head raised in recognition and then dropped. The motors started. Homo sapiens, the energy devourer, was on his way once more.
What was it she had said, I thought desperately as I swung aboard. Home, she had questioned, "Do you have a home?" Perhaps I once did, I was to think many times in the years that followed, but I, too, was a mental atavism. I, like that lost creature, would never find the place called home. It lay somewhere in the past down that hundred-thousand- year road on which travel was impossible. Only ghosts with uncertain eyes and abashed gestures would meet there. Upon a surging tide of power first conceived in the hearth fires of dead caverns mankind was plunging into an uncontrolled future beyond anything the people of the Ice had known.
The cell that had somehow mastered the secret of controlled energy, of surreptitious burning to a purpose, had finally produced the mind, judiciously, in its turn, controlling the inconstant fire at the cave mouth. Beyond anything that lost girl could imagine, words in the mouth or immured in libraries would cause substance to vanish and the earth itself to tremble. The little increments of individual energy dissolving at death had been coded and passed through the centuries by human ingenuity. A climbing juggernaut of power was leaping from triumph to triumph. It threatened to be more than man and all his words could master. It was more and less than man.
I remembered those cavernous eye sockets whose depths were forever hidden from me in the firelight. Did they contain a premonition of the end we had invited, or was it only that I was young and hungry for all that was untouchable? I have searched once more for the old notebooks but, again, in vain. They would tell me, at best, only how living phantoms can be anatomically compared with those of the past. They would tell nothing of that season of the falling leaves or how I learned under the night sky of the utter homelessness of man.
III
I have seen a tree root burst a rock face on a mountain or slowly wrench aside the gateway of a forgotten city. This is a very cunning feat, which men take too readily for granted. Life, unlike the inanimate, will take the long way round to circumvent barrenness. A kind of desperate will resides even in a root. It will perform the evasive tactics of an army, slowly inching its way through crevices and hoarding energy until someday it swells and a living tree upheaves the heaviest mausoleum. This covert struggle is part of the lifelong battle waged against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the heat death that has been frequently assumed to rule the universe. At the hands of man that hoarded energy takes strange forms, both in the methods of its accumulation and in the diverse ways of its expenditure.
For hundreds of thousands of years, a time longer than all we know of recorded history, the kin of that phantom girl had lived without cities along the Italian Mediterranean or below the northern tentacles of the groping ice. The low archaic skull vault had been as capacious as ours. Neanderthal man had, we now know after long digging, his own small dreams and kindnesses. He had buried his dead with offerings -- there were even evidences that they had been laid, in some instances, upon beds of wild flowers. Beyond the chipped flints and the fires in the cavern darkness his mind had not involved itself with what was to come upon him with our kind -- the first bowmen, the great artists, the terrible creatures of his blood who were never still.
It was a time of autumn driftage that might have lasted and been well forever. Whether it was his own heavy brow that changed in the chill nights or that somewhere his line had mingled with a changeling cuckoo brood who multiplied at his expense we do not know with certainty. We know only that he vanished, though sometimes, as in the case of my upland girl, a chance assemblage of archaic genes struggles to re-emerge from the loins of sapiens.
But the plucked flint had flown; the heavy sad girls had borne the children of the conquerors. Rain and leaves washed over the cave shelters of the past. Bronze replaced flint, iron replaced bronze, while the killing never ceased. The Neanderthals were forgotten; their grottoes housed the oracles of later religions. Marble cities gleamed along the Mediterranean. The ice and the cave bear had vanished. White-robed philosophers discoursed in Athens. Armed galleys moved upon the waters. Agriculture had brought wealth and diversification of labor. It had also brought professional soldiery. The armored ones were growing and, with them, slavery, torture, and death upon all the seas of the world.
The energy that had once sufficed only to take man from one camping place to another, the harsh but innocent world glimpsed by Cook in the eighteenth century on the shores of Australia, century by century was driving toward a climax. The warriors with the tall foreheads given increasingly to fanatic religions and monumental art had finally grown to doubt the creations of their own minds.
The remnants of what had once been talked about in Athens and been consumed in the flames of Alexandria hesitantly crept forth once more. Early in the seventeenth century Sir Francis Bacon asserted that "by the agency of man a new aspect of things, a new universe, comes into view." In those words he was laying the basis of what he came to call "the second world," that world which could be drawn out of the natural by the sheer power of the human mind. Man had, of course, unwittingly been doing something of the sort since he came to speak. Bacon, however, was dreaming of the new world of invention, of toleration, of escape from irrational custom. He was the herald of the scientific method itself. Yet that method demands history also -- the history I as an eager student had long ago beheld symbolically upon a corner in the shape of a junkman's cart. Without knowledge of the past, the way into the thickets of the future is desperate and unclear.
Bacon's second world is now so much with us that it rocks our conception of what the natural order was, or is, or in what sense it can be restored. A mathematical formula traveling weakly along the fibers of the neopallium may serve to wreck the planet. It is a kind of metabolic energy never envisaged by the lichen attacking a rock face or dreamed of in the flickering shadows of a cave fire. Yet from these ancient sources man's hunger has been drawn. Its potential is to be found in the life of the world we call natural, just as its terrifying intricacy is the product of the second visionary world evoked in the brain of man.
The two exist on the planet in an increasingly uneven balance. Into one or the other or into a terrifying nothing one of these two worlds must finally subside. Man, whose strange metabolism has passed beyond the search for food to the naked ingestion of power, is scarcely aware that the energy whose limited planetary store lies at the root of the struggle for existence has passed by way of his mind into another dimension. There the giant shadows of the past continue to contend. They do so because life is a furnace of concealed flame.
Some pages back I spoke of a wild-plum thicket. I did so because I had a youthful memory of visiting it in autumn. All the hoarded juices of summer had fallen with that lush un tasted fruit upon the grass. The tiny engines of the plant had painstakingly gathered throughout the summer rich stores of sugar and syrup from the ground. Seed had been produced; birds had flown away with fruit that would give rise to plum trees miles away. The energy dispersion was so beneficent on that autumn afternoon that earth itself seemed anxious to promote the process against the downward guttering of the stars. Even I, tasting the fruit, was in my animal way scooping up some of it into thoughts and dreams.
Long after the Antillean adventure I chanced on an autumn walk to revisit the plum thicket. I was older, much older, and I had come largely because I wondered if the thicket was still there and because this strange hoarding and burning at the heart of life still puzzled me. I have spoken figuratively of fire as an animal, as being perhaps the very essence of animal. Oxidation, I mean, as it enters into life and consciousness.
Fire, as we have learned to our cost, has an insatiable hunger to be fed. It is a nonliving force that can even locomote itself. What if now -- and I half closed my eyes against the blue plums and the smoke drifting along the draw -- what if now it is only concealed and grown slyly conscious of its own burning in this little house of sticks and clay that I inhabit? What if I am, in some way, only a sophisticated fire that has acquired an ability to regulate its rate of combustion and to hoard its fuel in order to see and walk?
The plums, like some gift given from no one to no one visible, continued to fall about me. I was old now, I thought suddenly, glancing at a vein on my hand. I would have to hoard what remained of the embers. I thought of the junkman's horse and tried to release him so that he might be gone.
Perhaps I had finally succeeded. I do not know. I remembered that star-filled night years ago on the escarpment and the heavy-headed dreaming girl drawing a circle in the dust. Perhaps it was time itself she drew, for my own head was growing heavy and the smoke from the autumn fields seemed to be penetrating my mind. I wanted to drop them at last, these carefully hoarded memories. I wanted to strew them like the blue plums in some gesture of love toward the universe all outward on a mat of leaves. Rich, rich and not to be hoarded, only to be laid down for someone, anyone, no longer to be carried and remembered in pain like the delicate paw lying forever on the beach at Curacao.
I leaned farther back, relaxing in the leaves. It was a feeling I had never had before, and it was strangely soothing. Perhaps I was no longer Homo sapiens, and perhaps that girl, the last Neanderthal, had known as much from the first. Perhaps all I was, really, was a pile of autumn leaves seeing smoke wraiths through the haze of my own burning. Things get odder on this planet, not less so. I dropped my head finally and gazed straight up through the branches at the sun. It was all going, I felt, memories dropping away in that high indifferent blaze that tolerated no other light. I let it be so for a little, but then I felt in my pocket the flint blade that I had carried all those years from the gravels on the escarpment. It reminded me of a journey I would not complete and the circle in the dust around which I had magically traveled for so long.
I arose then and, biting a plum that tasted bitter, I limped off down the ravine. One hundred thousand years had made little difference -- at least, to me. The secret was to travel always in the first world, not the second; or, at least, to know at each crossroad which world was which. I went on, clutching for stability the flint knife in my pocket. A blue smoke like some final conflagration swept out of the draw and preceded me. I could feel its heat. I coughed, and my eyes watered. I tried as best I could to keep pace with it as it swirled on. There was a crackling behind me as though I myself were burning, but the smoke was what I followed. I held the sharp flint like a dowser's twig, cold and steady in my hand.
For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field: and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.
-- Job 5:23
It has long been the thought of science, particularly in evolutionary biology, that nature does not make extended leaps, that her creatures slip in slow disguise from one shape to another. A simple observation will reveal, however, that there are rocks in deserts that glow with heat for a time after sundown. Similar emanations may come from the writer or the scientist. The creative individual is someone upon whom mysterious rays have converged and are again reflected, not necessarily immediately, but in the course of years. That all of this wispy geometry of dreams and memories should be the product of a kind of slow-burning oxidation carried on in an equally diffuse and mediating web of nerve and sense cells is surprising enough, but that the emanations from the same particulate organ, the brain, should be so strikingly different as to disobey the old truism of an unleaping nature is quite surprising, once one comes to contemplate the reality. The same incident may stand as a simple fact to some, an intangible hint of the nature of the universe to others, a useful myth to a savage, or any number of other things. The receptive mind makes all the difference, shadowing or lighting the original object. I was an observer, intent upon my own solitary hieroglyphics.
It happened a long time ago at Curacao, in the Netherlands Antilles, on a shore marked by the exposed ribs of a wrecked freighter. The place was one where only a student of desolation would find cause to linger. Pelicans perched awkwardly on what remained of a rusted prow. On the edge of the littered beach beyond the port I had come upon a dead dog wrapped in burlap, obviously buried at sea and drifted in by the waves. The dog was little more than a skeleton but still articulated, one delicate bony paw laid gracefully -- as though its owner merely slept, and would presently awaken -- across a stone at the water's edge. Around his throat was a waterlogged black strap that showed he had once belonged to someone. This dog was a mongrel whose life had been spent among the island fishermen. He had known only the small sea-beaten boats that come across the strait from Venezuela. He had romped briefly on shores like this to which he had been returned by the indifferent sea.
I stepped back a little hesitantly from the smell of death, but still I paused reluctantly. Why, in this cove littered with tin cans, bottles, and cast-off garments, did I find it difficult, if not a sacrilege, to turn away? Because, the thought finally came to me, this particular tattered garment had once lived. Scenes on the living sea that would never in all eternity recur again had streamed through the sockets of those vanished eyes. The dog was young, the teeth in its jaws still perfect. It was of that type of loving creature who had gamboled happily about the legs of men and striven to partake of their endeavors.
Someone had seen crudely to his sea burial, but not well enough to prevent his lying now where came everything abandoned. Nevertheless, vast natural forces had intervened to clothe him with a pathetic dignity. The tide had brought him quietly at night and placed what remained of him asleep upon the stones. Here at sunrise I had stood above him in a light he would never any longer see. Even if I had had a shovel the stones would have prevented his burial. He would wait for a second tide to spirit him away or lay him higher to bleach starkly upon coral and conch shells, mingling the little lime of his bones with all else that had once stood upright on these shores.
As I turned upward into the hills beyond the beach I was faintly aware of a tracery of lizard tails amidst the sand and the semi-desert shrubbery. The lizards were so numerous on the desert floor that their swift movement in the bright sun left a dizzying impression, like spots dancing before one's eyes. The creatures had a tangential way of darting off to the side like inconsequential thoughts that never paused long enough to be fully apprehended. One's eyesight was oppressed by subtly moving points where all should have been quiet. Similar darting specks seemed to be invading my mind. Offshore I could hear the sea wheezing and suspiring in long gasps among the caverns of the coral. The equatorial sun blazed on my unprotected head and hummingbirds flashed like little green flames in the underbrush. I sought quick shelter under a manzanillo tree, whose poisoned apples had tempted the sailors of Columbus.
I suppose the apples really made the connection. Or perhaps merely the interior rustling of the lizards as I passed some cardboard boxes beside a fence brought the thing to mind. Or again, it may have been the tropic sun, lending its flames to life with a kind of dreadful indifference as to the result. At any rate, as I shielded my head under the leaves of the poison tree, the darting lizard points began to run together into a pattern.
Before me passed a broken old horse plodding before a cart laden with bags of cast-off clothing. discarded furniture. and abandoned metal. The horse's harness was a makeshift combination of straps mended with rope. The bearded man perched high in the driver's seat looked as though he had been compounded from the assorted junk heap in the wagon bed. What finally occupied the center of my attention. however, was a street sign and a year -- a year that scurried into shape with the flickering alacrity of the lizards. "R Street," they spelled, and the year was 1923.
By now the man on the wagon is dead, his cargo dispersed, never to be reassembled. The plodding beast has been overtaken by whatever fate comes upon a junkman's horse. Their significance upon that particular day in 1923 had been resolved to this, just this: The wagon had been passing the intersection between R and Fourteenth streets when I had leaned from a high-school window a block away, absorbed as only a sixteen-year-old may sometimes be with the sudden discovery of time. It is all going, I thought with the bitter desperation of the young confronting history. No one can hold us. Each and all, we are riding into the dark. Even living, we cannot remember half the events of our own days.
At that moment my eye had fallen upon the junk dealer passing his fateful corner. Now, I had thought instantly, now, save him, immortalize the unseizable moment. The junkman is the symbol of all that is going or is gone. He is passing the intersection into nothingness. Say to the mind, "Hold him, do not forget."
The darting lizard points beyond the manzanillo tree converged and tightened. The phantom horse and the heaped, chaotic wagon were still jouncing across the intersection upon R Street. They had never crossed it; they would not. Forty-five years had fled away. I was not wrong about the powers latent in the brain. The scene was still In process.
I estimated the lowering of the sun with one eye while at the back of my mind the lizard rustling continued. The blistering apples of the manzanillo reminded me of an inconsequential wild-plum fall far away in Nebraska. They were not edible but they contained the same, if a simpler, version of the mystery hidden in our heads. They were hoarding and dispersing energy while the inanimate universe was running down around us.
"We must regard the organism as a configuration contrived to evade the tendency of the universal laws of nature," John Joly the geologist had once remarked. Unlike the fire in a thicket, life burned cunningly and hoarded its resources. Energy provisions in the seed provided against individual death. Of all the unexpected qualities of an unexpected universe, the sheer organizing power of animal and plant metabolism is one of the most remarkable, but, as in the case of most everyday marvels, we take it for granted. Where it reaches its highest development, in the human mind, we forget it completely. Yet out of it history is made -- the junkman on R Street is prevented from departing. Growing increasingly archaic, that phantom would be held at the R Street intersection while all around him new houses arose and the years passed unremembered. He would not be released until my own mind began to crumble.
The power to free him is not mine. He is held enchanted because long ago I willed a miniature of history, confined to a single brain. That brain is devouring oxygen at a rate out of all proportion to the rest of the body. It is involved in burning, evoking, and transposing visions, whether of lizard tails, alphabets from the sea, or the realms beyond the galaxy. So important does nature regard this unseen combustion, this smoke of the planet's autumn, that a starving man's brain will be protected to the last while his body is steadily consumed. It is a part of unexpected nature.
In the rational universe of the physical laboratory this sullen and obstinate burning might not, save for our habit of taking the existent for granted, have been expected. Nonetheless, it is here, and man is its most tremendous manifestation. One might ask, Would it be possible to understand humanity a little better if one could follow along just a step of the evolutionary pathway in person? Suppose that there still lived ... but let me tell the tale, make of it what you will.
II
Years after the experience I am about to describe, I came upon a recent but Neanderthaloid skull in the dissecting room -- a rare-enough occurrence, one that the far-out flitting of forgotten genes struggles occasionally to produce, as if life sometimes hesitated and were inclined to turn back upon its pathway. For a time, remembering an episode of my youth, I kept the indices of cranial measurement by me.
Today, thinking of that experience, I have searched vainly for my old notebook. It is gone. The years have a way of caring for things that do not seek the safety of print. The earlier event remains, however, because it was not a matter of measurements or anthropological indices but of a living person whom I once knew. Now, in my autumn, the face of that girl and the strange season I spent in her neighborhood return in a kind of hazy lesson that I was too young to understand.
It happened in the West, somewhere in that wide drought-ridden land of empty coulees that carry in sudden spates of flood the boulders of the Rockies toward the sea. I suppose that, with the outward flight of population, the region is as wild now as it was then, some forty years ago. It would be useless to search for the place upon a map, though I have tried. Too many years and too many uncertain miles lie behind all bone hunters. There was no town to fix upon a road map. There was only a sod house tucked behind a butte, out of the prevailing wind. And there was a little spring-fed pond in a grassy meadow -- that I remember.
Bone hunting is not really a very romantic occupation. One walks day after day along miles of frequently unrewarding outcrop. One grows browner, leaner, and tougher, it is true, but one is far from the bright lights, and the prospect, barring a big strike, like a mammoth, is always to abandon camp and go on. It was really a gypsy profession, then, for those who did the field collecting.
In this case, we did not go on. There was an eroding hill in the vicinity, and on top of that hill, just below sod cover, were the foot bones, hundreds of them, of some lost Tertiary species of American rhinoceros. It is useless to ask why we found only foot bones or why we gathered the mineralized things in such fantastic quantities that they must still lie stacked in some museum storeroom. Maybe the creatures had been immured standing up in a waterhole and in the millions of succeeding years the rest of the carcasses had eroded away from the hilltop stratum. But there were the foot bones, and the orders had come down, so we dug carpals and metacarpals till we cursed like an army platoon that headquarters has forgotten.
There was just one diversion: the spring, and the pond in the meadow. There, under the bank, we cooled our milk and butter purchased from the soddy inhabitants. There we swam and splashed after work. The country people were reserved and kept mostly to themselves. They were uninterested in the dull bones on the hilltop unenlivened by skulls or treasure. After all, there was reason for their reserve. We must have appeared, by their rural standards, harmless but undoubtedly touched in the head. The barrier of reserve was never broken. The surly farmer kept to his parched acres and estimated to his profit our damage to his uncultivated hilltop. The slatternly wife tended a few scrawny chickens. In that ever-blowing landscape their windmill largely ran itself.
Only a stocky barefoot girl of twenty sometimes came hesitantly down the path to our camp to deliver eggs. Some sixty days had drifted by upon that hillside. I began to remember the remark of an old fossil hunter who in his time had known the Gold Coast and the African veldt. "When calico begins to look like silk," he had once warned over a fire in the Sierras, "it is time to go home."
But enough of that. We were not bad young people. The girl shyly brought us the eggs, the butter, and the bacon and then withdrew. Only after some little time did her appearance begin to strike me as odd. Men are accustomed to men in their various color variations around the world. When the past intrudes into a modem setting, however, it is less apt to be visible, because to see it demands knowledge of the past, and the past is always camouflaged when it wears the clothes of the present.
The girl came slowly down the trail one evening, and it struck me suddenly how alone she looked and how, well, alien, she also appeared. Our cook was stoking up the evening fire, and as the shadows leaped and flickered I, leaning invisibly against a rock, was suddenly transported one hundred thousand years into the past. The shadows and their dancing highlights were the cause of it. They had swept the present out of sight. That girl coming reluctantly down the pathway to the fire was removed from us in time, and subconsciously she knew it as I did. By modem standards she was not pretty, and the gingham dress she wore, if anything, defined the difference.
Short, thickset, and massive, her body was still not the body of a typical peasant woman. Her head, thrust a little forward against the light, was massive-boned. Along the eye orbits at the edge of the frontal bone I could see outlined in the flames an armored protuberance that, particularly in women, had vanished before the close of the Wurmian ice. She swung her head almost like a great muzzle beneath its curls, and I was struck by the low bun-shaped breadth at the back. Along her exposed arms one could see a flash of golden hair.
No, we are out of time, I thought quickly. We are each and every one displaced. She is the last Neanderthal, and she does not know what to do. We are those who eliminated her long ago. It is like an old scene endlessly re-enacted. Only the chipped stones and the dead game are lacking.
I came out of the shadow then and spoke gently to her, taking the packages. It was the most one could do across that waste of infinite years. She spoke almost inaudibly, drawing an unconscious circle in the dust with a splayed bare foot. I saw, through the thin dress, the powerful thighs, the yearning fertility going unmated in this lone- some spot. She looked up, and a trick of the fire accentuated the cavernous eye sockets so that I saw only darkness within. I accompanied her a short distance along the trail. "What is it you are digging for?" she managed to ask.
"It has to do with time," I said slowly. "Something that happened a long time ago."
She listened incuriously, as one at the morning of creation might do.
"Do you like this?" she persisted. "Do you always just go from one place to another digging these things? And who pays for it, and what comes of it in the end? Do you have a home?" The soddy and her burly father were looming in the dusk. I paused, but questions flung across the centuries are hard to answer.
"I am a student," I said, but with no confidence. How could I say that suddenly she herself and her ulnar-bowed and golden-haired forearms were a part of a long reach backward into time?
"Of what has been, and what will come of it we are trying to find out. I am afraid it will not help one to find a home," I said, more to myself than her. "Quite the reverse, in fact. You see--"
The dark sockets under the tumbled hair seemed somehow sadly vacant. "Thank you for bringing the things," I said, knowing the customs of that land. "Your father is waiting. I will go back to camp now." With this I strode off toward our fire but went, on impulse, beyond it into the full-starred night.
This was the way of things along the Wild Cat escarpment. There was sand blowing and the past mingling with the present in more ways than professional science chose to see. There were eroded farms no longer running cattle and a diminishing population waiting, as this girl was waiting, for something they would never possess. They were, without realizing it, huntsmen without game, women without warriors. Obsolescence was upon their way of life.
But about the girl lingered a curious gentleness that we know now had long ago touched the vanished Neanderthals she so resembled. It would be her fate to marry eventually one of the illiterate hard-eyed uplanders of my own kind. Whatever the subtle genes had resurrected in her body would be buried once more and hidden in the creature called sapiens. Perhaps in the end his last woman would stand unwanted before some fiercer, brighter version of himself. It would be no more than justice. I was farther out in the deep spaces than I knew, and the fire was embers when I returned.
The season was waning. There came, inevitably, a time when the trees began to talk of winter in the crags above the camp. I have repeated all that can be said about so fragile an episode. I had exchanged in the course of weeks a few wistful, scarcely understood remarks. I had waved to her a time or so from the quarry hilltop. As the time of our departure neared I had once glimpsed her shyly surveying from a rise beyond the pond our youthful plungings and naked wallowings in the spring-fed water. Then suddenly the leaves were down or turning yellow. It was time to go. The fossil quarry and its interminable foot bones were at last exhausted.
But something never intended had arisen for me there by the darkening water -- some agonizing, lifelong nostalgia, both personal and, in another sense, transcending the personal. It was -- how shall I say it? -- the endurance in a single mind of two stages of man's climb up the energy ladder that may be both his triumph and his doom.
Our battered equipment was assembled in the Model T's, which, in that time, were the only penetrators of deep-rutted upland roads. Morose good-byes were expressed; money was passed over the broken sod cover on the hilltop. Hundreds of once galloping rhinoceros foot bones were stowed safely away. And that was it. I stood by the running board and slowly, very slowly, let my eyes wander toward that massive, archaic, and yet tragically noble head -- of a creature so far back in time it did not know it represented tragedy. I made, I think, some kind of little personal gesture of farewell. Her head raised in recognition and then dropped. The motors started. Homo sapiens, the energy devourer, was on his way once more.
What was it she had said, I thought desperately as I swung aboard. Home, she had questioned, "Do you have a home?" Perhaps I once did, I was to think many times in the years that followed, but I, too, was a mental atavism. I, like that lost creature, would never find the place called home. It lay somewhere in the past down that hundred-thousand- year road on which travel was impossible. Only ghosts with uncertain eyes and abashed gestures would meet there. Upon a surging tide of power first conceived in the hearth fires of dead caverns mankind was plunging into an uncontrolled future beyond anything the people of the Ice had known.
The cell that had somehow mastered the secret of controlled energy, of surreptitious burning to a purpose, had finally produced the mind, judiciously, in its turn, controlling the inconstant fire at the cave mouth. Beyond anything that lost girl could imagine, words in the mouth or immured in libraries would cause substance to vanish and the earth itself to tremble. The little increments of individual energy dissolving at death had been coded and passed through the centuries by human ingenuity. A climbing juggernaut of power was leaping from triumph to triumph. It threatened to be more than man and all his words could master. It was more and less than man.
I remembered those cavernous eye sockets whose depths were forever hidden from me in the firelight. Did they contain a premonition of the end we had invited, or was it only that I was young and hungry for all that was untouchable? I have searched once more for the old notebooks but, again, in vain. They would tell me, at best, only how living phantoms can be anatomically compared with those of the past. They would tell nothing of that season of the falling leaves or how I learned under the night sky of the utter homelessness of man.
III
I have seen a tree root burst a rock face on a mountain or slowly wrench aside the gateway of a forgotten city. This is a very cunning feat, which men take too readily for granted. Life, unlike the inanimate, will take the long way round to circumvent barrenness. A kind of desperate will resides even in a root. It will perform the evasive tactics of an army, slowly inching its way through crevices and hoarding energy until someday it swells and a living tree upheaves the heaviest mausoleum. This covert struggle is part of the lifelong battle waged against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the heat death that has been frequently assumed to rule the universe. At the hands of man that hoarded energy takes strange forms, both in the methods of its accumulation and in the diverse ways of its expenditure.
For hundreds of thousands of years, a time longer than all we know of recorded history, the kin of that phantom girl had lived without cities along the Italian Mediterranean or below the northern tentacles of the groping ice. The low archaic skull vault had been as capacious as ours. Neanderthal man had, we now know after long digging, his own small dreams and kindnesses. He had buried his dead with offerings -- there were even evidences that they had been laid, in some instances, upon beds of wild flowers. Beyond the chipped flints and the fires in the cavern darkness his mind had not involved itself with what was to come upon him with our kind -- the first bowmen, the great artists, the terrible creatures of his blood who were never still.
It was a time of autumn driftage that might have lasted and been well forever. Whether it was his own heavy brow that changed in the chill nights or that somewhere his line had mingled with a changeling cuckoo brood who multiplied at his expense we do not know with certainty. We know only that he vanished, though sometimes, as in the case of my upland girl, a chance assemblage of archaic genes struggles to re-emerge from the loins of sapiens.
But the plucked flint had flown; the heavy sad girls had borne the children of the conquerors. Rain and leaves washed over the cave shelters of the past. Bronze replaced flint, iron replaced bronze, while the killing never ceased. The Neanderthals were forgotten; their grottoes housed the oracles of later religions. Marble cities gleamed along the Mediterranean. The ice and the cave bear had vanished. White-robed philosophers discoursed in Athens. Armed galleys moved upon the waters. Agriculture had brought wealth and diversification of labor. It had also brought professional soldiery. The armored ones were growing and, with them, slavery, torture, and death upon all the seas of the world.
The energy that had once sufficed only to take man from one camping place to another, the harsh but innocent world glimpsed by Cook in the eighteenth century on the shores of Australia, century by century was driving toward a climax. The warriors with the tall foreheads given increasingly to fanatic religions and monumental art had finally grown to doubt the creations of their own minds.
The remnants of what had once been talked about in Athens and been consumed in the flames of Alexandria hesitantly crept forth once more. Early in the seventeenth century Sir Francis Bacon asserted that "by the agency of man a new aspect of things, a new universe, comes into view." In those words he was laying the basis of what he came to call "the second world," that world which could be drawn out of the natural by the sheer power of the human mind. Man had, of course, unwittingly been doing something of the sort since he came to speak. Bacon, however, was dreaming of the new world of invention, of toleration, of escape from irrational custom. He was the herald of the scientific method itself. Yet that method demands history also -- the history I as an eager student had long ago beheld symbolically upon a corner in the shape of a junkman's cart. Without knowledge of the past, the way into the thickets of the future is desperate and unclear.
Bacon's second world is now so much with us that it rocks our conception of what the natural order was, or is, or in what sense it can be restored. A mathematical formula traveling weakly along the fibers of the neopallium may serve to wreck the planet. It is a kind of metabolic energy never envisaged by the lichen attacking a rock face or dreamed of in the flickering shadows of a cave fire. Yet from these ancient sources man's hunger has been drawn. Its potential is to be found in the life of the world we call natural, just as its terrifying intricacy is the product of the second visionary world evoked in the brain of man.
The two exist on the planet in an increasingly uneven balance. Into one or the other or into a terrifying nothing one of these two worlds must finally subside. Man, whose strange metabolism has passed beyond the search for food to the naked ingestion of power, is scarcely aware that the energy whose limited planetary store lies at the root of the struggle for existence has passed by way of his mind into another dimension. There the giant shadows of the past continue to contend. They do so because life is a furnace of concealed flame.
Some pages back I spoke of a wild-plum thicket. I did so because I had a youthful memory of visiting it in autumn. All the hoarded juices of summer had fallen with that lush un tasted fruit upon the grass. The tiny engines of the plant had painstakingly gathered throughout the summer rich stores of sugar and syrup from the ground. Seed had been produced; birds had flown away with fruit that would give rise to plum trees miles away. The energy dispersion was so beneficent on that autumn afternoon that earth itself seemed anxious to promote the process against the downward guttering of the stars. Even I, tasting the fruit, was in my animal way scooping up some of it into thoughts and dreams.
Long after the Antillean adventure I chanced on an autumn walk to revisit the plum thicket. I was older, much older, and I had come largely because I wondered if the thicket was still there and because this strange hoarding and burning at the heart of life still puzzled me. I have spoken figuratively of fire as an animal, as being perhaps the very essence of animal. Oxidation, I mean, as it enters into life and consciousness.
Fire, as we have learned to our cost, has an insatiable hunger to be fed. It is a nonliving force that can even locomote itself. What if now -- and I half closed my eyes against the blue plums and the smoke drifting along the draw -- what if now it is only concealed and grown slyly conscious of its own burning in this little house of sticks and clay that I inhabit? What if I am, in some way, only a sophisticated fire that has acquired an ability to regulate its rate of combustion and to hoard its fuel in order to see and walk?
The plums, like some gift given from no one to no one visible, continued to fall about me. I was old now, I thought suddenly, glancing at a vein on my hand. I would have to hoard what remained of the embers. I thought of the junkman's horse and tried to release him so that he might be gone.
Perhaps I had finally succeeded. I do not know. I remembered that star-filled night years ago on the escarpment and the heavy-headed dreaming girl drawing a circle in the dust. Perhaps it was time itself she drew, for my own head was growing heavy and the smoke from the autumn fields seemed to be penetrating my mind. I wanted to drop them at last, these carefully hoarded memories. I wanted to strew them like the blue plums in some gesture of love toward the universe all outward on a mat of leaves. Rich, rich and not to be hoarded, only to be laid down for someone, anyone, no longer to be carried and remembered in pain like the delicate paw lying forever on the beach at Curacao.
I leaned farther back, relaxing in the leaves. It was a feeling I had never had before, and it was strangely soothing. Perhaps I was no longer Homo sapiens, and perhaps that girl, the last Neanderthal, had known as much from the first. Perhaps all I was, really, was a pile of autumn leaves seeing smoke wraiths through the haze of my own burning. Things get odder on this planet, not less so. I dropped my head finally and gazed straight up through the branches at the sun. It was all going, I felt, memories dropping away in that high indifferent blaze that tolerated no other light. I let it be so for a little, but then I felt in my pocket the flint blade that I had carried all those years from the gravels on the escarpment. It reminded me of a journey I would not complete and the circle in the dust around which I had magically traveled for so long.
I arose then and, biting a plum that tasted bitter, I limped off down the ravine. One hundred thousand years had made little difference -- at least, to me. The secret was to travel always in the first world, not the second; or, at least, to know at each crossroad which world was which. I went on, clutching for stability the flint knife in my pocket. A blue smoke like some final conflagration swept out of the draw and preceded me. I could feel its heat. I coughed, and my eyes watered. I tried as best I could to keep pace with it as it swirled on. There was a crackling behind me as though I myself were burning, but the smoke was what I followed. I held the sharp flint like a dowser's twig, cold and steady in my hand.
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Re: Starthrower, by Loren Eiseley
by admin » Mon May 02, 2016 12:34 am
II. Early Poems
The Spider
His science has progressed past stone,
His strange and dark geometries,
Impossible to flesh and bone,
Revive upon the passing breeze
The house the blundering foot destroys.
Indifferent to what is lost
He trusts the wind and yet employs
The jeweled stability of frost.
Foundations buried underfoot
Are forfeit to the mole and worm
But spiders know it and will put
Their trust in airy dreams more firm
Than any rock and raise from dew
Frail stairs the careless wind blows through.
Tasting the Mountain Spring
The spring comes to us through a mile of wood,
Beginning in the high cold acres where
Snow water starts, but seeping downward there
Feeds roots -- things at the abysmal sources of
All life. Sticks and wet stones and thirsts
Of worm and toadstool, unseen starry bursts
Of damp wood-pollen fill it -- taste enough
To let you know it has come down the brink
Of more than thunder .... In this foaming ditch
Water with earth's iron tainted and defiled
Mingles with stars, but, for myself, I drink
Like fawn or antelope, untasting which,
So long as all that water's quick and wild.
Things Will Go
When it is all done
Who will know? Who will care?
The snake will still be gliding by the stone,
The frog stare
From his place on the lily pad.
Things will go
Like water, like wind,
As they always have gone since the first
Ooze sprouted and finned.
This does not matter. What's done
Has always been so.
I shall tell myself this, not believe
Like the others I know.
Leaving September
If I have once forgotten on this field
The long light of the dusk, or far away
The sheep on tawny grass, how stones will yield
Small bitter puffballs, or a cricket stay
To wring wry tunes from emptiness and dearth,
Let me remember; let me hold them now
Close to the heart -- while I upon the earth
Am the stone field and pain the heavy plow.
Not in wide measures is the harvest culled;
Not by disaster nor by cutting hail
Is the loss seen, the grief in somewise dulled --
Being done at last. Ours is a different scale --
Leaving September stars and a little smoke
And memory tight as a lichen to an oak.
Nocturne in Silver
Here where the barbed wire straggles in the marsh
And alkali crusts all the weeds like frost,
I have come home, I have come home to hear
The new young frogs that cry along the lost
Wild ditches where at midnight only cows
And fools with eery marsh fire in their brains
Blunder toward midnight. Silvery and clear
Cry the new frogs; the blood runs in my veins
Coldly and clearly. I am mottled, too,
And feel a silver bubble in my throat.
Lock doors, turn keys, or follow in your fear
My eyes are green, and warily afloat
In the June darkness. I am done with fire.
Water quicksilver-like that slips through stone
Has quenched my madness -- if you find me here
My lineage squat and warty will be known.
Winter Sign
A spider web pulled tight between two stones
With nothing left but autumn leaves to catch
Is maybe a winter sign, or the thin blue bones
Of a hare picked clean by ants. A man can attach
Meanings enough to the wind when his luck is out,
But, having stumbled into this season of grief,
I mean to reflect on the life that is here and about
In the fall of the leaves -- not on the dying leaf.
Something more tough, reliable, and stark
Carries the blood of life toward a farther spring--
Something that lies concealed in the soundless dark
Of burr and pod, in the seeds that hook and sting.
I have learned from these that love which endures the night
May smolder in outward death while the colors blaze,
But trust my love -- it is small, burr-coated, and tight.
It will stick to the bone. It will last through the autumn days.
October Has the Heart
Left to his ruin with the autumn leaf,
The spider, black and yellow, treading air
By means of gossamer, goes like a thief
Up, up, and up -- till from that trembling stair
He launches out for some far other vine
Where pumpkins lie like moons among the corn.
As through some old, some bitter-clear thin wine
The world lies still -- no green leaf hides the thorn.
October has the heart; no more dark things
Cry in the blood; the quick impatient storms
Are all gone past, and with them all high wings.
Clear in this autumn quiet something forms:
Something to last -- what Keats once bent to learn
Painted forever on a certain urn.
Dusk Interval
Here is the waste, the stone, the streaming sunset,
Where no clouds pass.
Here, where the hawk's dark wing goes lonely over
Sheep-bitten grass,
Green ice once crawled and plowed the meadow.
The boulders lie
As they were dropped in that tremendous plowing.
The crows cry
Clamorous above it in the twilit evening ...
They do not stoop.
The rich grain and the harvest are not found here.
Night hawks loop
Erratic spirals in the windy starlight.
The fallow ground
Is sleeping, and I know with what ghost sleeping,
Deep under sound.
Oh, not for long the grass, the bells of grasses:
The mice who love
Their hidden runways will soon pass. The boulders
Will lift and move.
This land is sleeping in a dream of mammoth.
Their heavy tread
Will sound again. Sometime their feet will shudder
The last man from his bed.
Let the Red Fox Run
Red-bellied let the red fox run
Under the raining leaf, and weather
And summer go beyond recall
My heart will strain no more at its tether
I will not be out in the sharp hill frost,
I will not be there when the fox goes over
A wall where the broken boulders spill
The shape of a farm back into the clover
I will not be running with all that runs
(Its torn breath streaking down the furrow).
I will take my ease while the hunt pounds by,
Safe at last in earth's darkest burrow.
But somewhere still in the brain's gray vault,
Where the light grows dim and the owls are crying,
I shall run with the fox through the leaf-strewn wood
I shall not be present at my own dying.
The Fishers
The trout stream is fished out and still;
The fishers with their flies have gone.
Nor upstream now, nor down the hill
Move any men with waders on.
The water keeps on coming down;
Still water running green and deep
Harbors a stealthy life where brown
Old leaves go sailing into sleep.
The fishers say the stream is bad.
No rainbow flash against the sun
Will make the souls of fishers glad,
But say for fishers I am one
And here, at least, can still be caught
The slippery minnows of a thought
The Spider
His science has progressed past stone,
His strange and dark geometries,
Impossible to flesh and bone,
Revive upon the passing breeze
The house the blundering foot destroys.
Indifferent to what is lost
He trusts the wind and yet employs
The jeweled stability of frost.
Foundations buried underfoot
Are forfeit to the mole and worm
But spiders know it and will put
Their trust in airy dreams more firm
Than any rock and raise from dew
Frail stairs the careless wind blows through.
Tasting the Mountain Spring
The spring comes to us through a mile of wood,
Beginning in the high cold acres where
Snow water starts, but seeping downward there
Feeds roots -- things at the abysmal sources of
All life. Sticks and wet stones and thirsts
Of worm and toadstool, unseen starry bursts
Of damp wood-pollen fill it -- taste enough
To let you know it has come down the brink
Of more than thunder .... In this foaming ditch
Water with earth's iron tainted and defiled
Mingles with stars, but, for myself, I drink
Like fawn or antelope, untasting which,
So long as all that water's quick and wild.
Things Will Go
When it is all done
Who will know? Who will care?
The snake will still be gliding by the stone,
The frog stare
From his place on the lily pad.
Things will go
Like water, like wind,
As they always have gone since the first
Ooze sprouted and finned.
This does not matter. What's done
Has always been so.
I shall tell myself this, not believe
Like the others I know.
Leaving September
If I have once forgotten on this field
The long light of the dusk, or far away
The sheep on tawny grass, how stones will yield
Small bitter puffballs, or a cricket stay
To wring wry tunes from emptiness and dearth,
Let me remember; let me hold them now
Close to the heart -- while I upon the earth
Am the stone field and pain the heavy plow.
Not in wide measures is the harvest culled;
Not by disaster nor by cutting hail
Is the loss seen, the grief in somewise dulled --
Being done at last. Ours is a different scale --
Leaving September stars and a little smoke
And memory tight as a lichen to an oak.
Nocturne in Silver
Here where the barbed wire straggles in the marsh
And alkali crusts all the weeds like frost,
I have come home, I have come home to hear
The new young frogs that cry along the lost
Wild ditches where at midnight only cows
And fools with eery marsh fire in their brains
Blunder toward midnight. Silvery and clear
Cry the new frogs; the blood runs in my veins
Coldly and clearly. I am mottled, too,
And feel a silver bubble in my throat.
Lock doors, turn keys, or follow in your fear
My eyes are green, and warily afloat
In the June darkness. I am done with fire.
Water quicksilver-like that slips through stone
Has quenched my madness -- if you find me here
My lineage squat and warty will be known.
Winter Sign
A spider web pulled tight between two stones
With nothing left but autumn leaves to catch
Is maybe a winter sign, or the thin blue bones
Of a hare picked clean by ants. A man can attach
Meanings enough to the wind when his luck is out,
But, having stumbled into this season of grief,
I mean to reflect on the life that is here and about
In the fall of the leaves -- not on the dying leaf.
Something more tough, reliable, and stark
Carries the blood of life toward a farther spring--
Something that lies concealed in the soundless dark
Of burr and pod, in the seeds that hook and sting.
I have learned from these that love which endures the night
May smolder in outward death while the colors blaze,
But trust my love -- it is small, burr-coated, and tight.
It will stick to the bone. It will last through the autumn days.
October Has the Heart
Left to his ruin with the autumn leaf,
The spider, black and yellow, treading air
By means of gossamer, goes like a thief
Up, up, and up -- till from that trembling stair
He launches out for some far other vine
Where pumpkins lie like moons among the corn.
As through some old, some bitter-clear thin wine
The world lies still -- no green leaf hides the thorn.
October has the heart; no more dark things
Cry in the blood; the quick impatient storms
Are all gone past, and with them all high wings.
Clear in this autumn quiet something forms:
Something to last -- what Keats once bent to learn
Painted forever on a certain urn.
Dusk Interval
Here is the waste, the stone, the streaming sunset,
Where no clouds pass.
Here, where the hawk's dark wing goes lonely over
Sheep-bitten grass,
Green ice once crawled and plowed the meadow.
The boulders lie
As they were dropped in that tremendous plowing.
The crows cry
Clamorous above it in the twilit evening ...
They do not stoop.
The rich grain and the harvest are not found here.
Night hawks loop
Erratic spirals in the windy starlight.
The fallow ground
Is sleeping, and I know with what ghost sleeping,
Deep under sound.
Oh, not for long the grass, the bells of grasses:
The mice who love
Their hidden runways will soon pass. The boulders
Will lift and move.
This land is sleeping in a dream of mammoth.
Their heavy tread
Will sound again. Sometime their feet will shudder
The last man from his bed.
Let the Red Fox Run
Red-bellied let the red fox run
Under the raining leaf, and weather
And summer go beyond recall
My heart will strain no more at its tether
I will not be out in the sharp hill frost,
I will not be there when the fox goes over
A wall where the broken boulders spill
The shape of a farm back into the clover
I will not be running with all that runs
(Its torn breath streaking down the furrow).
I will take my ease while the hunt pounds by,
Safe at last in earth's darkest burrow.
But somewhere still in the brain's gray vault,
Where the light grows dim and the owls are crying,
I shall run with the fox through the leaf-strewn wood
I shall not be present at my own dying.
The Fishers
The trout stream is fished out and still;
The fishers with their flies have gone.
Nor upstream now, nor down the hill
Move any men with waders on.
The water keeps on coming down;
Still water running green and deep
Harbors a stealthy life where brown
Old leaves go sailing into sleep.
The fishers say the stream is bad.
No rainbow flash against the sun
Will make the souls of fishers glad,
But say for fishers I am one
And here, at least, can still be caught
The slippery minnows of a thought
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Re: Starthrower, by Loren Eiseley
by admin » Mon May 02, 2016 2:45 am
III. Science and Humanism
The Star Thrower
I
It has ever been my lot, though formally myself a teacher, to be taught surely by none. There are times when I have thought to read lessons in the sky, or in books, or from the behavior of my fellows, but in the end my perceptions have frequently been inadequate or betrayed. Nevertheless, I venture to say that of what man may be I have caught a fugitive glimpse, not among multitudes of men, but along an endless wave-beaten coast at dawn. As always, there is this apparent break, this rift in nature, before the insight comes. The terrible question has to translate itself into an even more terrifying freedom.
If there is any meaning to this book [The Unexpected Universe], it began on the beaches of Costabel with just such a leap across an unknown abyss. It began, if I may borrow the expression from a Buddhist sage, with the skull and the eye. I was the skull. I was the inhumanly stripped skeleton without voice, without hope, wandering alone upon the shores of the world. I was devoid of pity, because pity implies hope. There was, in this desiccated skull, only an eye like a pharos light, a beacon, a search beam revolving endlessly in sunless noonday or black night. Ideas like swarms of insects rose to the beam, but the light consumed them. Upon that shore meaning had ceased. There were only the dead skull and the revolving eye. With such an eye, some have said, science looks upon the world. I do not know. I know only that I was the skull of emptiness and the endlessly revolving light without pity.
Once, in a dingy restaurant in the town, I had heard a woman say: "My father reads a goose bone for the weather." A modern primitive, I had thought, a diviner, using a method older than Stonehenge, as old as the arctic forests.
"And where does he do that?" the woman's companion had asked amusedly.
"In Costabel," she answered complacently, "in Costabel." The voice came back and buzzed faintly for a moment in the dark under the revolving eye. It did not make sense, but nothing in Costabel made sense. Perhaps that was why I had finally found myself in Costabel. Perhaps all men are destined at some time to arrive there as I did.
I had come by quite ordinary means, but I was still the skull with the eye. I concealed myself beneath a fisherman's cap and sunglasses, so that I looked like everyone else on the beach. This is the way things are managed in Costabel. It is on the shore that the revolving eye begins its beam and the whispers rise in the empty darkness of the skull.
The beaches of Costabel are littered with the debris of life. Shells are cast up in windrows; a hermit crab, fumbling for a new home in the depths, is tossed naked ashore, where the waiting gulls cut him to pieces. Along the strip of wet sand that marks the ebbing and flowing of the tide, death walks hugely and in many forms. Even the torn fragments of green sponge yield bits of scrambling life striving to return to the great mother that has nourished and protected them.
In the end the sea rejects its offspring. They cannot fight their way home through the surf which casts them repeatedly back upon the shore. The tiny breathing pores of starfish are stuffed with sand. The rising sun shrivels the mucilaginous bodies of the unprotected. The seabeach and its endless war are soundless. Nothing screams but the gulls.
In the night, particularly in the tourist season, or during great storms, one can observe another vulturine activity. One can see, in the hour before dawn on the ebb tide, electric torches bobbing like fireflies along the beach. This is the sign of the professional shellers seeking to outrun and anticipate their less aggressive neighbors. A kind of greedy madness sweeps over the competing collectors. After a storm one can see them hurrying along with bundles of gathered starfish, or, toppling and overburdened, clutching bags of living shells whose hidden occupants will be slowly cooked and dissolved in the outdoor kettles provided by the resort hotels for the cleaning of specimens. Following one such episode I met the star thrower.
As soon as the ebb was flowing, as soon as I could make out in my sleeplessness the flashlights on the beach, I arose and dressed in the dark. As I came down the steps to the shore I could hear the deeper rumble of the surf. A gaping hole filled with churning sand had cut sharply into the breakwater. Flying sand as light as powder coated every exposed object like snow. I made my way around the altered edges of the cove and proceeded on my morning walk up the shore. Now and then a stooping figure moved in the gloom or a rain squall swept past me with light pattering steps. There was a faint sense of coming light somewhere behind me in the east.
Soon I began to make out objects, up-ended timbers, conch shells, sea wrack wrenched from the far-out kelp forests. A pink-clawed crab encased in a green cup of sponge lay sprawling where the waves had tossed him. Long-limbed starfish were strewn everywhere, as though the night sky had showered down. I paused once briefly. A small octopus, its beautiful dark-lensed eyes bleared with sand, gazed up at me from a ragged bundle of tentacles. I hesitated, and touched it briefly with my foot. It was dead. I paced on once more before the spreading whitecaps of the surf.
The shore grew steeper, the sound of the sea heavier and more menacing, as I rounded a bluff into the full blast of the offshore wind. I was away from the shellers now and strode more rapidly over the wet sand that effaced my footprints. Around the next point there might be a refuge from the wind. The sun behind me was pressing upward at the horizon's rim -- an ominous red glare amidst the tumbling blackness of the clouds. Ahead of me, over the projecting point, a gigantic rainbow of incredible perfection had sprung shimmering into existence. Somewhere toward its foot I discerned a human figure standing, as it seemed to me, within the rainbow, though unconscious of his position. He was gazing fixedly at something in the sand.
Eventually he stooped and flung the object beyond the breaking surf. I labored toward him over a half-mile of uncertain footing. By the time I reached him the rainbow had receded ahead of us, but something of its color still ran hastily in many changing lights across his features. He was starting to kneel again.
In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud.
"It's still alive," I ventured.
"Yes," he said, and with a quick yet gentle movement he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea. It sank in a burst of spume, and the waters roared once more.
"It may live," he said, "if the offshore pull is strong enough." He spoke gently, and across his bronzed worn face the light still came and went in subtly altering colors.
"There are not many come this far," I said, groping in a sudden embarrassment for words. "Do you collect?"
"Only like this," he said softly, gesturing amidst the wreckage of the shore. "And only for the living." He stooped again, oblivious of my curiosity, and skipped another star neatly across the water.
"The stars," he said, "throw well. One can help them."
He looked full at me with a faint question kindling in his eyes, which seemed to take on the far depths of the sea.
"I do not collect," I said uncomfortably, the wind beating at my garments. "Neither the living nor the dead. I gave it up a long time ago. Death is the only successful collector." I could feel the full night blackness in my skull and the terrible eye resuming its indifferent journey. I nodded and walked away, leaving him there upon the dune with that great rainbow ranging up the sky behind him.
I turned as I neared a bend in the coast and saw him toss another star, skimming it skillfully far out over the ravening and tumultuous water. For a moment, in the changing light, the sower appeared magnified, as though casting larger stars upon some greater sea. He had, at any rate, the posture of a god.
But again the eye, the cold world-shriveling eye, began its inevitable circling in my skull. He is a man, I considered sharply, bringing my thought to rest. The star thrower is a man, and death is running more fleet than he along every seabeach in the world.
I adjusted the dark lens of my glasses and, thus disguised, I paced slowly back by the starfish gatherers, past the shell collectors, with their vulgar little spades and the stick-length shelling pincers that eased their elderly backs while they snatched at treasures in the sand. I chose to look full at the steaming kettles in which beautiful voiceless things were being boiled alive. Behind my sunglasses a kind of litany began and refused to die down. "As I came through the desert thus it was, as I came through the desert."
In the darkness of my room I lay quiet with the sunglasses removed, but the eye turned and turned. In the desert, an old monk had once advised a traveler, the voices of God and the Devil are scarcely distinguishable. Costabel was a desert. I lay quiet, but my restless hand at the bedside fingered the edge of an invisible abyss. "Certain coasts" -- the remark of a perceptive writer came back to me --"are set apart for shipwreck." With unerring persistence I had made my way thither.
II
There is a difference in our human outlook, depending on whether we have been born on level plains, where one step reasonably leads to another, or whether, by contrast, we have spent our lives amidst glacial crevasses and precipitous descents. In the case of the mountaineer, one step does not always lead rationally to another save by a desperate leap over a chasm, or by an even more hesitant tiptoeing across precarious snow bridges.
Something about these opposed landscapes has its analogue in the mind of man. Our prehistoric life, one might say, began amidst enforested gloom with the abandonment of the protected instinctive life of nature. We sought, instead, an adventurous existence amidst the crater lands and ice fields of self-generated ideas. Clambering onward, we have slowly made our way out of a maze of isolated peaks into the level plains of science. Here, one step seems definitely to succeed another, the universe appears to take on an imposed order, and the illusions through which mankind has painfully made its way for many centuries have given place to the enormous vistas of past and future time. The encrusted eye in the stone speaks to us of undeviating sunlight; the calculated elliptic of Halley's comet no longer forecasts world disaster. The planet plunges on through a chill void of star years, and there is little or nothing that remains unmeasured.
Nothing, that is, but the mind of man. Since boyhood I had been traveling across the endless coordinated realms of science, just as, in the body, I was a plains dweller, accustomed to plodding through distances unbroken by precipices. Now that I come to look back, there was one contingent aspect of that landscape I inhabited whose significance, at the time, escaped me. "Twisters," we called them locally. They were a species of cyclonic, bouncing air funnel that could suddenly loom out of nowhere, crumpling windmills or slashing with devastating fury through country towns. Sometimes, by modest contrast, more harmless varieties known as dust devils might pursue one in a gentle spinning dance for miles. One could see them hesitantly stalking across the alkali flats on a hot day, debating, perhaps, in their tall, rotating columns, whether to ascend and assume more formidable shapes. They were the trickster part of an otherwise pedestrian landscape.
Infrequent though the visitations of these malign creations of the air might be, all prudent homesteaders in those parts had provided themselves with cyclone cellars. In the careless neighborhood in which I grew up, however, we contented ourselves with the queer yarns of cyclonic folklore and the vagaries of weather prophecy. As a boy, aroused by these tales and cherishing a subterranean fondness for caves, I once attempted to dig a storm cellar. Like most such projects this one was never completed. The trickster element in nature, I realize now, had so buffeted my parents that they stoically rejected planning. Unconsciously, they had arrived at the philosophy that foresight merely invited the attention of some baleful intelligence that despised and persecuted the calculating planner. It was not until many years later that I came to realize that a kind of maleficent primordial power persists in the mind as well as in the wandering dust storms of the exterior world.
A hidden dualism that has haunted man since antiquity runs across his religious conceptions as the conflict between good and evil. It persists in the modern world of science under other guises. It becomes chaos versus form or antichaos. Form, since the rise of the evolutionary philosophy, has itself taken on an illusory quality. Our apparent shapes no longer have the stability of a single divine fiat. Instead, they waver and dissolve into the unexpected. We gaze backward into a contracting cone of life until words leave us and all we know is dissolved into the simple circuits of a reptilian brain. Finally, sentience subsides into an animalcule.
Or we revolt and refuse to look deeper, but the void remains. We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight -- the light of our particular day. In a fortnight, as aeons are measured, we may lie silent in a bed of stone, or, as has happened in the past, be figured in another guise. Two forces struggle perpetually in our bodies: Yam, the old sea dragon of the original Biblical darkness, and, arrayed against him, some wisp of dancing light that would have us linger, wistful, in our human form. "Tarry thou, till I come again" -- an old legend survives among us of the admonition given by Jesus to the Wandering Jew. The words are applicable to all of us. Deep-hidden in the human psyche there is a similar injunction, no longer having to do with the longevity of the body but, rather, a plea to wait upon some transcendent lesson preparing in the mind itself.
Yet the facts we face seem terrifyingly arrayed against us. It is as if at our backs, masked and demonic, moved the trickster as I have seen his role performed among the remnant of a savage people long ago. It was that of the jokester present at the most devout of ceremonies. This creature never laughed; he never made a sound. Painted in black, he followed silently behind the officiating priest, mimicking, with the added flourish of a little whip, the gestures of the devout one. His timed and stylized posturings conveyed a derision infinitely more formidable than actual laughter.
In modern terms, the dance of contingency, of the indeterminable, outwits us all. The approaching fateful whirlwind on the plain had mercifully passed me by in youth. In the moment when I witnessed that fireside performance I knew with surety that primitive man had lived with a dark message. He had acquiesced in the admission into his village of a cosmic messenger. Perhaps the primitives were wiser in the ways of the trickster universe than ourselves; perhaps they knew, as we do not, how to ground or make endurable the lightning.
At all events, I had learned, as I watched that half-understood drama by the leaping fire, why man, even modern man, reads goose bones for the weather of his soul. Afterward I had gone out, a troubled unbeliever, into the night. There was a shadow I could not henceforth shake off, which I knew was posturing and would always posture behind me. That mocking shadow looms over me as I write. It scrawls with a derisive pen and an exaggerated flourish. I know instinctively it will be present to caricature the solemnities of my deathbed. In a quarter of a century it has never spoken.
Black magic, the magic of the primeval chaos, blots out or transmogrifies the true form of things. At the stroke of twelve the princess must flee the banquet or risk discovery in the rags of a kitchen wench; coach reverts to pumpkin. Instability lies at the heart of the world. With uncanny foresight folklore has long toyed symbolically with what the nineteenth century was to proclaim a reality -- namely, that form is an illusion of the time dimension, that the magic flight of the pursued hero or heroine through frogskin and wolf coat has been, and will continue to be, the flight of all men.
Goethe's genius sensed, well before the publication of the Origin of Species, the thesis and antithesis that epitomize the eternal struggle of the immediate species against its dissolution into something other: in modern terms, fish into reptile, ape into man. The power to change is both creative and destructive -- a sinister gift, which, unrestricted, leads onward toward the formless and inchoate void of the possible. This force can only be counterbalanced by an equal impulse toward specificity. Form, once arisen, clings to its identity. Each species and each individual holds tenaciously to its present nature. Each strives to contain the creative and abolishing maelstrom that pours unseen through the generations. The past vanishes; the present momentarily persists; the future is potential only. In this specious present of the real, life struggles to maintain every manifestation, every individuality, that exists. In the end, life always fails, but the amorphous hurrying stream is held and diverted into new organic vessels in which form persists, though the form may not be that of yesterday.
The evolutionists, piercing beneath the show of momentary stability, discovered, hidden in rudimentary organs, the discarded rubbish of the past. They detected the reptile under the lifted feathers of the bird, the lost terrestrial limbs dwindling beneath the blubber of the giant cetaceans. They saw life rushing outward from an unknown center, just as today the astronomer senses the galaxies fleeing into the infinity of darkness. As the spinning galactic clouds hurl stars and worlds across the night, so life, equally impelled by the centrifugal powers lurking in the germ cell, scatters the splintered radiance of consciousness and sends it prowling and contending through the thickets of the world.
All this devious, tattered way was exposed to the ceaselessly turning eye within the skull that lay hidden upon the bed in Costabel. Slowly that eye grew conscious of another eye that searched it with equal penetration from the shadows of the room. It may have been a projection from the mind within the skull, but the eye was, nevertheless, exteriorized and haunting. It began as something glaucous and blind beneath a web of clinging algae. It altered suddenly and became the sand-smeared eye of the dead cephalopod I had encountered upon the bead~. The transformations became more rapid with the concentration of my attention, and they became more formidable. There was the beaten, bloodshot eye of an animal from somewhere within my childhood experience. Finally, there was an eye that seemed tom from a photograph, but that looked through me as though it had already raced in vision up to the steep edge of nothingness and absorbed whatever terror lay in that abyss. I sank back again upon my cot and buried my head in the pillow. I knew the eye and the circumstance and the question. It was my mother. She was long dead, and the way backward was lost.
III
Now it may be asked, upon the coasts that invite shipwreck, why the ships should come, just as we may ask the man who pursues knowledge why he should be left with a revolving search beam in the head whose light falls only upon disaster or the flotsam of the shore. There is an answer, but its way is not across the level plains of science, for the science of remote abysses no longer shelters man. Instead, it reveals him in vaporous metamorphic succession as the homeless and unspecified one, the creature of the magic flight.
Long ago, when the future was just a simple tomorrow, men had cast intricately carved game counters to determine its course, or they had traced with a grimy finger the cracks on the burnt shoulder blade of a hare. It was a prophecy of tomorrow's hunt, just as was the old farmer's anachronistic reading of the weather from the signs on the breastbone of a goose. Such quaint almanacs of nature's intent had sufficed mankind since antiquity. They would do so no longer, nor would formal apologies to the souls of the game men hunted. The hunters had come, at last, beyond the satisfying supernatural world that had always surrounded the little village, into a place of homeless frontiers and precipitous edges, the indescribable world of the natural. Here tools increasingly revenged themselves upon their creators and tomorrow became unmanageable. Man had come in his journeying to a region of terrible freedoms.
It was a place of no traditional shelter, save those erected with the aid of tools, which had also begun to achieve a revolutionary independence from their masters. Their ways had grown secretive and incalculable. Science, more powerful than the magical questions that might be addressed by a shaman to a burnt shoulder blade, could create these tools but had not succeeded in controlling their ambivalent nature. Moreover, they responded all too readily to that urge for tampering and dissolution which is part of our primate heritage.
We had been safe in the enchanted forest only because of our weakness. When the powers of that gloomy region were given to us, immediately, as in a witch's house, things began to fly about unbidden. The tools, if not science itself, were linked intangibly to the subconscious poltergeist aspect of man's nature. The closer man and the natural world drew together, the more erratic became the behavior of each. Huge shadows leaped triumphantly after every blinding illumination. It was a magnified but clearly recognizable version of the black trickster's antics behind the solemn backs of the priesthood. Here, there was one difference. The shadows had passed out of all human semblance; no societal ritual safely contained their posturings, as in the warning dance of the trickster. Instead, unseen by many because it was so gigantically real, the multiplied darkness threatened to submerge the carriers of the light.
Darwin, Einstein, and Freud might be said to have released the shadows. Yet man had already entered the perilous domain that henceforth would contain his destiny. Four hundred years ago Francis Bacon had already anticipated its dual nature. The individuals do not matter. If they had not made their discoveries, others would have surely done so. They were good men, and they came as enlighteners of mankind. The tragedy was only that at their backs the ritual figure with the whip was invisible. There was no longer anything to subdue the pride of man. The world had been laid under the heavy spell of the natural; henceforth, it would be ordered by man.
Humanity was suddenly entranced by light and fancied it reflected light. Progress was its watchword, and for a time the shadows seemed to recede. Only a few guessed that the retreat of darkness presaged the emergence of an entirely new and less tangible terror. Things, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, were to grow incalculable by being calculated. Man's powers were finite; the forces he had released in nature recognized no such limitations. They were the irrevocable monsters conjured up by a completely amateur sorcerer.
But what, we may ask, was the nature of the first discoveries that now threaten to induce disaster? Pre-eminent among them was, of course, the perception to which we have already referred: the discovery of the interlinked and evolving web of life. The great Victorian biologists saw, and yet refused to see, the war between form and formlessness, chaos and antichaos, which the poet Goethe had sensed contesting beneath the smiling surface of nature. "The dangerous gift from above," he had termed it, with uneasy foresight.
By contrast, Darwin, the prime student of the struggle for existence, sought to visualize in a tangled bank of leaves the silent and insatiable war of nature. Still, he could imply with a veiled complacency that man might "with some confidence" look forward to a secure future "of inappreciable length." This he could do upon the same page in the Origin of Species where he observes that "of the species now living very few will transmit progeny to a far distant futurity." The contradiction escaped him; he did not wish to see it. Darwin, in addition, saw life as a purely selfish struggle, in which nothing is modified for the good of another species without being directly advantageous to its associated form.
If, he contended, one part of any single species had been formed for the exclusive good of another, "it would annihilate my theory." Powerfully documented and enhanced though the statement has become, famine, war, and death are not the sole instruments biologists today would accept as the means toward that perfection of which Darwin spoke. The subject is subtle and intricate; let it suffice to say here that the sign of the dark cave and the club became so firmly fixed in human thinking that in our time it has been invoked as signifying man's true image in books selling in the hundreds of thousands.
From the thesis and antithesis contained in Darwinism we come to Freud. The public knows that, like Darwin, the master of the inner world took the secure, stable, and sunlit province of the mind and revealed it as a place of contending furies. Ghostly transformations, flitting night shadows, misshapen changelings existed there, as real as anything that haunted the natural universe of Darwin. For this reason, appropriately, I had come as the skull and the eye to Costabel -- the coast demanding shipwreck. Why else had I remembered the phrase, except for a dark impulse toward destruction lurking somewhere in the subconscious? I lay on the bed while the agonized eye in the remembered photograph persisted at the back of my closed lids.
It had begun when, after years of separation, I had gone dutifully home to a house from which the final occupant had departed. In a musty attic -- among old trunks, a broken aquarium, and a dusty heap of fossil shells collected in childhood -- I found a satchel. The satchel was already a shabby antique, in whose depths I turned up a jackknife and a "rat" of hair such as women wore at the beginning of the century. Beneath these lay a pile of old photographs and a note -- two notes, rather, evidently dropped into the bag at different times. Each, in a thin, ornate hand, reiterated a single message that the writer had believed important. "This satchel belongs to my son, Loren Eiseley." It was the last message. I recognized the trivia. The jackknife I had carried in childhood. The rat of hair had belonged to my mother, and there were also two incredibly pointed slippers that looked as though they had been intended for a formal ball, to which I knew well my mother would never in her life have been invited. I undid the rotted string around the studio portraits.
Mostly they consisted of stiff, upright bearded men and heavily clothed women equally bound to the formalities and ritual that attended upon the photography of an earlier generation. No names identified the pictures, although here and there a reminiscent family trait seemed faintly evident. Finally I came upon a less formal photograph, taken in the eighties of the last century. Again no names identified the people, but a commercial stamp upon the back identified the place: Dyersville, Iowa. I had never been in that country town, but I knew at once it was my mother's birthplace.
Dyersville, the thought flashed through my mind, making the connection now for the first time: the dire place. I recognized at once the two sisters at the edge of the photograph, the younger clinging reluctantly to the older. Six years old, I thought, turning momentarily away from the younger child's face. Here it began, her pain and mine. The eyes in the photograph were already remote and shadowed by some inner turmoil. The poise of the body was already that of one miserably departing the peripheries of the human estate. The gaze was mutely clairvoyant and lonely. It was the gaze of a child who knew unbearable difference and impending isolation.
I dropped the notes and pictures once more into the bag. The last message had come from Dyersville: "my son." The child in the photograph had survived to be an ill-taught prairie artist. She had been deaf. All her life she had walked the precipice of mental breakdown. Here on this faded porch it had begun -- the long crucifixion of life. I slipped downstairs and out of the house. I walked for miles through the streets.
Now at Costabel I put on the sunglasses once more, but the face from the torn photograph persisted behind them. It was as though I, as man, was being asked to confront, in all its overbearing weight, the universe itself. "Love not the world," the Biblical injunction runs, "neither the things that are in the world." The revolving beam in my mind had stopped, and the insect whisperings of the intellect. There was, at last, an utter stillness, a waiting as though for a cosmic judgment. The eye, the torn eye, considered me.
"But 1 do love the world," 1 whispered to a waiting presence in the empty room. "I love its small ones, the things beaten in the strangling surf, the bird, singing, which flies and falls and is not seen again." 1 choked and said, with the torn eye still upon me, "I love the lost ones, the failures of the world." It was like the renunciation of my scientific heritage. The torn eye surveyed me sadly and was gone. 1 had come full upon one of the last great rifts in nature, and the merciless beam no longer was in traverse around my skull.
But no, it was not a rift but a joining: the expression of love projected beyond the species boundary by a creature born of Darwinian struggle, in the silent war under the tangled bank. "There is no boon in nature," one of the new philosophers had written harshly in the first years of the industrial cities. Nevertheless, through war and famine and death, a sparse mercy had persisted, like a mutation whose time had not yet come. I had seen the star thrower cross that rift and, in so doing, he had reasserted the human right to define his own frontier. He had moved to the utmost edge of natural being, if not across its boundaries. It was as though at some point the supernatural had touched hesitantly, for an instant, upon the natural.
Out of the depths of a seemingly empty universe had grown an eye, like the eye in my room, but an eye on a vastly larger scale. It looked out upon what I can only call itself. It searched the skies and it searched the depths of being. In the shape of man it had ascended like a vaporous emanation from the depths of night. The nothing had miraculously gazed upon the nothing and was not content. It was an intrusion into, or a projection out of, nature for which no precedent existed. The act was, in short, an assertion of value arisen from the domain of absolute zero. A little whirlwind of commingling molecules had succeeded in confronting its own universe.
Here, at last, was the rift that lay beyond Darwin's tangled bank. For a creature, arisen from that bank and born of its contentions, had stretched out its hand in pity. Some ancient, inexhaustible, and patient intelligence, lying dispersed in the planetary fields of force or amidst the inconceivable cold of interstellar space, had chosen to endow its desolation with an apparition as mysterious as itself. The fate of man is to be the ever-recurrent, reproachful Eye floating upon night and solitude. The world cannot be said to exist save by the interposition of that inward eye -- an eye various and not under the restraints to be apprehended from what is vulgarly called the natural.
I had been unbelieving. I had walked away from the star thrower in the hardened indifference of maturity. But thought mediated by the eye is one of nature's infinite disguises. Belatedly, I arose with a solitary mission. I set forth in an effort to find the star thrower.
IV
Man is himself, like the universe he inhabits, like the demoniacal stirrings of the ooze from which he sprang, a tale of desolations. He walks in his mind from birth to death the long resounding shores of endless disillusionment. Finally, the commitment to life departs or turns to bitterness. But out of such desolation emerges the awesome freedom to choose -- to choose beyond the narrowly circumscribed circle that delimits the animal being. In that widening ring of human choice, chaos and order renew their symbolic struggle in the role of titans. They contend for the destiny of a world.
Somewhere far up the coast wandered the star thrower beneath his rainbow. Our exchange had been brief because upon that coast I had learned that men who ventured out at dawn resented others in the greediness of their compulsive collecting. I had also been abrupt because I had, in the terms of my profession and experience, nothing to say. The star thrower was mad, and his particular acts were a folly with which I had not chosen to associate myself. I was an observer and a scientist. Nevertheless, I had seen the rainbow attempting to attach itself to earth.
On a point of land, as though projecting into a domain beyond us, I found the star thrower. In the sweet rain-swept morning, that great many-hued rainbow still lurked and wavered tentatively beyond him. Silently I sought and picked up a still-living star, spinning it far out into the waves. I spoke once briefly. "I understand," I said. "Call me another thrower." Only then I allowed myself to think, He is not alone any longer. After us there will be others.
We were part of the rainbow -- an unexplained projection into the natural. As I went down the beach I could feel the drawing of a circle in men's minds, like that lowering, shifting realm of color in which the thrower labored. It was a visible model of something toward which man's mind had striven, the circle of perfection.
I picked and flung another star. Perhaps far outward on the rim of space a genuine star was similarly seized and flung. I could feel the movement in my body. It was like a sowing -- the sowing of life on an infinitely gigantic scale. I looked back across my shoulder. Small and dark against the receding rainbow, the star thrower stooped and flung once more. I never looked again. The task we had assumed was too immense for gazing. I flung and flung again while all about us roared the insatiable waters of death.
But we, pale and alone and small in that immensity, hurled back the living stars. Somewhere far off, across bottomless abysses, I felt as though another world was flung more joyfully. I could have thrown in a frenzy of joy, but I set my shoulders and cast, as the thrower in the rainbow cast, slowly, deliberately, and well. The task was not to be assumed lightly, for it was men as well as starfish that we sought to save. For a moment, we cast on an infinite beach together beside an unknown hurler of suns. It was, unsought, the destiny of my kind since the rituals of the Ice Age hunters, when life in the Northern Hemisphere had come close to vanishing. We had lost our way, I thought, but we had kept, some of us, the memory of the perfect circle of compassion from life to death and back again to life -- the completion of the rainbow of existence. Even the hunters in the snow, making obeisance to the souls of the hunted, had known the cycle. The legend had come down and lingered that he who gained the gratitude of animals gained help in need from the dark wood.
I cast again with an increasingly remembered sowing motion and went my lone way up the beaches. Somewhere, I felt, in a great atavistic surge of feeling, somewhere the Thrower knew. Perhaps he smiled and cast once more into the boundless pit of darkness. Perhaps he, too, was lonely, and the end toward which he labored remained hidden -- even as with ourselves.
I picked up a star whose tube feet ventured timidly among my fingers while, like a true star, it cried soundlessly for life. I saw it with an unaccustomed clarity and cast far out. With it, I flung myself as forfeit, for the first time, into some unknown dimension of existence. From Darwin's tangled bank of unceasing struggle, selfishness, and death, had arisen, incomprehensibly, the thrower who loved not man, but life. It was the subtle cleft in nature before which biological thinking had faltered. We had reached the last shore of an invisible island -- yet, strangely, also a shore that the primitives had always known. They had sensed intuitively that man cannot exist spiritually without life, his brother, even if he slays. Somewhere, my thought persisted, there is a hurler of stars, and he walks, because he chooses, always in desolation, but not in defeat.
In the night the gas flames under the shelling kettles would continue to glow. I set my clock accordingly. Tomorrow I would walk in the storm. I would walk against the shell collectors and the flames. I would walk remembering Bacon's forgotten words "for the uses of life." I would walk with the knowledge of the discontinuities of the unexpected universe. I would walk knowing of the rift revealed by the thrower, a hint that there looms, inexplicably, in nature something above the role men give her. I knew it from the man at the foot of the rainbow, the starfish thrower on the beaches of Costabel.
The Star Thrower
Who is the man walking in the Way? An eye glaring in the skull.
-- Seccho
I
It has ever been my lot, though formally myself a teacher, to be taught surely by none. There are times when I have thought to read lessons in the sky, or in books, or from the behavior of my fellows, but in the end my perceptions have frequently been inadequate or betrayed. Nevertheless, I venture to say that of what man may be I have caught a fugitive glimpse, not among multitudes of men, but along an endless wave-beaten coast at dawn. As always, there is this apparent break, this rift in nature, before the insight comes. The terrible question has to translate itself into an even more terrifying freedom.
If there is any meaning to this book [The Unexpected Universe], it began on the beaches of Costabel with just such a leap across an unknown abyss. It began, if I may borrow the expression from a Buddhist sage, with the skull and the eye. I was the skull. I was the inhumanly stripped skeleton without voice, without hope, wandering alone upon the shores of the world. I was devoid of pity, because pity implies hope. There was, in this desiccated skull, only an eye like a pharos light, a beacon, a search beam revolving endlessly in sunless noonday or black night. Ideas like swarms of insects rose to the beam, but the light consumed them. Upon that shore meaning had ceased. There were only the dead skull and the revolving eye. With such an eye, some have said, science looks upon the world. I do not know. I know only that I was the skull of emptiness and the endlessly revolving light without pity.
Once, in a dingy restaurant in the town, I had heard a woman say: "My father reads a goose bone for the weather." A modern primitive, I had thought, a diviner, using a method older than Stonehenge, as old as the arctic forests.
"And where does he do that?" the woman's companion had asked amusedly.
"In Costabel," she answered complacently, "in Costabel." The voice came back and buzzed faintly for a moment in the dark under the revolving eye. It did not make sense, but nothing in Costabel made sense. Perhaps that was why I had finally found myself in Costabel. Perhaps all men are destined at some time to arrive there as I did.
I had come by quite ordinary means, but I was still the skull with the eye. I concealed myself beneath a fisherman's cap and sunglasses, so that I looked like everyone else on the beach. This is the way things are managed in Costabel. It is on the shore that the revolving eye begins its beam and the whispers rise in the empty darkness of the skull.
The beaches of Costabel are littered with the debris of life. Shells are cast up in windrows; a hermit crab, fumbling for a new home in the depths, is tossed naked ashore, where the waiting gulls cut him to pieces. Along the strip of wet sand that marks the ebbing and flowing of the tide, death walks hugely and in many forms. Even the torn fragments of green sponge yield bits of scrambling life striving to return to the great mother that has nourished and protected them.
In the end the sea rejects its offspring. They cannot fight their way home through the surf which casts them repeatedly back upon the shore. The tiny breathing pores of starfish are stuffed with sand. The rising sun shrivels the mucilaginous bodies of the unprotected. The seabeach and its endless war are soundless. Nothing screams but the gulls.
In the night, particularly in the tourist season, or during great storms, one can observe another vulturine activity. One can see, in the hour before dawn on the ebb tide, electric torches bobbing like fireflies along the beach. This is the sign of the professional shellers seeking to outrun and anticipate their less aggressive neighbors. A kind of greedy madness sweeps over the competing collectors. After a storm one can see them hurrying along with bundles of gathered starfish, or, toppling and overburdened, clutching bags of living shells whose hidden occupants will be slowly cooked and dissolved in the outdoor kettles provided by the resort hotels for the cleaning of specimens. Following one such episode I met the star thrower.
As soon as the ebb was flowing, as soon as I could make out in my sleeplessness the flashlights on the beach, I arose and dressed in the dark. As I came down the steps to the shore I could hear the deeper rumble of the surf. A gaping hole filled with churning sand had cut sharply into the breakwater. Flying sand as light as powder coated every exposed object like snow. I made my way around the altered edges of the cove and proceeded on my morning walk up the shore. Now and then a stooping figure moved in the gloom or a rain squall swept past me with light pattering steps. There was a faint sense of coming light somewhere behind me in the east.
Soon I began to make out objects, up-ended timbers, conch shells, sea wrack wrenched from the far-out kelp forests. A pink-clawed crab encased in a green cup of sponge lay sprawling where the waves had tossed him. Long-limbed starfish were strewn everywhere, as though the night sky had showered down. I paused once briefly. A small octopus, its beautiful dark-lensed eyes bleared with sand, gazed up at me from a ragged bundle of tentacles. I hesitated, and touched it briefly with my foot. It was dead. I paced on once more before the spreading whitecaps of the surf.
The shore grew steeper, the sound of the sea heavier and more menacing, as I rounded a bluff into the full blast of the offshore wind. I was away from the shellers now and strode more rapidly over the wet sand that effaced my footprints. Around the next point there might be a refuge from the wind. The sun behind me was pressing upward at the horizon's rim -- an ominous red glare amidst the tumbling blackness of the clouds. Ahead of me, over the projecting point, a gigantic rainbow of incredible perfection had sprung shimmering into existence. Somewhere toward its foot I discerned a human figure standing, as it seemed to me, within the rainbow, though unconscious of his position. He was gazing fixedly at something in the sand.
Eventually he stooped and flung the object beyond the breaking surf. I labored toward him over a half-mile of uncertain footing. By the time I reached him the rainbow had receded ahead of us, but something of its color still ran hastily in many changing lights across his features. He was starting to kneel again.
In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud.
"It's still alive," I ventured.
"Yes," he said, and with a quick yet gentle movement he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea. It sank in a burst of spume, and the waters roared once more.
"It may live," he said, "if the offshore pull is strong enough." He spoke gently, and across his bronzed worn face the light still came and went in subtly altering colors.
"There are not many come this far," I said, groping in a sudden embarrassment for words. "Do you collect?"
"Only like this," he said softly, gesturing amidst the wreckage of the shore. "And only for the living." He stooped again, oblivious of my curiosity, and skipped another star neatly across the water.
"The stars," he said, "throw well. One can help them."
He looked full at me with a faint question kindling in his eyes, which seemed to take on the far depths of the sea.
"I do not collect," I said uncomfortably, the wind beating at my garments. "Neither the living nor the dead. I gave it up a long time ago. Death is the only successful collector." I could feel the full night blackness in my skull and the terrible eye resuming its indifferent journey. I nodded and walked away, leaving him there upon the dune with that great rainbow ranging up the sky behind him.
I turned as I neared a bend in the coast and saw him toss another star, skimming it skillfully far out over the ravening and tumultuous water. For a moment, in the changing light, the sower appeared magnified, as though casting larger stars upon some greater sea. He had, at any rate, the posture of a god.
But again the eye, the cold world-shriveling eye, began its inevitable circling in my skull. He is a man, I considered sharply, bringing my thought to rest. The star thrower is a man, and death is running more fleet than he along every seabeach in the world.
I adjusted the dark lens of my glasses and, thus disguised, I paced slowly back by the starfish gatherers, past the shell collectors, with their vulgar little spades and the stick-length shelling pincers that eased their elderly backs while they snatched at treasures in the sand. I chose to look full at the steaming kettles in which beautiful voiceless things were being boiled alive. Behind my sunglasses a kind of litany began and refused to die down. "As I came through the desert thus it was, as I came through the desert."
In the darkness of my room I lay quiet with the sunglasses removed, but the eye turned and turned. In the desert, an old monk had once advised a traveler, the voices of God and the Devil are scarcely distinguishable. Costabel was a desert. I lay quiet, but my restless hand at the bedside fingered the edge of an invisible abyss. "Certain coasts" -- the remark of a perceptive writer came back to me --"are set apart for shipwreck." With unerring persistence I had made my way thither.
II
There is a difference in our human outlook, depending on whether we have been born on level plains, where one step reasonably leads to another, or whether, by contrast, we have spent our lives amidst glacial crevasses and precipitous descents. In the case of the mountaineer, one step does not always lead rationally to another save by a desperate leap over a chasm, or by an even more hesitant tiptoeing across precarious snow bridges.
Something about these opposed landscapes has its analogue in the mind of man. Our prehistoric life, one might say, began amidst enforested gloom with the abandonment of the protected instinctive life of nature. We sought, instead, an adventurous existence amidst the crater lands and ice fields of self-generated ideas. Clambering onward, we have slowly made our way out of a maze of isolated peaks into the level plains of science. Here, one step seems definitely to succeed another, the universe appears to take on an imposed order, and the illusions through which mankind has painfully made its way for many centuries have given place to the enormous vistas of past and future time. The encrusted eye in the stone speaks to us of undeviating sunlight; the calculated elliptic of Halley's comet no longer forecasts world disaster. The planet plunges on through a chill void of star years, and there is little or nothing that remains unmeasured.
Nothing, that is, but the mind of man. Since boyhood I had been traveling across the endless coordinated realms of science, just as, in the body, I was a plains dweller, accustomed to plodding through distances unbroken by precipices. Now that I come to look back, there was one contingent aspect of that landscape I inhabited whose significance, at the time, escaped me. "Twisters," we called them locally. They were a species of cyclonic, bouncing air funnel that could suddenly loom out of nowhere, crumpling windmills or slashing with devastating fury through country towns. Sometimes, by modest contrast, more harmless varieties known as dust devils might pursue one in a gentle spinning dance for miles. One could see them hesitantly stalking across the alkali flats on a hot day, debating, perhaps, in their tall, rotating columns, whether to ascend and assume more formidable shapes. They were the trickster part of an otherwise pedestrian landscape.
Infrequent though the visitations of these malign creations of the air might be, all prudent homesteaders in those parts had provided themselves with cyclone cellars. In the careless neighborhood in which I grew up, however, we contented ourselves with the queer yarns of cyclonic folklore and the vagaries of weather prophecy. As a boy, aroused by these tales and cherishing a subterranean fondness for caves, I once attempted to dig a storm cellar. Like most such projects this one was never completed. The trickster element in nature, I realize now, had so buffeted my parents that they stoically rejected planning. Unconsciously, they had arrived at the philosophy that foresight merely invited the attention of some baleful intelligence that despised and persecuted the calculating planner. It was not until many years later that I came to realize that a kind of maleficent primordial power persists in the mind as well as in the wandering dust storms of the exterior world.
A hidden dualism that has haunted man since antiquity runs across his religious conceptions as the conflict between good and evil. It persists in the modern world of science under other guises. It becomes chaos versus form or antichaos. Form, since the rise of the evolutionary philosophy, has itself taken on an illusory quality. Our apparent shapes no longer have the stability of a single divine fiat. Instead, they waver and dissolve into the unexpected. We gaze backward into a contracting cone of life until words leave us and all we know is dissolved into the simple circuits of a reptilian brain. Finally, sentience subsides into an animalcule.
Or we revolt and refuse to look deeper, but the void remains. We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight -- the light of our particular day. In a fortnight, as aeons are measured, we may lie silent in a bed of stone, or, as has happened in the past, be figured in another guise. Two forces struggle perpetually in our bodies: Yam, the old sea dragon of the original Biblical darkness, and, arrayed against him, some wisp of dancing light that would have us linger, wistful, in our human form. "Tarry thou, till I come again" -- an old legend survives among us of the admonition given by Jesus to the Wandering Jew. The words are applicable to all of us. Deep-hidden in the human psyche there is a similar injunction, no longer having to do with the longevity of the body but, rather, a plea to wait upon some transcendent lesson preparing in the mind itself.
Yet the facts we face seem terrifyingly arrayed against us. It is as if at our backs, masked and demonic, moved the trickster as I have seen his role performed among the remnant of a savage people long ago. It was that of the jokester present at the most devout of ceremonies. This creature never laughed; he never made a sound. Painted in black, he followed silently behind the officiating priest, mimicking, with the added flourish of a little whip, the gestures of the devout one. His timed and stylized posturings conveyed a derision infinitely more formidable than actual laughter.
In modern terms, the dance of contingency, of the indeterminable, outwits us all. The approaching fateful whirlwind on the plain had mercifully passed me by in youth. In the moment when I witnessed that fireside performance I knew with surety that primitive man had lived with a dark message. He had acquiesced in the admission into his village of a cosmic messenger. Perhaps the primitives were wiser in the ways of the trickster universe than ourselves; perhaps they knew, as we do not, how to ground or make endurable the lightning.
At all events, I had learned, as I watched that half-understood drama by the leaping fire, why man, even modern man, reads goose bones for the weather of his soul. Afterward I had gone out, a troubled unbeliever, into the night. There was a shadow I could not henceforth shake off, which I knew was posturing and would always posture behind me. That mocking shadow looms over me as I write. It scrawls with a derisive pen and an exaggerated flourish. I know instinctively it will be present to caricature the solemnities of my deathbed. In a quarter of a century it has never spoken.
Black magic, the magic of the primeval chaos, blots out or transmogrifies the true form of things. At the stroke of twelve the princess must flee the banquet or risk discovery in the rags of a kitchen wench; coach reverts to pumpkin. Instability lies at the heart of the world. With uncanny foresight folklore has long toyed symbolically with what the nineteenth century was to proclaim a reality -- namely, that form is an illusion of the time dimension, that the magic flight of the pursued hero or heroine through frogskin and wolf coat has been, and will continue to be, the flight of all men.
Goethe's genius sensed, well before the publication of the Origin of Species, the thesis and antithesis that epitomize the eternal struggle of the immediate species against its dissolution into something other: in modern terms, fish into reptile, ape into man. The power to change is both creative and destructive -- a sinister gift, which, unrestricted, leads onward toward the formless and inchoate void of the possible. This force can only be counterbalanced by an equal impulse toward specificity. Form, once arisen, clings to its identity. Each species and each individual holds tenaciously to its present nature. Each strives to contain the creative and abolishing maelstrom that pours unseen through the generations. The past vanishes; the present momentarily persists; the future is potential only. In this specious present of the real, life struggles to maintain every manifestation, every individuality, that exists. In the end, life always fails, but the amorphous hurrying stream is held and diverted into new organic vessels in which form persists, though the form may not be that of yesterday.
The evolutionists, piercing beneath the show of momentary stability, discovered, hidden in rudimentary organs, the discarded rubbish of the past. They detected the reptile under the lifted feathers of the bird, the lost terrestrial limbs dwindling beneath the blubber of the giant cetaceans. They saw life rushing outward from an unknown center, just as today the astronomer senses the galaxies fleeing into the infinity of darkness. As the spinning galactic clouds hurl stars and worlds across the night, so life, equally impelled by the centrifugal powers lurking in the germ cell, scatters the splintered radiance of consciousness and sends it prowling and contending through the thickets of the world.
All this devious, tattered way was exposed to the ceaselessly turning eye within the skull that lay hidden upon the bed in Costabel. Slowly that eye grew conscious of another eye that searched it with equal penetration from the shadows of the room. It may have been a projection from the mind within the skull, but the eye was, nevertheless, exteriorized and haunting. It began as something glaucous and blind beneath a web of clinging algae. It altered suddenly and became the sand-smeared eye of the dead cephalopod I had encountered upon the bead~. The transformations became more rapid with the concentration of my attention, and they became more formidable. There was the beaten, bloodshot eye of an animal from somewhere within my childhood experience. Finally, there was an eye that seemed tom from a photograph, but that looked through me as though it had already raced in vision up to the steep edge of nothingness and absorbed whatever terror lay in that abyss. I sank back again upon my cot and buried my head in the pillow. I knew the eye and the circumstance and the question. It was my mother. She was long dead, and the way backward was lost.
III
Now it may be asked, upon the coasts that invite shipwreck, why the ships should come, just as we may ask the man who pursues knowledge why he should be left with a revolving search beam in the head whose light falls only upon disaster or the flotsam of the shore. There is an answer, but its way is not across the level plains of science, for the science of remote abysses no longer shelters man. Instead, it reveals him in vaporous metamorphic succession as the homeless and unspecified one, the creature of the magic flight.
Long ago, when the future was just a simple tomorrow, men had cast intricately carved game counters to determine its course, or they had traced with a grimy finger the cracks on the burnt shoulder blade of a hare. It was a prophecy of tomorrow's hunt, just as was the old farmer's anachronistic reading of the weather from the signs on the breastbone of a goose. Such quaint almanacs of nature's intent had sufficed mankind since antiquity. They would do so no longer, nor would formal apologies to the souls of the game men hunted. The hunters had come, at last, beyond the satisfying supernatural world that had always surrounded the little village, into a place of homeless frontiers and precipitous edges, the indescribable world of the natural. Here tools increasingly revenged themselves upon their creators and tomorrow became unmanageable. Man had come in his journeying to a region of terrible freedoms.
It was a place of no traditional shelter, save those erected with the aid of tools, which had also begun to achieve a revolutionary independence from their masters. Their ways had grown secretive and incalculable. Science, more powerful than the magical questions that might be addressed by a shaman to a burnt shoulder blade, could create these tools but had not succeeded in controlling their ambivalent nature. Moreover, they responded all too readily to that urge for tampering and dissolution which is part of our primate heritage.
We had been safe in the enchanted forest only because of our weakness. When the powers of that gloomy region were given to us, immediately, as in a witch's house, things began to fly about unbidden. The tools, if not science itself, were linked intangibly to the subconscious poltergeist aspect of man's nature. The closer man and the natural world drew together, the more erratic became the behavior of each. Huge shadows leaped triumphantly after every blinding illumination. It was a magnified but clearly recognizable version of the black trickster's antics behind the solemn backs of the priesthood. Here, there was one difference. The shadows had passed out of all human semblance; no societal ritual safely contained their posturings, as in the warning dance of the trickster. Instead, unseen by many because it was so gigantically real, the multiplied darkness threatened to submerge the carriers of the light.
Darwin, Einstein, and Freud might be said to have released the shadows. Yet man had already entered the perilous domain that henceforth would contain his destiny. Four hundred years ago Francis Bacon had already anticipated its dual nature. The individuals do not matter. If they had not made their discoveries, others would have surely done so. They were good men, and they came as enlighteners of mankind. The tragedy was only that at their backs the ritual figure with the whip was invisible. There was no longer anything to subdue the pride of man. The world had been laid under the heavy spell of the natural; henceforth, it would be ordered by man.
Humanity was suddenly entranced by light and fancied it reflected light. Progress was its watchword, and for a time the shadows seemed to recede. Only a few guessed that the retreat of darkness presaged the emergence of an entirely new and less tangible terror. Things, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, were to grow incalculable by being calculated. Man's powers were finite; the forces he had released in nature recognized no such limitations. They were the irrevocable monsters conjured up by a completely amateur sorcerer.
But what, we may ask, was the nature of the first discoveries that now threaten to induce disaster? Pre-eminent among them was, of course, the perception to which we have already referred: the discovery of the interlinked and evolving web of life. The great Victorian biologists saw, and yet refused to see, the war between form and formlessness, chaos and antichaos, which the poet Goethe had sensed contesting beneath the smiling surface of nature. "The dangerous gift from above," he had termed it, with uneasy foresight.
By contrast, Darwin, the prime student of the struggle for existence, sought to visualize in a tangled bank of leaves the silent and insatiable war of nature. Still, he could imply with a veiled complacency that man might "with some confidence" look forward to a secure future "of inappreciable length." This he could do upon the same page in the Origin of Species where he observes that "of the species now living very few will transmit progeny to a far distant futurity." The contradiction escaped him; he did not wish to see it. Darwin, in addition, saw life as a purely selfish struggle, in which nothing is modified for the good of another species without being directly advantageous to its associated form.
If, he contended, one part of any single species had been formed for the exclusive good of another, "it would annihilate my theory." Powerfully documented and enhanced though the statement has become, famine, war, and death are not the sole instruments biologists today would accept as the means toward that perfection of which Darwin spoke. The subject is subtle and intricate; let it suffice to say here that the sign of the dark cave and the club became so firmly fixed in human thinking that in our time it has been invoked as signifying man's true image in books selling in the hundreds of thousands.
From the thesis and antithesis contained in Darwinism we come to Freud. The public knows that, like Darwin, the master of the inner world took the secure, stable, and sunlit province of the mind and revealed it as a place of contending furies. Ghostly transformations, flitting night shadows, misshapen changelings existed there, as real as anything that haunted the natural universe of Darwin. For this reason, appropriately, I had come as the skull and the eye to Costabel -- the coast demanding shipwreck. Why else had I remembered the phrase, except for a dark impulse toward destruction lurking somewhere in the subconscious? I lay on the bed while the agonized eye in the remembered photograph persisted at the back of my closed lids.
It had begun when, after years of separation, I had gone dutifully home to a house from which the final occupant had departed. In a musty attic -- among old trunks, a broken aquarium, and a dusty heap of fossil shells collected in childhood -- I found a satchel. The satchel was already a shabby antique, in whose depths I turned up a jackknife and a "rat" of hair such as women wore at the beginning of the century. Beneath these lay a pile of old photographs and a note -- two notes, rather, evidently dropped into the bag at different times. Each, in a thin, ornate hand, reiterated a single message that the writer had believed important. "This satchel belongs to my son, Loren Eiseley." It was the last message. I recognized the trivia. The jackknife I had carried in childhood. The rat of hair had belonged to my mother, and there were also two incredibly pointed slippers that looked as though they had been intended for a formal ball, to which I knew well my mother would never in her life have been invited. I undid the rotted string around the studio portraits.
Mostly they consisted of stiff, upright bearded men and heavily clothed women equally bound to the formalities and ritual that attended upon the photography of an earlier generation. No names identified the pictures, although here and there a reminiscent family trait seemed faintly evident. Finally I came upon a less formal photograph, taken in the eighties of the last century. Again no names identified the people, but a commercial stamp upon the back identified the place: Dyersville, Iowa. I had never been in that country town, but I knew at once it was my mother's birthplace.
Dyersville, the thought flashed through my mind, making the connection now for the first time: the dire place. I recognized at once the two sisters at the edge of the photograph, the younger clinging reluctantly to the older. Six years old, I thought, turning momentarily away from the younger child's face. Here it began, her pain and mine. The eyes in the photograph were already remote and shadowed by some inner turmoil. The poise of the body was already that of one miserably departing the peripheries of the human estate. The gaze was mutely clairvoyant and lonely. It was the gaze of a child who knew unbearable difference and impending isolation.
I dropped the notes and pictures once more into the bag. The last message had come from Dyersville: "my son." The child in the photograph had survived to be an ill-taught prairie artist. She had been deaf. All her life she had walked the precipice of mental breakdown. Here on this faded porch it had begun -- the long crucifixion of life. I slipped downstairs and out of the house. I walked for miles through the streets.
Now at Costabel I put on the sunglasses once more, but the face from the torn photograph persisted behind them. It was as though I, as man, was being asked to confront, in all its overbearing weight, the universe itself. "Love not the world," the Biblical injunction runs, "neither the things that are in the world." The revolving beam in my mind had stopped, and the insect whisperings of the intellect. There was, at last, an utter stillness, a waiting as though for a cosmic judgment. The eye, the torn eye, considered me.
"But 1 do love the world," 1 whispered to a waiting presence in the empty room. "I love its small ones, the things beaten in the strangling surf, the bird, singing, which flies and falls and is not seen again." 1 choked and said, with the torn eye still upon me, "I love the lost ones, the failures of the world." It was like the renunciation of my scientific heritage. The torn eye surveyed me sadly and was gone. 1 had come full upon one of the last great rifts in nature, and the merciless beam no longer was in traverse around my skull.
But no, it was not a rift but a joining: the expression of love projected beyond the species boundary by a creature born of Darwinian struggle, in the silent war under the tangled bank. "There is no boon in nature," one of the new philosophers had written harshly in the first years of the industrial cities. Nevertheless, through war and famine and death, a sparse mercy had persisted, like a mutation whose time had not yet come. I had seen the star thrower cross that rift and, in so doing, he had reasserted the human right to define his own frontier. He had moved to the utmost edge of natural being, if not across its boundaries. It was as though at some point the supernatural had touched hesitantly, for an instant, upon the natural.
Out of the depths of a seemingly empty universe had grown an eye, like the eye in my room, but an eye on a vastly larger scale. It looked out upon what I can only call itself. It searched the skies and it searched the depths of being. In the shape of man it had ascended like a vaporous emanation from the depths of night. The nothing had miraculously gazed upon the nothing and was not content. It was an intrusion into, or a projection out of, nature for which no precedent existed. The act was, in short, an assertion of value arisen from the domain of absolute zero. A little whirlwind of commingling molecules had succeeded in confronting its own universe.
Here, at last, was the rift that lay beyond Darwin's tangled bank. For a creature, arisen from that bank and born of its contentions, had stretched out its hand in pity. Some ancient, inexhaustible, and patient intelligence, lying dispersed in the planetary fields of force or amidst the inconceivable cold of interstellar space, had chosen to endow its desolation with an apparition as mysterious as itself. The fate of man is to be the ever-recurrent, reproachful Eye floating upon night and solitude. The world cannot be said to exist save by the interposition of that inward eye -- an eye various and not under the restraints to be apprehended from what is vulgarly called the natural.
I had been unbelieving. I had walked away from the star thrower in the hardened indifference of maturity. But thought mediated by the eye is one of nature's infinite disguises. Belatedly, I arose with a solitary mission. I set forth in an effort to find the star thrower.
IV
Man is himself, like the universe he inhabits, like the demoniacal stirrings of the ooze from which he sprang, a tale of desolations. He walks in his mind from birth to death the long resounding shores of endless disillusionment. Finally, the commitment to life departs or turns to bitterness. But out of such desolation emerges the awesome freedom to choose -- to choose beyond the narrowly circumscribed circle that delimits the animal being. In that widening ring of human choice, chaos and order renew their symbolic struggle in the role of titans. They contend for the destiny of a world.
Somewhere far up the coast wandered the star thrower beneath his rainbow. Our exchange had been brief because upon that coast I had learned that men who ventured out at dawn resented others in the greediness of their compulsive collecting. I had also been abrupt because I had, in the terms of my profession and experience, nothing to say. The star thrower was mad, and his particular acts were a folly with which I had not chosen to associate myself. I was an observer and a scientist. Nevertheless, I had seen the rainbow attempting to attach itself to earth.
On a point of land, as though projecting into a domain beyond us, I found the star thrower. In the sweet rain-swept morning, that great many-hued rainbow still lurked and wavered tentatively beyond him. Silently I sought and picked up a still-living star, spinning it far out into the waves. I spoke once briefly. "I understand," I said. "Call me another thrower." Only then I allowed myself to think, He is not alone any longer. After us there will be others.
We were part of the rainbow -- an unexplained projection into the natural. As I went down the beach I could feel the drawing of a circle in men's minds, like that lowering, shifting realm of color in which the thrower labored. It was a visible model of something toward which man's mind had striven, the circle of perfection.
I picked and flung another star. Perhaps far outward on the rim of space a genuine star was similarly seized and flung. I could feel the movement in my body. It was like a sowing -- the sowing of life on an infinitely gigantic scale. I looked back across my shoulder. Small and dark against the receding rainbow, the star thrower stooped and flung once more. I never looked again. The task we had assumed was too immense for gazing. I flung and flung again while all about us roared the insatiable waters of death.
But we, pale and alone and small in that immensity, hurled back the living stars. Somewhere far off, across bottomless abysses, I felt as though another world was flung more joyfully. I could have thrown in a frenzy of joy, but I set my shoulders and cast, as the thrower in the rainbow cast, slowly, deliberately, and well. The task was not to be assumed lightly, for it was men as well as starfish that we sought to save. For a moment, we cast on an infinite beach together beside an unknown hurler of suns. It was, unsought, the destiny of my kind since the rituals of the Ice Age hunters, when life in the Northern Hemisphere had come close to vanishing. We had lost our way, I thought, but we had kept, some of us, the memory of the perfect circle of compassion from life to death and back again to life -- the completion of the rainbow of existence. Even the hunters in the snow, making obeisance to the souls of the hunted, had known the cycle. The legend had come down and lingered that he who gained the gratitude of animals gained help in need from the dark wood.
I cast again with an increasingly remembered sowing motion and went my lone way up the beaches. Somewhere, I felt, in a great atavistic surge of feeling, somewhere the Thrower knew. Perhaps he smiled and cast once more into the boundless pit of darkness. Perhaps he, too, was lonely, and the end toward which he labored remained hidden -- even as with ourselves.
I picked up a star whose tube feet ventured timidly among my fingers while, like a true star, it cried soundlessly for life. I saw it with an unaccustomed clarity and cast far out. With it, I flung myself as forfeit, for the first time, into some unknown dimension of existence. From Darwin's tangled bank of unceasing struggle, selfishness, and death, had arisen, incomprehensibly, the thrower who loved not man, but life. It was the subtle cleft in nature before which biological thinking had faltered. We had reached the last shore of an invisible island -- yet, strangely, also a shore that the primitives had always known. They had sensed intuitively that man cannot exist spiritually without life, his brother, even if he slays. Somewhere, my thought persisted, there is a hurler of stars, and he walks, because he chooses, always in desolation, but not in defeat.
In the night the gas flames under the shelling kettles would continue to glow. I set my clock accordingly. Tomorrow I would walk in the storm. I would walk against the shell collectors and the flames. I would walk remembering Bacon's forgotten words "for the uses of life." I would walk with the knowledge of the discontinuities of the unexpected universe. I would walk knowing of the rift revealed by the thrower, a hint that there looms, inexplicably, in nature something above the role men give her. I knew it from the man at the foot of the rainbow, the starfish thrower on the beaches of Costabel.
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Re: Starthrower, by Loren Eiseley
by admin » Mon May 02, 2016 2:50 am
Science and the Sense of the Holy
I
When I was a young man engaged in fossil hunting in the Nebraska badlands I was frequently reminded that the ravines, washes, and gullies over which we wandered resembled the fissures in a giant exposed brain. The human brain contains the fossil memories of its past -- buried but not extinguished moments -- just as this more formidable replica contained deep in its inner stratigraphic convolutions earth's past in the shape of horned titanotheres and stalking, dirk-toothed cats. Man's memory erodes away in the short space of a lifetime. Jutting from the coils of the earth brain over which I clambered were the buried remnants, the changing history, of the entire age of mammals -- millions of years of vanished daylight with their accompanying traces of volcanic outbursts and upheavals. It may well be asked why this analogy of earth's memory should so preoccupy the mind of a scientist as to have affected his entire outlook upon nature and upon his kinship with -- even his concern for -- the plant and animal world about him.
Perhaps the problem can best be formulated by pointing out that there are two extreme approaches to the interpretation of the living world. One was expressed by Charles Darwin at the age of twenty-eight; one by Sigmund Freud in his mature years. Other men of science have been arrayed on opposite sides of the question, but the eminence of these two scholars will serve to point up a controversy that has been going on since science arose, sometimes quietly, sometimes marked by vitriolic behavior, as when a certain specialist wedded to his own view of the universe hurled his opponent's book into his wastebasket only to have it retrieved and cherished by a graduate student who became a lifelong advocate of the opinions reviled by his mentor. Thus it is evident that, in the supposed objective world of science, emotion and temperament may playa role in our selection of the mental tools with which we choose to investigate nature.
Charles Darwin, at a time when the majority of learned men looked upon animals as either automatons or creatures created merely for human exploitation, jotted thoughtfully into one of his early journals upon evolution the following observation:
"If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, suffering and famine -- our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements -- they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor -- we may be all netted together."
What, we may now inquire, is the world view here implied, one way in which a great scientist looked upon the subject matter that was to preoccupy his entire working life? In spite of the fact that Darwin was, in his later years, an agnostic, in spite of confessing he was "in thick mud" so far as metaphysics was concerned, the remark I have quoted gives every sign of that feeling of awe, of dread of the holy playing upon nature, which characterizes the work of a number of naturalists and physicists down even to the present day. Darwin's remark reveals an intuitive sensitivity to the life of other creatures about him, an attitude quite distinct from that of the laboratory experimentalist who is hardened to the infliction of pain. In addition, Darwin's final comment that we may be all netted together in one gigantic mode of experience, that we are in a mystic sense one single diffuse animal, subject to joy and suffering beyond what we endure as individuals, reveals a youth drawn to the world of nature by far more than just the curiosity to be readily satisfied by the knife or the scalpel.
If we turn to Sigmund Freud by way of contrast we find an oddly inhibited reaction. Freud, though obviously influenced by the elegant medical experimenters of his college days, groped his way alone, and by methods not subject to quantification or absolute verification, into the dark realms of the subconscious. His reaction to the natural world, or at least his feelings and intuitions about it, are basically cold, clinical, and reserved. He of all men recognized what one poet has termed "the terrible archaeology of the brain." Freud states that "nothing once constructed has perished, and all the earlier stages of development have survived alongside the latest." But for Freud, convinced that childhood made the man, adult reactions were apt to fall under the suspicion of being childhood ghosts raised up in a disguised fashion. Thus, insightful though he could be, the very nature of his study of man tended to generate distrust of that outgoing empathy we observed in the young Darwin. "I find it very difficult to work with these intangible qualities," confessed Freud. He was suspicious of their representing some lingering monster of childhood, even if reduced in size. Since Freud regarded any type of religious feeling -- even the illuminative quality of the universe -- as an illusion, feelings of awe before natural phenomena such as that manifested by Darwin were to him basically remnants of childhood and to be dismissed accordingly.
In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud speaks with slight condescension of a friend who claimed a sensation of eternity, something limitless, unbounded -- "oceanic," to use the friend's expression. The feeling had no sectarian origin, no assurance of immortality, but implied just such a sense of awe as might lie at the root of the religious impulse. "I cannot," maintained Freud, "discover this 'oceanic' impulse in myself." Instead he promptly psychoanalyzes the feeling of oneness with the universe into the child's pleasure ego which holds to itself all that is comforting; in short, the original ego, the infant's ego, included everything. Later, by experience, contended Freud, our adult ego becomes only a shrunken vestige of that far more extensive feeling which "expressed an inseparable connection ... with the external world."
In essence, then, Freud is explaining away one of the great feelings characteristic of the best in man by relegating it to a childhood atavistic survival in adult life. The most highly developed animals, he observes, have arisen from the lowest. Although the great saurians are gone, the dwarfed crocodile remains. Presumably if Freud had completed the analogy he would have been forced to say that crocodilian adults without awe and with egos shrunken safely into their petty concerns represented a higher, more practical evolutionary level than the aberrant adult who persists in feelings of wonder before which Freud recoiled with a nineteenth-century mechanist's distaste, although not without acknowledging that this lurking child· like corruption might be widespread. He chose to regard it, however, as just another manifestation of the irrational aspect of man's divided psyche.
Over six decades before the present, a German theologian, Rudolf Otto, had chosen for his examination what he termed The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige). Appearing in 1917 in a time of bitterness and disillusionment, his book was and is still widely read. It cut across denominational divisions and spoke to all those concerned with that mysterium tremendum, that very awe before the universe which Freud had sighed over and dismissed as irrational. I think it safe to affirm that Freud left adult man somewhat shrunken and misjudged -- misjudged because some of the world's scientists and artists have been deeply affected by the great mystery, less so the child at one's knee who frequently has to be disciplined to what in India has been called the "opening of the heavenly eye."
Ever since man first painted animals in the dark of caves he has been responding to the holy, to the numinous, to the mystery of being and becoming, to what Goethe very aptly called "the weird portentous." Something inexpressible was felt to lie behind nature. The bear cult, circumpolar in distribution and known archaeologically to extend into Neanderthal times, is a further and most ancient example. The widespread beliefs in descent from a totemic animal, guardian helpers in the shapes of animals, the concept of the game lords who released or held back game to man are all part of a variety of a sanctified, reverent experience that extends from the beautiful rock paintings of South Africa to the men of the Labradorean forests or the Plains Indian seeking by starvation and isolation to bring the sacred spirits to his assistance. All this is part of the human inheritance, the wonder of the world, and nowhere does that wonder press closer to us than in the guise of animals which, whether supernaturally as in the caves of our origins or, as in Darwin's sudden illumination, perceived to be, at heart, one form, one awe-inspiring mystery, seemingly diverse and apart but derived from the same genetic source. Thus the mysterium arose not by primitive campfires alone.
Skins may still prickle in a modern classroom.
In the end, science as we know it has two basic types of practitioners. One is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snail's eye or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ. The second kind of observer is the extreme reductionist who is so busy stripping things apart that the tremendous mystery has been reduced to a trifle, to intangibles not worth troubling one's head about. The world of the secondary qualities -- color, sound, thought -- is reduced to illusion. The only true reality becomes the chill void of ever-streaming particles.
If one is a biologist this approach can result in behavior so remarkably cruel that it ceases to be objective but rather suggests a deep grain of sadism that is not science. To list but one example, a recent newspaper article reported that a great urban museum of national reputation had spent over a half-million dollars on mutilating experiments with cats. The experiments are too revolting to chronicle here and the museum has not seen fit to enlighten the public on the knowledge gained at so frightful a cost in pain. The cost, it would appear, lies not alone in animal suffering but in the dehumanization of those willing to engage in such blind, random cruelty. The practice was defended by museum officials, who in a muted show of scientific defense maintained the right to study what they chose "without regard to its demonstrable practical value."
This is a scientific precept hard to override since the days of Galileo, as the official well knew. Nevertheless, behind its seamless facade of probity many terrible things are and will be done. Blaise Pascal, as far back as the seventeenth century, foresaw our two opposed methods. Of them he said: "There are two equally dangerous extremes, to shut reason out, and to let nothing else in." It is the reductionist who, too frequently, would claim that the end justifies the means, who would assert reason as his defense and let that mysterium which guards man's moral nature fall away in indifference, a phantom without reality.
"The whole of existence frightens me," protested the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard; "from the smallest fly to the mystery of the Incarnation, everything is unintelligible to me, most of all myself." By contrast, the evolutionary reductionist Ernst Haeckel, writing in 1877, commented that "the cell consists of matter ... composed chiefly of carbon with an admixture of hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur. These component parts, properly united, produce the soul and body of the animated world, and suitably nourished become man. With this single argument the mystery of the universe is explained, the Deity annulled and a new era of infinite knowledge ushered in." Since these remarks of Haeckel's, uttered a hundred years ago, the genetic alphabet has scarcely substantiated in its essential intricacy Haeckel's carefree dismissal of the complexity of life. If anything, it has given weight to Kierkegaard's wary statement or at least heightened the compassionate wonder with which we are led to look upon our kind.
"A conviction akin to religious feeling of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a high order," says Albert Einstein. Here once more the eternal dichotomy manifests itself. Thoreau, the man of literature, writes compassionately, "Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?" Or Walt Whitman, the poet, protests in his Song of Myself: "whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in a shroud."
"Magnifying and applying come I" -- he thunders --
"Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters ...
Not objecting to special revelations, considering a curl of smoke or a hair
on the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation."
Strange, is it not, that so many of these voices are not those of children, but those of great men -- Newton playing on the vast shores of the universe, or Whitman touched with pity or Darwin infused with wonder over the clambering tree of life. Strange, that all these many voices should be dismissed as the atavistic yearnings of an unreduced childlike ego seeking in "oceanic" fashion to absorb its entire surroundings, as though in revolt against the counting house, the laboratory, and the computer.
II
Not long ago in a Manhattan art gallery there were exhibited paintings by Irwin Fleminger, a modernist whose vast lawless Martianlike landscapes contain cryptic human artifacts. One of these paintings attracted my eye by its title: "Laws of Nature." Here in a jumbled desert waste without visible life two thin laths had been erected a little distance apart. Strung across the top of the laths was an insubstantial string with even more insubstantial filaments depending from the connecting cord. The effect was terrifying. In the huge inhuman universe that constituted the background, man, who was even more diminished by his absence, had attempted to delineate and bring under natural law an area too big for his comprehension. His effort, his "law," whatever it was, denoted a tiny measure in the midst of an ominous landscape looming away to the horizon. The frail slats and dangling string would not have sufficed to fence a chicken run.
The message grew as one looked. With all the great powers of the human intellect we were safe, we understood, in degree, a space between some slats and string, a little gate into the world of infinitude. The effect was crushing and it brought before one that sense of the "other" of which Rudolf Otto spoke, the sense beyond our senses, unspoken awe, or, as the reductionist would have it, nothing but waste. There the slats stood and the string drooped hopelessly. It was the natural law imposed by man, but outside its compass, again to use the words of Thoreau, was something terrific, not bound to be kind to man. Not man's at all really -- a star's substance totally indifferent to life or what laws life might concoct. No man would greatly extend that trifling toy. The line sagged hopelessly. Man's attempt had failed, leaving but an artifact in the wilderness. Perhaps, I thought, this is man's own measure. Perhaps he has already gone. The crepitation at my spine increased. I felt the mood of the paleolithic artists, lost in the mysteries of birth and corning, as they carved pregnant beasts in the dark of caves and tried by crayons to secure the food necessarily wrung from similar vast landscapes. Their art had the same holy quality that shows in the ivory figurines, the worship before the sacred mother who brought man mysteriously into the limited world of the cave mouth.
The numinous then is touched with superstition, the reductionist would say, but all the rituals suggest even toward hunted animals a respect and sympathy leading to ceremonial treatment of hunted souls; whereas by contrast in the modern world the degradation of animals in experiments of little, or vile, meaning, were easily turned to the experimental human torture practiced at Dachau and Buchenwald by men dignified with medical degrees. So the extremes of temperament stand today: the man with reverence and compassion in his heart whose eye ranges farther than the two slats in the wilderness, and the modern vandal totally lacking in empathy for life beyond his own, his sense of wonder reduced to a crushing series of gears and quantitative formula, the educated vandal without mercy or tolerance, the collecting man that I once tried to prevent from killing an endangered falcon, who raised his rifle, fired, and laughed as the bird tumbled at my feet. I suppose Freud might have argued that this was a man of normal ego, but I, extending my childlike mind into the composite life of the world, bled accordingly.
Perhaps Freud was right, but let us look once more at this brain that in many distinguished minds has agonized over life and the mysterious road by which it has come. Certainly, as Darwin recognized, it was not the tough-minded, logical inductionists of the early nineteenth century who in a deliberate distortion of Baconian philosophy solved the problem of evolution. Rather, it was what Darwin chose to call "speculative" men, men, in other words, with just a touch of the numinous in their eye, a sense of marvel, a glimpse of what was happening behind the visible, who saw the whole of the living world as though turning in a child's kaleidoscope.
Among the purely human marvels of the world is the way the human brain after birth, when its cranial capacity is scarcely larger than that of a gorilla or other big anthropoid, spurts onward to treble its size during the first year of life. The human infant's skull will soar to a cranial capacity of 950 cubic centimeters while the gorilla has reached only 380 cubic centimeters. In other words, ·the human brain grows at an exponential rate, a spurt which carries it almost to adult capacity at the age of fourteen.
This clever and specifically human adaptation enables the human offspring successfully to pass the birth canal like a reasonably small-headed animal, but in a more larval and helpless condition than its giant relatives. The brain burgeons after birth, not before, and it is this fact which enables the child, with proper care, to assimilate all that larger world which will be forever denied to its relative the gorilla. The big anthropoids enjoy no such expansion. Their brains grow without exponential quickening into maturity. Somewhere in the far past of man something strange happened in his evolutionary development. His skull has enhanced its youthful globularity; he has lost most of his body hair and what remains grows strangely. He demands, because of his immature emergence into the world, a lengthened and protected childhood. Without prolonged familial attendance he would not survive, yet in him reposes the capacity for great art, inventiveness, and his first mental tool, speech, which creates his humanity. He is without doubt the oddest and most unusual evolutionary product that this planet has yet seen.
The term applied to this condition is neoteny, or pedomorphism. Basically the evolutionary forces, and here "forces" stands for complete ignorance, seem to have taken a roughhewn ordinary primate and softened and eliminated the adult state in order to allow for a fantastic leap in brain growth. In fact, there is a growing suspicion that some, at least, of the African fossils found and ascribed to the direct line of human ascent in eastern Africa may never, except for bipedalism and some incipient tool-using capacities, have taken the human road at all.
Some with brains that seem to have remained at the same level through long ages have what amounts quantitatively to no more than an anthropoid brain. Allowing for upright posture and free use of the hand, there is no assurance that they spoke or in any effective way were more than well-adapted bipedal apes. Collateral relatives, in short, but scarcely to be termed men. All this is the more remarkable because their history can now be traced over roughly five if not six million years -- a singularly unprogressive period for a creature destined later to break upon the world with such remarkable results after so long a period of gestation.
Has something about our calculations gone wrong? Are we studying, however necessarily, some bipedal cousins but not ancestral men? The human phylogeny which we seemed well on the way to arranging satisfactorily is now confused by a multiplicity of material contended over by an almost equal number of scholars. Just as a superfluity of flying particles is embarrassing the physicist, so man's evolution, once thought to be so clearly delineated, is showing signs of similar strain. A skull from Lake Rudolf with an estimated capacity of 775 cubic centimeters or even 800 and an antiquity ranging into the three-million-year range is at the human Rubicon, yet much younger fossils are nowhere out of the anthropoid range.
Are these all parts of a single variable subhumanity from which we arose, or are some parts of this assemblage neotenous of brain and others not? The scientific exchanges are as stiff with politeness as exchanges between enemies on the floor of the Senate. "Professor so-and-so forgets the difficult task of restoring to its proper position a frontal bone trampled by cattle." A million years may be covertly jumped because there is nothing to be found in it. We must never lose sight of one fact, however: it is by neotenous brain growth that we came to be men, and certain of the South African hominids to which we have given such careful attention seem to have been remarkably slow in revealing such development. Some of them, in fact, during more years than present mankind has been alive seem to have flourished quite well as simple grassland apes.
Why indeed should they all have become men? Because they occupied the same ecological niche, contend those who would lump this variable assemblage. But surely paleontology does not always so bind its deliberations. We are here dealing with a gleam, a whisper, a thing of awe in the mind itself, that oceanic feeling which even the hardheaded Freud did not deny existed though he tried to assign it to childhood.
With animals whose precise environment through time may overlap, extinction may result among contending forms; it can and did happen among men. But with the first stirrings of the neotenous brain and its superinduced transformation of the family system a new type of ecological niche had incipiently appeared -- a speaking niche, a wondering niche which need not have been first manifested in tools but in family organization, in wonder over what layover the next hill or what became of the dead. Whether man preferred seeds or flesh, how he regarded his silent collateral relatives, may not at first have induced great competition. Only those gifted with the pedomorphic brain would in some degree have fallen out of competition with the real. It would have been their danger and at the same time their beginning triumph. They were starting to occupy, not a niche in nature, but an invisible niche carved into thought which in time would bring them suffering, superstition, and great power.
It cannot, in the beginning, be recognized clearly because it is not a matter of molar teeth and seeds, or killer instincts and ill-interpreted pebbles. Rather it was something happening in the brain, some blinding, irradiating thing. Until the quantity of that gray matter reached the threshold of human proportions no one could be sure whether the creature saw with a human eye or looked upon life with even the faint stirrings of some kind of religious compassion.
The new niche in its beginnings is invisible; it has to be inferred. It does not lie waiting to be discovered in a pebble or a massive molar. These things are important in the human dawn but so is the mystery that ordained that mind should pass the channel of birth and then grow like a fungus in the night -- grow and convolute and overlap its older buried strata, while a 600-pound gorilla retains by contrast the cranial content of a very small child. When man cast off his fur and placed his trust in that remarkable brain linked by neural pathways to his tongue he had potentially abandoned niches for dreams. Henceforth the world was man's niche. All else would live by his toleration -- even the earth from which he sprang. Perhaps this is the hardest, most expensive lesson the layers of the fungus brain have yet to learn: that man is not as other creatures and that without the sense of the holy, without compassion, his brain can become a gray stalking horror -- the deviser of Belsen.
Its beginning is not the only curious thing about that brain. There are some finds in South Africa dating into immediately post-glacial times that reveal a face and calvaria more "modern" in appearance, more pedomorphic, than that of the average European. The skull is marked by cranial capacities in excess of 1700 cubic centimeters -- big brained by any standards. The mastoids are childlike, the teeth reduced, the cranial base foreshortened. These people, variously termed Boskopoid or Strandlooper, have, in the words of one anthropologist, "the amazing cranium to face ratio of almost five to one. In Europeans it is about three to one. Face size has been modernized and subordinated to brain growth." In a culture still relying on coarse fare and primitive implements, the face and brain had been subtly altered in the direction science fiction writers like to imagine as the direction in which mankind is progressing. Yet here the curious foetalization of the human body seems to have outrun man's cultural status, though in the process giving warning that man's brain could still pass the straitened threshold of its birth.
How did these people look upon the primitive world into which they found themselves precipitated? History gives back no answer save that here there flourished striking three-dimensional art -- the art of the brother animal seen in beauty. Childlike, Freud might have muttered, with childlike dreams, rushed into conflict with the strong, the adult and shrunken ego, the ego that gets what it wants. Yet how strangely we linger over this lost episode of the human story, its pathos, its possible meaning. From whence did these people come? We are not sure. We are not even sure that they derive from one of the groups among the ruck of bipedal wandering apes long ago in Kenya that reveal some relationship to ourselves. Their development was slow, if indeed some of them took that road, the strange road to the foetalized brain that was to carry man outside of the little niche that fed him his tuberous, sandy diet.
We thought we were on the verge of solving the human story, but now we hold in our hands gross jaws and delicate, and are unsure of our direction save that the trail is longer than we had imagined twenty years ago. Yet still the question haunts us, the numinous, the holy in man's mind. Early man laid gifts beside the dead, but then in the modern unbelieving world, Ernst Haeckel's world, a renowned philosopher says, "The whole of existence frightens me," or another humbler thinker says, "In the world there is nothing to explain the world" but remembers the gold eyes of the falcon thrown brutally at his feet. He shivers while Freud says, "As for me I have never had such feelings." They are a part of childhood, Freud argues, though there are some who counter that in childhood -- yes, even Freud might grant it -- the man is made, the awe persists or is turned off by blows or the dullness of unthinking parents. One can only assert that in science, as in religion, when one has destroyed human wonder and compassion, one has killed man, even if the man in question continues to go about his laboratory tasks.
III
Perhaps there is one great book out of all American literature which best expresses the clash between the man who has genuine perception and the one who pursues nature as ruthlessly as a hunted animal. I refer to Moby Dick, whose narrator, Ishmael, is the namesake of a Biblical wanderer. Every literate person knows the story of Moby Dick and his pursuit by the crazed Captain Ahab who had yielded a leg to the great albino whale. It is the whale and Ahab who dominate the story. What does the whale represent? A symbol of evil, as some critics have contended? Fate, destiny, the universe personified, as other scholars have protested?
Moby Dick is "all a magnet," remarks Ahab cryptically at one moment. "And be he agent or be he principal I will wreak my hate upon him." Here, reduced to the deck of a whaler out of Nantucket, the old immortal questions resound, the questions labeled science in our era. Nothing is to go unchallenged. Thrice, by different vessels, Ahab is warned away from his contemplated conquest. The whale does not pursue Ahab, Ahab pursues the whale. If there is evil represented in the white whale it cannot be personalized. The evils of self-murder, of megalomania, are at work in a single soul calling up its foreordained destruction. Ahab heartlessly brushes aside the supplications of a brother captain to aid in the search for his son, lost somewhere in a boat in the trail of the white whale's passing. Such a search would only impede the headlong fury of the pursuit.
In Ahab's anxiety to "strike through the mask," to confront "the principal," whether god or destiny, he is denuding himself of all humanity. He has forgotten his owners, his responsibility to his crew. His single obsession, the hidden obsession that lies at the root of much Faustian overdrive in science, totally possesses him. Like Faust he must know, if the knowing kills him, if naught lies beyond. "All my means are sane," he writes, like Haeckel and many another since. "My motive and my object mad."
So it must have been in the laboratories of the atom breakers in their first heady days of success. Yet again on the third day Starbuck, the doomed mate, cries out to Ahab, "Desist. See. Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him." This then is not the pursuit of evil. It is man in his pride that the almighty gods will challenge soon enough. Not for nothing is Moby Dick a white snow hill rushing through Pacific nights. He carries upon his brow the inscrutability of fate. Agent or principal, Moby Dick presents to Ahab the mystery he may confront but never conquer. There is no harpoon tempered that will strike successfully the heart of the great enigma.
So much for the seeking peg-legged man without heart. We know he launched his boats and struck his blows and in the fury of returning vengeance lost his ship, his comrades, and his own life. If, indeed, he pierced momentarily the mask of the "agent," it was not long enough to tell the tale. But what of the sometimes silent narrator, the man who begins the book with the nonchalant announcement, "Call me Ishmael," the man whose Biblical namesake had every man's hand lifted against him? What did he tell? After all, Moby Dick is his book.
Ishmael, in contrast to Ahab, is the wondering man, the acceptor of all races and their gods. In contrast to the obsessed Ahab he paints a magnificent picture of the peace that reigned in the giant whale schools of the 1840s, the snuffling and grunting about the boats like dogs, loving and being loved, huge mothers gazing in bliss upon their offspring. After hours of staring in those peaceful depths, "Deep down," says Ishmael, "there I still bathe in eternal mildness of joy." The weird, the holy, hangs undisturbed over the whales' huge cradle. Ishmael knows it, others do not.
At the end, when Ahab has done his worst and the Pequod with the wounded whale is dragged into the depths amidst shrieking seafowl, it is Ishmael, buoyed up on the calked coffin of his cannibal friend Queequeg, who survives to tell the tale. Like Whitman, like W. H. Hudson, like Thoreau, Ishmael, the wanderer, has noted more of nature and his fellow men than has the headstrong pursuer of the white whale, whether "agent" or "principal," within the universe. The tale is not of science, but it symbolizes on a gigantic canvas the struggle between two ways of looking at the universe: the magnification by the poet's mind attempting to see all, while disturbing as little as possible, as opposed to the plunging fury of Ahab with his cry, "Strike, strike through the mask, whatever it may cost in lives and suffering." Within our generation we have seen the one view plead for endangered species and reject the despoliation of the earth; the other has left us lingering in the shadow of atomic disaster. Actually, the division is not so abrupt as this would imply, but we are conscious as never before in history that there is an invisible line of demarcation, an ethic that science must sooner or later devise for itself if mankind is to survive. Herman Melville glimpsed in his huge mythology of the white beast that was nature's agent something that only the twentieth century can fully grasp.
It may be that those childlike big-brained skulls from Africa are not of the past but of the future, man, not, in Freud's words, retaining an atavistic child's ego, but pushing onward in an evolutionary attempt to become truly at peace with the universe, to know and enjoy the sperm-whale nursery as did Ishmael, to paint in three dimensions the beauty of the world while not to harm it.
Yesterday, wandering along a railroad spur line, I glimpsed a surprising sight. All summer long, nourished by a few clods of earth on a boxcar roof, a sunflower had been growing. At last, the car had been remembered. A train was being made up. The box car with its swaying rooftop inhabitant was coupled in. The engine tooted and slowly, with nodding dignity, my plant began to travel.
Throughout the summer I had watched it grow but never troubled it. Now it lingered and bowed a trifle toward me as the winds began to touch it. A light not quite the sunlight of this earth was touching the flower, or perhaps it was the watering of my aging eye -- who knows? The plant would not long survive its journey but the flower seeds were autumn-brown. At every jolt for miles they would drop along the embankment. They were travelers -- travelers like Ishmael and myself, outlasting all fierce pursuits and destined to re-emerge into future autumns. Like Ishmael, I thought, they will speak with the voice of the one true agent: "I only am escaped to tell thee."
I
When I was a young man engaged in fossil hunting in the Nebraska badlands I was frequently reminded that the ravines, washes, and gullies over which we wandered resembled the fissures in a giant exposed brain. The human brain contains the fossil memories of its past -- buried but not extinguished moments -- just as this more formidable replica contained deep in its inner stratigraphic convolutions earth's past in the shape of horned titanotheres and stalking, dirk-toothed cats. Man's memory erodes away in the short space of a lifetime. Jutting from the coils of the earth brain over which I clambered were the buried remnants, the changing history, of the entire age of mammals -- millions of years of vanished daylight with their accompanying traces of volcanic outbursts and upheavals. It may well be asked why this analogy of earth's memory should so preoccupy the mind of a scientist as to have affected his entire outlook upon nature and upon his kinship with -- even his concern for -- the plant and animal world about him.
Perhaps the problem can best be formulated by pointing out that there are two extreme approaches to the interpretation of the living world. One was expressed by Charles Darwin at the age of twenty-eight; one by Sigmund Freud in his mature years. Other men of science have been arrayed on opposite sides of the question, but the eminence of these two scholars will serve to point up a controversy that has been going on since science arose, sometimes quietly, sometimes marked by vitriolic behavior, as when a certain specialist wedded to his own view of the universe hurled his opponent's book into his wastebasket only to have it retrieved and cherished by a graduate student who became a lifelong advocate of the opinions reviled by his mentor. Thus it is evident that, in the supposed objective world of science, emotion and temperament may playa role in our selection of the mental tools with which we choose to investigate nature.
Charles Darwin, at a time when the majority of learned men looked upon animals as either automatons or creatures created merely for human exploitation, jotted thoughtfully into one of his early journals upon evolution the following observation:
"If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, suffering and famine -- our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements -- they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor -- we may be all netted together."
What, we may now inquire, is the world view here implied, one way in which a great scientist looked upon the subject matter that was to preoccupy his entire working life? In spite of the fact that Darwin was, in his later years, an agnostic, in spite of confessing he was "in thick mud" so far as metaphysics was concerned, the remark I have quoted gives every sign of that feeling of awe, of dread of the holy playing upon nature, which characterizes the work of a number of naturalists and physicists down even to the present day. Darwin's remark reveals an intuitive sensitivity to the life of other creatures about him, an attitude quite distinct from that of the laboratory experimentalist who is hardened to the infliction of pain. In addition, Darwin's final comment that we may be all netted together in one gigantic mode of experience, that we are in a mystic sense one single diffuse animal, subject to joy and suffering beyond what we endure as individuals, reveals a youth drawn to the world of nature by far more than just the curiosity to be readily satisfied by the knife or the scalpel.
If we turn to Sigmund Freud by way of contrast we find an oddly inhibited reaction. Freud, though obviously influenced by the elegant medical experimenters of his college days, groped his way alone, and by methods not subject to quantification or absolute verification, into the dark realms of the subconscious. His reaction to the natural world, or at least his feelings and intuitions about it, are basically cold, clinical, and reserved. He of all men recognized what one poet has termed "the terrible archaeology of the brain." Freud states that "nothing once constructed has perished, and all the earlier stages of development have survived alongside the latest." But for Freud, convinced that childhood made the man, adult reactions were apt to fall under the suspicion of being childhood ghosts raised up in a disguised fashion. Thus, insightful though he could be, the very nature of his study of man tended to generate distrust of that outgoing empathy we observed in the young Darwin. "I find it very difficult to work with these intangible qualities," confessed Freud. He was suspicious of their representing some lingering monster of childhood, even if reduced in size. Since Freud regarded any type of religious feeling -- even the illuminative quality of the universe -- as an illusion, feelings of awe before natural phenomena such as that manifested by Darwin were to him basically remnants of childhood and to be dismissed accordingly.
In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud speaks with slight condescension of a friend who claimed a sensation of eternity, something limitless, unbounded -- "oceanic," to use the friend's expression. The feeling had no sectarian origin, no assurance of immortality, but implied just such a sense of awe as might lie at the root of the religious impulse. "I cannot," maintained Freud, "discover this 'oceanic' impulse in myself." Instead he promptly psychoanalyzes the feeling of oneness with the universe into the child's pleasure ego which holds to itself all that is comforting; in short, the original ego, the infant's ego, included everything. Later, by experience, contended Freud, our adult ego becomes only a shrunken vestige of that far more extensive feeling which "expressed an inseparable connection ... with the external world."
In essence, then, Freud is explaining away one of the great feelings characteristic of the best in man by relegating it to a childhood atavistic survival in adult life. The most highly developed animals, he observes, have arisen from the lowest. Although the great saurians are gone, the dwarfed crocodile remains. Presumably if Freud had completed the analogy he would have been forced to say that crocodilian adults without awe and with egos shrunken safely into their petty concerns represented a higher, more practical evolutionary level than the aberrant adult who persists in feelings of wonder before which Freud recoiled with a nineteenth-century mechanist's distaste, although not without acknowledging that this lurking child· like corruption might be widespread. He chose to regard it, however, as just another manifestation of the irrational aspect of man's divided psyche.
Over six decades before the present, a German theologian, Rudolf Otto, had chosen for his examination what he termed The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige). Appearing in 1917 in a time of bitterness and disillusionment, his book was and is still widely read. It cut across denominational divisions and spoke to all those concerned with that mysterium tremendum, that very awe before the universe which Freud had sighed over and dismissed as irrational. I think it safe to affirm that Freud left adult man somewhat shrunken and misjudged -- misjudged because some of the world's scientists and artists have been deeply affected by the great mystery, less so the child at one's knee who frequently has to be disciplined to what in India has been called the "opening of the heavenly eye."
Ever since man first painted animals in the dark of caves he has been responding to the holy, to the numinous, to the mystery of being and becoming, to what Goethe very aptly called "the weird portentous." Something inexpressible was felt to lie behind nature. The bear cult, circumpolar in distribution and known archaeologically to extend into Neanderthal times, is a further and most ancient example. The widespread beliefs in descent from a totemic animal, guardian helpers in the shapes of animals, the concept of the game lords who released or held back game to man are all part of a variety of a sanctified, reverent experience that extends from the beautiful rock paintings of South Africa to the men of the Labradorean forests or the Plains Indian seeking by starvation and isolation to bring the sacred spirits to his assistance. All this is part of the human inheritance, the wonder of the world, and nowhere does that wonder press closer to us than in the guise of animals which, whether supernaturally as in the caves of our origins or, as in Darwin's sudden illumination, perceived to be, at heart, one form, one awe-inspiring mystery, seemingly diverse and apart but derived from the same genetic source. Thus the mysterium arose not by primitive campfires alone.
Skins may still prickle in a modern classroom.
In the end, science as we know it has two basic types of practitioners. One is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snail's eye or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ. The second kind of observer is the extreme reductionist who is so busy stripping things apart that the tremendous mystery has been reduced to a trifle, to intangibles not worth troubling one's head about. The world of the secondary qualities -- color, sound, thought -- is reduced to illusion. The only true reality becomes the chill void of ever-streaming particles.
If one is a biologist this approach can result in behavior so remarkably cruel that it ceases to be objective but rather suggests a deep grain of sadism that is not science. To list but one example, a recent newspaper article reported that a great urban museum of national reputation had spent over a half-million dollars on mutilating experiments with cats. The experiments are too revolting to chronicle here and the museum has not seen fit to enlighten the public on the knowledge gained at so frightful a cost in pain. The cost, it would appear, lies not alone in animal suffering but in the dehumanization of those willing to engage in such blind, random cruelty. The practice was defended by museum officials, who in a muted show of scientific defense maintained the right to study what they chose "without regard to its demonstrable practical value."
This is a scientific precept hard to override since the days of Galileo, as the official well knew. Nevertheless, behind its seamless facade of probity many terrible things are and will be done. Blaise Pascal, as far back as the seventeenth century, foresaw our two opposed methods. Of them he said: "There are two equally dangerous extremes, to shut reason out, and to let nothing else in." It is the reductionist who, too frequently, would claim that the end justifies the means, who would assert reason as his defense and let that mysterium which guards man's moral nature fall away in indifference, a phantom without reality.
"The whole of existence frightens me," protested the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard; "from the smallest fly to the mystery of the Incarnation, everything is unintelligible to me, most of all myself." By contrast, the evolutionary reductionist Ernst Haeckel, writing in 1877, commented that "the cell consists of matter ... composed chiefly of carbon with an admixture of hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur. These component parts, properly united, produce the soul and body of the animated world, and suitably nourished become man. With this single argument the mystery of the universe is explained, the Deity annulled and a new era of infinite knowledge ushered in." Since these remarks of Haeckel's, uttered a hundred years ago, the genetic alphabet has scarcely substantiated in its essential intricacy Haeckel's carefree dismissal of the complexity of life. If anything, it has given weight to Kierkegaard's wary statement or at least heightened the compassionate wonder with which we are led to look upon our kind.
"A conviction akin to religious feeling of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a high order," says Albert Einstein. Here once more the eternal dichotomy manifests itself. Thoreau, the man of literature, writes compassionately, "Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?" Or Walt Whitman, the poet, protests in his Song of Myself: "whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in a shroud."
"Magnifying and applying come I" -- he thunders --
"Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters ...
Not objecting to special revelations, considering a curl of smoke or a hair
on the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation."
Strange, is it not, that so many of these voices are not those of children, but those of great men -- Newton playing on the vast shores of the universe, or Whitman touched with pity or Darwin infused with wonder over the clambering tree of life. Strange, that all these many voices should be dismissed as the atavistic yearnings of an unreduced childlike ego seeking in "oceanic" fashion to absorb its entire surroundings, as though in revolt against the counting house, the laboratory, and the computer.
II
Not long ago in a Manhattan art gallery there were exhibited paintings by Irwin Fleminger, a modernist whose vast lawless Martianlike landscapes contain cryptic human artifacts. One of these paintings attracted my eye by its title: "Laws of Nature." Here in a jumbled desert waste without visible life two thin laths had been erected a little distance apart. Strung across the top of the laths was an insubstantial string with even more insubstantial filaments depending from the connecting cord. The effect was terrifying. In the huge inhuman universe that constituted the background, man, who was even more diminished by his absence, had attempted to delineate and bring under natural law an area too big for his comprehension. His effort, his "law," whatever it was, denoted a tiny measure in the midst of an ominous landscape looming away to the horizon. The frail slats and dangling string would not have sufficed to fence a chicken run.
The message grew as one looked. With all the great powers of the human intellect we were safe, we understood, in degree, a space between some slats and string, a little gate into the world of infinitude. The effect was crushing and it brought before one that sense of the "other" of which Rudolf Otto spoke, the sense beyond our senses, unspoken awe, or, as the reductionist would have it, nothing but waste. There the slats stood and the string drooped hopelessly. It was the natural law imposed by man, but outside its compass, again to use the words of Thoreau, was something terrific, not bound to be kind to man. Not man's at all really -- a star's substance totally indifferent to life or what laws life might concoct. No man would greatly extend that trifling toy. The line sagged hopelessly. Man's attempt had failed, leaving but an artifact in the wilderness. Perhaps, I thought, this is man's own measure. Perhaps he has already gone. The crepitation at my spine increased. I felt the mood of the paleolithic artists, lost in the mysteries of birth and corning, as they carved pregnant beasts in the dark of caves and tried by crayons to secure the food necessarily wrung from similar vast landscapes. Their art had the same holy quality that shows in the ivory figurines, the worship before the sacred mother who brought man mysteriously into the limited world of the cave mouth.
The numinous then is touched with superstition, the reductionist would say, but all the rituals suggest even toward hunted animals a respect and sympathy leading to ceremonial treatment of hunted souls; whereas by contrast in the modern world the degradation of animals in experiments of little, or vile, meaning, were easily turned to the experimental human torture practiced at Dachau and Buchenwald by men dignified with medical degrees. So the extremes of temperament stand today: the man with reverence and compassion in his heart whose eye ranges farther than the two slats in the wilderness, and the modern vandal totally lacking in empathy for life beyond his own, his sense of wonder reduced to a crushing series of gears and quantitative formula, the educated vandal without mercy or tolerance, the collecting man that I once tried to prevent from killing an endangered falcon, who raised his rifle, fired, and laughed as the bird tumbled at my feet. I suppose Freud might have argued that this was a man of normal ego, but I, extending my childlike mind into the composite life of the world, bled accordingly.
Perhaps Freud was right, but let us look once more at this brain that in many distinguished minds has agonized over life and the mysterious road by which it has come. Certainly, as Darwin recognized, it was not the tough-minded, logical inductionists of the early nineteenth century who in a deliberate distortion of Baconian philosophy solved the problem of evolution. Rather, it was what Darwin chose to call "speculative" men, men, in other words, with just a touch of the numinous in their eye, a sense of marvel, a glimpse of what was happening behind the visible, who saw the whole of the living world as though turning in a child's kaleidoscope.
Among the purely human marvels of the world is the way the human brain after birth, when its cranial capacity is scarcely larger than that of a gorilla or other big anthropoid, spurts onward to treble its size during the first year of life. The human infant's skull will soar to a cranial capacity of 950 cubic centimeters while the gorilla has reached only 380 cubic centimeters. In other words, ·the human brain grows at an exponential rate, a spurt which carries it almost to adult capacity at the age of fourteen.
This clever and specifically human adaptation enables the human offspring successfully to pass the birth canal like a reasonably small-headed animal, but in a more larval and helpless condition than its giant relatives. The brain burgeons after birth, not before, and it is this fact which enables the child, with proper care, to assimilate all that larger world which will be forever denied to its relative the gorilla. The big anthropoids enjoy no such expansion. Their brains grow without exponential quickening into maturity. Somewhere in the far past of man something strange happened in his evolutionary development. His skull has enhanced its youthful globularity; he has lost most of his body hair and what remains grows strangely. He demands, because of his immature emergence into the world, a lengthened and protected childhood. Without prolonged familial attendance he would not survive, yet in him reposes the capacity for great art, inventiveness, and his first mental tool, speech, which creates his humanity. He is without doubt the oddest and most unusual evolutionary product that this planet has yet seen.
The term applied to this condition is neoteny, or pedomorphism. Basically the evolutionary forces, and here "forces" stands for complete ignorance, seem to have taken a roughhewn ordinary primate and softened and eliminated the adult state in order to allow for a fantastic leap in brain growth. In fact, there is a growing suspicion that some, at least, of the African fossils found and ascribed to the direct line of human ascent in eastern Africa may never, except for bipedalism and some incipient tool-using capacities, have taken the human road at all.
Some with brains that seem to have remained at the same level through long ages have what amounts quantitatively to no more than an anthropoid brain. Allowing for upright posture and free use of the hand, there is no assurance that they spoke or in any effective way were more than well-adapted bipedal apes. Collateral relatives, in short, but scarcely to be termed men. All this is the more remarkable because their history can now be traced over roughly five if not six million years -- a singularly unprogressive period for a creature destined later to break upon the world with such remarkable results after so long a period of gestation.
Has something about our calculations gone wrong? Are we studying, however necessarily, some bipedal cousins but not ancestral men? The human phylogeny which we seemed well on the way to arranging satisfactorily is now confused by a multiplicity of material contended over by an almost equal number of scholars. Just as a superfluity of flying particles is embarrassing the physicist, so man's evolution, once thought to be so clearly delineated, is showing signs of similar strain. A skull from Lake Rudolf with an estimated capacity of 775 cubic centimeters or even 800 and an antiquity ranging into the three-million-year range is at the human Rubicon, yet much younger fossils are nowhere out of the anthropoid range.
Are these all parts of a single variable subhumanity from which we arose, or are some parts of this assemblage neotenous of brain and others not? The scientific exchanges are as stiff with politeness as exchanges between enemies on the floor of the Senate. "Professor so-and-so forgets the difficult task of restoring to its proper position a frontal bone trampled by cattle." A million years may be covertly jumped because there is nothing to be found in it. We must never lose sight of one fact, however: it is by neotenous brain growth that we came to be men, and certain of the South African hominids to which we have given such careful attention seem to have been remarkably slow in revealing such development. Some of them, in fact, during more years than present mankind has been alive seem to have flourished quite well as simple grassland apes.
Why indeed should they all have become men? Because they occupied the same ecological niche, contend those who would lump this variable assemblage. But surely paleontology does not always so bind its deliberations. We are here dealing with a gleam, a whisper, a thing of awe in the mind itself, that oceanic feeling which even the hardheaded Freud did not deny existed though he tried to assign it to childhood.
With animals whose precise environment through time may overlap, extinction may result among contending forms; it can and did happen among men. But with the first stirrings of the neotenous brain and its superinduced transformation of the family system a new type of ecological niche had incipiently appeared -- a speaking niche, a wondering niche which need not have been first manifested in tools but in family organization, in wonder over what layover the next hill or what became of the dead. Whether man preferred seeds or flesh, how he regarded his silent collateral relatives, may not at first have induced great competition. Only those gifted with the pedomorphic brain would in some degree have fallen out of competition with the real. It would have been their danger and at the same time their beginning triumph. They were starting to occupy, not a niche in nature, but an invisible niche carved into thought which in time would bring them suffering, superstition, and great power.
It cannot, in the beginning, be recognized clearly because it is not a matter of molar teeth and seeds, or killer instincts and ill-interpreted pebbles. Rather it was something happening in the brain, some blinding, irradiating thing. Until the quantity of that gray matter reached the threshold of human proportions no one could be sure whether the creature saw with a human eye or looked upon life with even the faint stirrings of some kind of religious compassion.
The new niche in its beginnings is invisible; it has to be inferred. It does not lie waiting to be discovered in a pebble or a massive molar. These things are important in the human dawn but so is the mystery that ordained that mind should pass the channel of birth and then grow like a fungus in the night -- grow and convolute and overlap its older buried strata, while a 600-pound gorilla retains by contrast the cranial content of a very small child. When man cast off his fur and placed his trust in that remarkable brain linked by neural pathways to his tongue he had potentially abandoned niches for dreams. Henceforth the world was man's niche. All else would live by his toleration -- even the earth from which he sprang. Perhaps this is the hardest, most expensive lesson the layers of the fungus brain have yet to learn: that man is not as other creatures and that without the sense of the holy, without compassion, his brain can become a gray stalking horror -- the deviser of Belsen.
Its beginning is not the only curious thing about that brain. There are some finds in South Africa dating into immediately post-glacial times that reveal a face and calvaria more "modern" in appearance, more pedomorphic, than that of the average European. The skull is marked by cranial capacities in excess of 1700 cubic centimeters -- big brained by any standards. The mastoids are childlike, the teeth reduced, the cranial base foreshortened. These people, variously termed Boskopoid or Strandlooper, have, in the words of one anthropologist, "the amazing cranium to face ratio of almost five to one. In Europeans it is about three to one. Face size has been modernized and subordinated to brain growth." In a culture still relying on coarse fare and primitive implements, the face and brain had been subtly altered in the direction science fiction writers like to imagine as the direction in which mankind is progressing. Yet here the curious foetalization of the human body seems to have outrun man's cultural status, though in the process giving warning that man's brain could still pass the straitened threshold of its birth.
How did these people look upon the primitive world into which they found themselves precipitated? History gives back no answer save that here there flourished striking three-dimensional art -- the art of the brother animal seen in beauty. Childlike, Freud might have muttered, with childlike dreams, rushed into conflict with the strong, the adult and shrunken ego, the ego that gets what it wants. Yet how strangely we linger over this lost episode of the human story, its pathos, its possible meaning. From whence did these people come? We are not sure. We are not even sure that they derive from one of the groups among the ruck of bipedal wandering apes long ago in Kenya that reveal some relationship to ourselves. Their development was slow, if indeed some of them took that road, the strange road to the foetalized brain that was to carry man outside of the little niche that fed him his tuberous, sandy diet.
We thought we were on the verge of solving the human story, but now we hold in our hands gross jaws and delicate, and are unsure of our direction save that the trail is longer than we had imagined twenty years ago. Yet still the question haunts us, the numinous, the holy in man's mind. Early man laid gifts beside the dead, but then in the modern unbelieving world, Ernst Haeckel's world, a renowned philosopher says, "The whole of existence frightens me," or another humbler thinker says, "In the world there is nothing to explain the world" but remembers the gold eyes of the falcon thrown brutally at his feet. He shivers while Freud says, "As for me I have never had such feelings." They are a part of childhood, Freud argues, though there are some who counter that in childhood -- yes, even Freud might grant it -- the man is made, the awe persists or is turned off by blows or the dullness of unthinking parents. One can only assert that in science, as in religion, when one has destroyed human wonder and compassion, one has killed man, even if the man in question continues to go about his laboratory tasks.
III
Perhaps there is one great book out of all American literature which best expresses the clash between the man who has genuine perception and the one who pursues nature as ruthlessly as a hunted animal. I refer to Moby Dick, whose narrator, Ishmael, is the namesake of a Biblical wanderer. Every literate person knows the story of Moby Dick and his pursuit by the crazed Captain Ahab who had yielded a leg to the great albino whale. It is the whale and Ahab who dominate the story. What does the whale represent? A symbol of evil, as some critics have contended? Fate, destiny, the universe personified, as other scholars have protested?
Moby Dick is "all a magnet," remarks Ahab cryptically at one moment. "And be he agent or be he principal I will wreak my hate upon him." Here, reduced to the deck of a whaler out of Nantucket, the old immortal questions resound, the questions labeled science in our era. Nothing is to go unchallenged. Thrice, by different vessels, Ahab is warned away from his contemplated conquest. The whale does not pursue Ahab, Ahab pursues the whale. If there is evil represented in the white whale it cannot be personalized. The evils of self-murder, of megalomania, are at work in a single soul calling up its foreordained destruction. Ahab heartlessly brushes aside the supplications of a brother captain to aid in the search for his son, lost somewhere in a boat in the trail of the white whale's passing. Such a search would only impede the headlong fury of the pursuit.
In Ahab's anxiety to "strike through the mask," to confront "the principal," whether god or destiny, he is denuding himself of all humanity. He has forgotten his owners, his responsibility to his crew. His single obsession, the hidden obsession that lies at the root of much Faustian overdrive in science, totally possesses him. Like Faust he must know, if the knowing kills him, if naught lies beyond. "All my means are sane," he writes, like Haeckel and many another since. "My motive and my object mad."
So it must have been in the laboratories of the atom breakers in their first heady days of success. Yet again on the third day Starbuck, the doomed mate, cries out to Ahab, "Desist. See. Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him." This then is not the pursuit of evil. It is man in his pride that the almighty gods will challenge soon enough. Not for nothing is Moby Dick a white snow hill rushing through Pacific nights. He carries upon his brow the inscrutability of fate. Agent or principal, Moby Dick presents to Ahab the mystery he may confront but never conquer. There is no harpoon tempered that will strike successfully the heart of the great enigma.
So much for the seeking peg-legged man without heart. We know he launched his boats and struck his blows and in the fury of returning vengeance lost his ship, his comrades, and his own life. If, indeed, he pierced momentarily the mask of the "agent," it was not long enough to tell the tale. But what of the sometimes silent narrator, the man who begins the book with the nonchalant announcement, "Call me Ishmael," the man whose Biblical namesake had every man's hand lifted against him? What did he tell? After all, Moby Dick is his book.
Ishmael, in contrast to Ahab, is the wondering man, the acceptor of all races and their gods. In contrast to the obsessed Ahab he paints a magnificent picture of the peace that reigned in the giant whale schools of the 1840s, the snuffling and grunting about the boats like dogs, loving and being loved, huge mothers gazing in bliss upon their offspring. After hours of staring in those peaceful depths, "Deep down," says Ishmael, "there I still bathe in eternal mildness of joy." The weird, the holy, hangs undisturbed over the whales' huge cradle. Ishmael knows it, others do not.
At the end, when Ahab has done his worst and the Pequod with the wounded whale is dragged into the depths amidst shrieking seafowl, it is Ishmael, buoyed up on the calked coffin of his cannibal friend Queequeg, who survives to tell the tale. Like Whitman, like W. H. Hudson, like Thoreau, Ishmael, the wanderer, has noted more of nature and his fellow men than has the headstrong pursuer of the white whale, whether "agent" or "principal," within the universe. The tale is not of science, but it symbolizes on a gigantic canvas the struggle between two ways of looking at the universe: the magnification by the poet's mind attempting to see all, while disturbing as little as possible, as opposed to the plunging fury of Ahab with his cry, "Strike, strike through the mask, whatever it may cost in lives and suffering." Within our generation we have seen the one view plead for endangered species and reject the despoliation of the earth; the other has left us lingering in the shadow of atomic disaster. Actually, the division is not so abrupt as this would imply, but we are conscious as never before in history that there is an invisible line of demarcation, an ethic that science must sooner or later devise for itself if mankind is to survive. Herman Melville glimpsed in his huge mythology of the white beast that was nature's agent something that only the twentieth century can fully grasp.
It may be that those childlike big-brained skulls from Africa are not of the past but of the future, man, not, in Freud's words, retaining an atavistic child's ego, but pushing onward in an evolutionary attempt to become truly at peace with the universe, to know and enjoy the sperm-whale nursery as did Ishmael, to paint in three dimensions the beauty of the world while not to harm it.
Yesterday, wandering along a railroad spur line, I glimpsed a surprising sight. All summer long, nourished by a few clods of earth on a boxcar roof, a sunflower had been growing. At last, the car had been remembered. A train was being made up. The box car with its swaying rooftop inhabitant was coupled in. The engine tooted and slowly, with nodding dignity, my plant began to travel.
Throughout the summer I had watched it grow but never troubled it. Now it lingered and bowed a trifle toward me as the winds began to touch it. A light not quite the sunlight of this earth was touching the flower, or perhaps it was the watering of my aging eye -- who knows? The plant would not long survive its journey but the flower seeds were autumn-brown. At every jolt for miles they would drop along the embankment. They were travelers -- travelers like Ishmael and myself, outlasting all fierce pursuits and destined to re-emerge into future autumns. Like Ishmael, I thought, they will speak with the voice of the one true agent: "I only am escaped to tell thee."
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Re: Starthrower, by Loren Eiseley
by admin » Mon May 02, 2016 2:50 am
The Winter of Man
"We fear," remarked an Eskimo shaman responding to a religious question from the explorer Knud Rasmussen some fifty years ago. "We fear the cold and the things we do not understand. But most of all we fear the doings of the heedless ones among ourselves."
Students of the earth's climate have observed that man, in spite of the disappearance of the great continental ice fields, still lives on the steep edge of winter or early spring. The pulsations of these great ice deserts, thousands of feet thick and capable of overflowing mountains and valleys, have characterized the nature of the world since man, in his thinking and speaking phase, arose. The ice which has left the marks of its passing upon the landscape of the Northern Hemisphere has also accounted, in its long, slow advances and retreats, for movements, migrations and extinctions throughout the plant and animal kingdoms.
Though man is originally tropical in his origins, the ice has played a great role in his unwritten history. At times it has constricted his movements, affecting the genetic selection that has created him. Again, ice has established conditions in which man has had to exert all his ingenuity in order to survive. By contrast, there have been other times when the ice has withdrawn farther than today and then, like a kind of sleepy dragon, has crept forth to harry man once more. For something like a million years this strange and alternating contest has continued between man and the ice.
When the dragon withdrew again some fifteen or twenty thou- sand years ago, man was on the verge of literacy. He already possessed great art, as the paintings in the Lascaux cavern reveal. It was an art devoted to the unseen, to the powers that control the movement of game and the magic that drives the hunter's shaft to its target. Without such magic man felt weak and helpless against the vagaries of nature. It was his first attempt at technology, at control of nature by dominating the luck element, the principle of uncertainty in the universe.
A few millennia further on in time man had forgotten the doorway of snow through which he had emerged. He would only rediscover the traces of the ice age in the nineteenth century by means of the new science of geology. At first he would not believe his own history or the reality of the hidden ice dragon, even though Greenland and the polar world today lie shrouded beneath that same ice. He would not see that what the Eskimo said to Rasmussen was a belated modern enactment of an age-old drama in which we, too, had once participated. "We fear," the Eskimo sage had said in essence, "we fear the ice and cold. We fear nature which we do not understand and which provides us with food or brings famine."
Man, achieving literacy on the far Mediterranean shores in an instant of golden sunlight would take the world as it was, to be forever. He would explore the intricacies of thought and wisdom in Athens. He would dream the first dreams of science and record them upon scrolls of parchment. Twenty-five centuries later those dreams would culminate in vast agricultural projects, green revolutions, power pouring through great pipelines, or electric energy surging across continents. Voices would speak into the distances of space. Huge jet transports would hurtle through the skies. Radio telescopes would listen to cosmic whispers from beyond our galaxy. Enormous concentrations of people would gather and be fed in towering metropolises. Few would remember the Greek word hubris, the term for overweening pride, that pride which eventually causes some unseen balance to swing in the opposite direction.
Today the ice at the poles lies quiet. There have been times in the past when it has maintained that passivity scores of thousands of years -- times longer, in fact, than the endurance of the whole of urban civilization since its first incipient beginnings no more than seven thousand years ago. The temperature gradient from the poles to the equator is still steeper than throughout much of the unglaciated periods of the past. The doorway through which man has come is just tentatively closing behind him.
So complex is the problem of the glacial rhythms that no living scientist can say with surety the ice will not return. If it does the swarming millions who now populate the planet may mostly perish in misery and darkness, inexorably pushed from their own lands to be rejected in desperation by their neighbors. Like the devouring locust swarms that gather in favorable summers, man may have some of that same light-winged ephemeral quality about him. One senses it occasionally in those places where the dropped, transported boulders of the ice fields still hint of formidable powers lurking somewhere behind the face of present nature.
These fractured mementoes of devastating cold need to be contemplated for another reason than themselves. They constitute exteriorly what may be contemplated interiorly. They contain a veiled warning, perhaps the greatest symbolic warning man has ever received from nature. The giant fragments whisper, in the words of Einstein, that "nature does not always play the same game." Nature is devious in spite of what we have learned of her. The greatest scholars have always sensed this. "She will tell you a direct lie if she can," Charles Darwin once warned a sympathetic listener. Even Darwin, however, alert as he was to vestigial traces of former evolutionary structures in our bodies, was not in a position to foresee the kind of strange mental archaeology by which Sigmund Freud would probe the depths of the human mind. Today we are aware of the latent and shadowy powers contained in the subconscious: the alternating winter and sunlight of the human soul.
Has the earth's glacial winter, for all our mastery of science, surely subsided? No, the geologist would answer. We merely stand in a transitory spot of sunshine that takes on the illusion of permanence only because the human generations are short.
Has the wintry bleakness in the troubled heart of humanity at least equally retreated? -- that aspect of man referred to when the Eskimo, adorned with amulets to ward off evil, reiterated: "Most of all we fear the secret misdoings of the heedless ones among ourselves."
No, the social scientist would have to answer, the winter of man has not departed. The Eskimo standing in the snow, when questioned about his beliefs, said: "We do not believe. We only fear. We fear those things which are about us and of which we have no sure knowledge. . . ."
But surely we can counter that this old man was an ignorant remnant of the Ice Age, fearful of a nature he did not understand. Today we have science; we do not fear the Eskimo's malevolent ghosts. We do not wear amulets to ward off evil spirits. We have pierced to the far rim of the universe. We roam mentally through light-years of time.
Yes, this could be admitted, but we also fear. We fear more deeply than the old man in the snow. It comes to us, if we are honest, that perhaps nothing has changed the grip of winter in our hearts, that winter before which we cringed amidst the ice long ages ago.
For what is it that we do? We fear. We do not fear ghosts but we fear the ghost of ourselves. We have come now, in this time, to fear the water we drink, the air we breathe, the insecticides that are dusted over our giant fruits. Because of the substances we have poured into our contaminated rivers, we fear the food that comes to us from the sea. There are also those who tell us that by our own heedless acts the sea is dying.
We fear the awesome powers we have lifted out of nature and cannot return to her. We fear the weapons we have made, the hatreds we have engendered. We fear the crush of fanatic people to whom we readily sell these weapons. We fear for the value of the money in our pockets that stands symbolically for food and shelter. We fear the growing power of the state to take all these things from us. We fear to walk in our streets at evening. We have come to fear even our scientists and their gifts.
We fear, in short, as that self-sufficient Eskimo of the long night had never feared. Our minds, if not our clothes, are hung with invisible amulets: nostrums changed each year for our bodies whether it be chlorophyl toothpaste, the signs of astrology, or cold cures that do not cure: witchcraft nostrums for our society as it fractures into contending multitudes all crying for liberation without responsibility.
We fear, and never in this century will we cease to fear. We fear the end of man as that old shaman in the snow had never had cause to fear it. There is a winter still about us -- the winter of man that has followed him relentlessly from the caverns and the ice. The old Eskimo spoke well. It is the winter of the heedless ones. We are in the winter. We have never left its breath.
"We fear," remarked an Eskimo shaman responding to a religious question from the explorer Knud Rasmussen some fifty years ago. "We fear the cold and the things we do not understand. But most of all we fear the doings of the heedless ones among ourselves."
Students of the earth's climate have observed that man, in spite of the disappearance of the great continental ice fields, still lives on the steep edge of winter or early spring. The pulsations of these great ice deserts, thousands of feet thick and capable of overflowing mountains and valleys, have characterized the nature of the world since man, in his thinking and speaking phase, arose. The ice which has left the marks of its passing upon the landscape of the Northern Hemisphere has also accounted, in its long, slow advances and retreats, for movements, migrations and extinctions throughout the plant and animal kingdoms.
Though man is originally tropical in his origins, the ice has played a great role in his unwritten history. At times it has constricted his movements, affecting the genetic selection that has created him. Again, ice has established conditions in which man has had to exert all his ingenuity in order to survive. By contrast, there have been other times when the ice has withdrawn farther than today and then, like a kind of sleepy dragon, has crept forth to harry man once more. For something like a million years this strange and alternating contest has continued between man and the ice.
When the dragon withdrew again some fifteen or twenty thou- sand years ago, man was on the verge of literacy. He already possessed great art, as the paintings in the Lascaux cavern reveal. It was an art devoted to the unseen, to the powers that control the movement of game and the magic that drives the hunter's shaft to its target. Without such magic man felt weak and helpless against the vagaries of nature. It was his first attempt at technology, at control of nature by dominating the luck element, the principle of uncertainty in the universe.
A few millennia further on in time man had forgotten the doorway of snow through which he had emerged. He would only rediscover the traces of the ice age in the nineteenth century by means of the new science of geology. At first he would not believe his own history or the reality of the hidden ice dragon, even though Greenland and the polar world today lie shrouded beneath that same ice. He would not see that what the Eskimo said to Rasmussen was a belated modern enactment of an age-old drama in which we, too, had once participated. "We fear," the Eskimo sage had said in essence, "we fear the ice and cold. We fear nature which we do not understand and which provides us with food or brings famine."
Man, achieving literacy on the far Mediterranean shores in an instant of golden sunlight would take the world as it was, to be forever. He would explore the intricacies of thought and wisdom in Athens. He would dream the first dreams of science and record them upon scrolls of parchment. Twenty-five centuries later those dreams would culminate in vast agricultural projects, green revolutions, power pouring through great pipelines, or electric energy surging across continents. Voices would speak into the distances of space. Huge jet transports would hurtle through the skies. Radio telescopes would listen to cosmic whispers from beyond our galaxy. Enormous concentrations of people would gather and be fed in towering metropolises. Few would remember the Greek word hubris, the term for overweening pride, that pride which eventually causes some unseen balance to swing in the opposite direction.
Today the ice at the poles lies quiet. There have been times in the past when it has maintained that passivity scores of thousands of years -- times longer, in fact, than the endurance of the whole of urban civilization since its first incipient beginnings no more than seven thousand years ago. The temperature gradient from the poles to the equator is still steeper than throughout much of the unglaciated periods of the past. The doorway through which man has come is just tentatively closing behind him.
So complex is the problem of the glacial rhythms that no living scientist can say with surety the ice will not return. If it does the swarming millions who now populate the planet may mostly perish in misery and darkness, inexorably pushed from their own lands to be rejected in desperation by their neighbors. Like the devouring locust swarms that gather in favorable summers, man may have some of that same light-winged ephemeral quality about him. One senses it occasionally in those places where the dropped, transported boulders of the ice fields still hint of formidable powers lurking somewhere behind the face of present nature.
These fractured mementoes of devastating cold need to be contemplated for another reason than themselves. They constitute exteriorly what may be contemplated interiorly. They contain a veiled warning, perhaps the greatest symbolic warning man has ever received from nature. The giant fragments whisper, in the words of Einstein, that "nature does not always play the same game." Nature is devious in spite of what we have learned of her. The greatest scholars have always sensed this. "She will tell you a direct lie if she can," Charles Darwin once warned a sympathetic listener. Even Darwin, however, alert as he was to vestigial traces of former evolutionary structures in our bodies, was not in a position to foresee the kind of strange mental archaeology by which Sigmund Freud would probe the depths of the human mind. Today we are aware of the latent and shadowy powers contained in the subconscious: the alternating winter and sunlight of the human soul.
Has the earth's glacial winter, for all our mastery of science, surely subsided? No, the geologist would answer. We merely stand in a transitory spot of sunshine that takes on the illusion of permanence only because the human generations are short.
Has the wintry bleakness in the troubled heart of humanity at least equally retreated? -- that aspect of man referred to when the Eskimo, adorned with amulets to ward off evil, reiterated: "Most of all we fear the secret misdoings of the heedless ones among ourselves."
No, the social scientist would have to answer, the winter of man has not departed. The Eskimo standing in the snow, when questioned about his beliefs, said: "We do not believe. We only fear. We fear those things which are about us and of which we have no sure knowledge. . . ."
But surely we can counter that this old man was an ignorant remnant of the Ice Age, fearful of a nature he did not understand. Today we have science; we do not fear the Eskimo's malevolent ghosts. We do not wear amulets to ward off evil spirits. We have pierced to the far rim of the universe. We roam mentally through light-years of time.
Yes, this could be admitted, but we also fear. We fear more deeply than the old man in the snow. It comes to us, if we are honest, that perhaps nothing has changed the grip of winter in our hearts, that winter before which we cringed amidst the ice long ages ago.
For what is it that we do? We fear. We do not fear ghosts but we fear the ghost of ourselves. We have come now, in this time, to fear the water we drink, the air we breathe, the insecticides that are dusted over our giant fruits. Because of the substances we have poured into our contaminated rivers, we fear the food that comes to us from the sea. There are also those who tell us that by our own heedless acts the sea is dying.
We fear the awesome powers we have lifted out of nature and cannot return to her. We fear the weapons we have made, the hatreds we have engendered. We fear the crush of fanatic people to whom we readily sell these weapons. We fear for the value of the money in our pockets that stands symbolically for food and shelter. We fear the growing power of the state to take all these things from us. We fear to walk in our streets at evening. We have come to fear even our scientists and their gifts.
We fear, in short, as that self-sufficient Eskimo of the long night had never feared. Our minds, if not our clothes, are hung with invisible amulets: nostrums changed each year for our bodies whether it be chlorophyl toothpaste, the signs of astrology, or cold cures that do not cure: witchcraft nostrums for our society as it fractures into contending multitudes all crying for liberation without responsibility.
We fear, and never in this century will we cease to fear. We fear the end of man as that old shaman in the snow had never had cause to fear it. There is a winter still about us -- the winter of man that has followed him relentlessly from the caverns and the ice. The old Eskimo spoke well. It is the winter of the heedless ones. We are in the winter. We have never left its breath.
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Re: Starthrower, by Loren Eiseley
by admin » Mon May 02, 2016 2:51 am
Man Against the Universe
I
Man against the universe. But who is man and how is the universe to be defined? Sigmund Freud, in the modern era, remarked that man's mind has suffered from the impact of three significant events. The first took place when Nicolaus Copernicus, over four centuries ago, succeeded in demonstrating that the earth revolved around the sun, thus removing man from his privileged position at the center of the cosmos. The second blow which man's religious sensitivity sustained might well be dated to Darwin's demonstration in 1859 that man was only one part of nature's living web and was akin to, indeed was descended from, the animal life of the past. Finally, Freud himself, the great conquistador of psychology, created the third trauma by revealing the subterranean irrational qualities of the human mind.
The five-hundredth anniversary of Copernicus's birth was only recently celebrated. In the 1970S science has lengthened out the period in which man was a mere wandering proto-homonid on the African savanna. Thanks to the researches of Harlow Shapley, for fifty years we have known we are not even located at the heart of our own galaxy but like a sand grain are drifting on a remote arm of a spiral nebula which contains uncounted members. In truth, we can find no center. As far as the eye can reach, the objects of our attention are fleeing outward through billions of light-years.
Yet to say that man's self-examination began with the dawn of Copernican science would be to ignore that tremendous confrontation between Job and the voice from the whirlwind, in which the humbled Job is asked where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid. Furthermore, the ancient Orient had always viewed the world as illusory and envisioned the good life as primarily a way of hastening one's escape from the suffering wheel of existence. Thus man's sense of alienation, his feelings of inadequacy and trepidation before the natural world about him, long preceded the psychical disturbances that Freud regarded as induced by modern science. As Robin Collingwood pointed out some years ago, Anicius Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, written in the sixth century A.D., had the distinction of being one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages. For a thousand years every literate individual sought solace and comfort in the Consolation. It was never a proscribed book. Nevertheless it touches upon the infinitesimal space occupied by man in the scheme of things. Copernicus, on the other hand, had actually opened the possibility that human power extended into the celestial realms. In no mean sense he was a necessary forerunner of the space voyagers.
Yet any great scholar or artist is likely to find his conceptions denigrated in some quarters. To say that the entirety of mankind has been overwhelmed and psychologically traumatized beyond recall is to overestimate the achievements of any single intellectual. Today there exist millions of people who are totally encapsulated in another era and to whom Darwin and Darwin's ideas mean nothing. The accretion of ideas through the centuries does change the intellectual climate. Rarely, however, is the contemporary mass conscious of the innovator in its midst. This was particularly true before the rise of the news-disseminating media, but even today the content of much of science and philosophy is confined to learned circles and only rarely reaches a wider audience. As our probes into nature become more sophisticated, the greater becomes our reliance upon the specialist, while he, in turn, appeals to a minute audience of his peers.
The truth is that no man expounds upon great ideas to a single audience. He speaks, instead, to audiences, and these in turn will be receiving his message, like the far-traveling light from a star, sometimes centuries after he has delivered it. Man is not one public; he is many and the messages he receives are likely to become garbled in transmission. Again, the ideas of the most honest and well-intentioned scholar may be distorted, reoriented, or trimmed to fit the public needs of a given epoch. In addition, it could be argued that no great act of scientific synthesis is really fixed in the public mind until that public has been prepared to receive it through anticipatory glimpses.
Darwin, for example, had the way partly prepared for his ideas by the geological and paleontological efforts of the generation before him. The fact that geological time had been vastly extended had been recognized. Animal breeders were beginning to discern a lurking dynamism, a potential for change concealed in their domestic creations. In the 1840s Robert Chambers, an enterprising journalist and amateur geologist, had written a widely circulated popular book espousing, albeit anonymously, the evolutionary cause. Even the concept of natural selection, Darwin's major claim to originality, had been anticipated, in admittedly firefly glimpses, by several previous writers. Without detracting in the least from Darwin's massive and major achievement, one may observe that the literate public was in some measure ready to receive his views. In spite of some contemporary furor, the educated world accepted him within his lifetime.
By contrast, Gregor Mendel, as significant in his own way as Darwin, never received serious recognition in scientific circles and had been dead for thirty-five years before his discoveries in genetics were appreciated. He was ahead of his century and was what today might be called a laboratory geneticist carrying out seemingly unspectacular experiments upon pea plants in a kitchen garden. He was a monk burdened with the religious duties of his monastery. He had no romantic aura of wealth, no spectacular world voyage, no eminent scientific colleagues and defenders to heighten his prestige. Mendel's discoveries, though essential to the full understanding of the evolutionary mechanism, were of a sufficiently mathematical cast to belong to the biological studies of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth.
Though his work could be regarded as leading on to a far more sophisticated understanding of the miracle of life and its interrelatedness, Mendel went unnoticed by the public. No philosopher has tried to describe what Mendel's discoveries might have done to our world view, in the way either of shock or of renewed uplift. Such horizons of thought are implicit in his work and need not be equated with a more simplistic nineteenth-century Darwinism. The simple point is, however, that Mendel never had the kind of philosophical attention that would have attracted Freud. His thought lay outside the stream of public attention and he never would have gained Freud's interest as the purveyor of psychological shock.
Freud gauged his own impact upon society, but I wonder, with all due respect to his discoveries in the basement depths of the intellect, whether his claim to having destroyed man's faith in the godlike attributes of reason is justified, or whether he has expressed merely the happy ardor of the triumphant psychiatrist. For out of the depths of unreason, the murkiness of the subconscious, have come also some of the most poignant works of great art and literature. Even scientists have, on occasion, acknowledged indebtedness to that subterranean river. Freud did not in actuality destroy man's faith in mind. He merely added to its mystery by the realization that it could create besides flawed half-idiot phantasms, a more incredible beauty than could be conjured up in daylight. Before Freud was born, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a man of no inconsiderable literary gifts, had written: "I conceive a man as always spoken to from behind, and unable to turn his head and see the speaker." From those words emerges the voice of nineteenth-century romanticism. With Emerson and Darwin as opposed yet converging forces in nineteenth-century thought I shall now concern myself.
II
George Boas, one of our most eminent intellectual historians, remarked, some thirty years ago, that there are always at least two philosophies in a country: one based upon the way people live, and the other upon the results of meditation upon the universe. In the end, one is apt to contend against the other. A perfect example of this may be observed in the rise of those doctrines labeled by critics as romanticism. They reached a peculiar intensity in the early nineteenth century, chiefly as a revolt against the formalism and social restraint of the eighteenth century.
One can venture that one of the first principles to emerge from the romantic revolt was the assertion of the self against the universe -- the self, "dirty and amused" or titillated with midnight terrors but for all that having escaped forever out of the constraining formal gardens of custom into a wilder nature of crags and leaping torrents. Reason gave way for the moment to the long-restrained but impassioned reality of the heart. People wept over the new poetry, and the new poetry -- that of Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge -- was full of picturesque revolutionaries and moon-haunted landscapes that would have seemed absurd to Lord Chesterfield and his contemporaries -- men who believed that gentlemen neither laughed nor wept, at least in public. So much was the nostalgic time-sense deepened that people of means began to replace their formal gardens with artificially constructed ruins in which to brood. The experience of nature became tinged with a belief in a higher awareness, as though in the observation of nature itself one saw into the mind of the Divinity. Something subjective, lingering behind one's casual impressions, was thus sensed in nature. An intensified empathy, a willingness to transcend the ordinary modes of thinking, became a part of the suddenly emancipated and magnified self.
This feeling for nature as a thought to be encompassed, a human ego sustained by a creative power greater than itself yet capable of assimilation by the individual, crossed the Atlantic and took on a peculiarly American tinge among Emerson and his followers, who became known as transcendentalists. The mystical aspect of this experience is described by Emerson early in his career. "Standing on bare ground," he says, "my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing, I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God."
If such remarks now seem a trifle grandiose it is because this first careless rapture, what we might call the utter intoxication with wild nature which descended upon the first romantics, has largely departed. These first innovators were dreamers, sleepwalkers upon mountain heights, who groped their way out of formal gardens to be hurried along through obscure lanes and falling leaves. One's destination mattered less than the sudden freedom from restraint.
In New England with its Puritan heritage it is not surprising that, instead of being engaged with the tale of the Ancient Mariner or the defiant acts of Byronic heroes, verse should remain spare and clipped, but that the granite hillsides should take on an unearthly light in the prose that flowered by Walden Pond. Emerson was the basic sustainer, teacher, and father of the American movement. He had traveled abroad, talked with Coleridge, visited Stonehenge with Carlyle. There he had remarked in a flash of insight that the huge broken slabs reminded him of some ancient egg out of which all the ecclesiastical structures and history of the British isles had proceeded. Unconsciously the great essayist's gift for words had forecast something of his own role in American thought. His utterance was destined to inspire the democratic embrace of Whitman, as well as the austerities of Thoreau.
Of all the Concord circle Emerson was perhaps the most widely read in science. He was familiar with Sir Charles Lyell's work in geology and was well aware that Christian chronology had become a mere "kitchen clock" compared with the vast time depths the earth sciences were beginning to reveal. "What terrible questions we are learning to ask," brooded the man sometimes accused of walking with his head in the clouds. He saw us as already divesting ourselves of the theism of our fathers.
No, it cannot be asserted that this romantic of the winds and stars did not comprehend true nature. Louis Agassiz, the exponent of the Ice Age, was his friend. Emerson could speak without reluctance of early man's chewed marrow bones, of pain and disillusion, of the exploration of dreams and their midnight revelations. Yet he remained deceptively aloof, and it is perhaps this quality which has led to much castigation and to assumptions that his puritanism could never tolerate a full evolutionary philosophy.
"I found," he once humorously remarked, "when I had finished my new lecture that it was a very good house, only the architect had unfortunately omitted the stairs." And so indeed Emerson had. For all that, however, the stairs, or the somewhat wispy and transparent ghost of them, exist. It is what he called the infinitude of the private man. But if the private man is to understand his infinitude he must be led to explore it, to clamber up any available ladder. This was Emerson's primary occupation and to it he brought not alone a truly prophetic glimpse of nature before Darwin, but also a remarkably clear perception of the fauna contained in man's own psyche.
To explain the intellectual relationship between such opposites as Darwin and Emerson is not easy. At first glance, though contemporaries in time, they appear poles apart in thought, even though both have derived much from the scientific discoveries of their elders. Darwin would never have compared himself to a transparent eyeball, neither would Emerson have ever used Darwin's words "on the clumsy ... blundering and horribly cruel works of Nature." Darwin was also willing to confess that nature was capable of telling "a direct lie," but in spite of his occasional protestations, weariness, and doubt I cannot quite visualize him confiding, as did Emerson, that his journals were full of disjointed dreams and all manner of rambling reveries and "audacities." "I delight in telling what I think," Emerson affirms in a letter, "but if you ask how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men." Here Emerson is the honest romantic admitting that the voice of the speaker he was never destined to see pre-empted his thoughts. Yet he knew his own gifts well, and the powers he had "by the help of some fine words" to make "every old wagon and woodpile oscillate a little and threaten to dance."
Darwin was capable of perceiving, from the presence of vestigial organs in living creatures, the fact that they were engaged on an invisible journey. Animals slipped through the interstices between one medium and another, dragging with them evolutionary traces of the past in the shape of functionless claws or rudimentary teeth. Nevertheless, no professional biologist should be unaware of Emerson's pronouncement that "there is a crack in everything God has made." Emerson is perfectly aware that the oak glades about Concord present, at best, peripheral vistas into a nature whose "interiors are terrific, full of hydras and crocodiles." In his journals there is a hidden melancholy not always to be found in his published essays.
The Romantic Movement has been studied in many aspects -- its effects on the social order, its effects upon philosophy, literature, music, and the graphic arts. I know of no adequate treatment of its impact upon the science of the nineteenth century and I shall not attempt one here. It should be recognized, however, that nature in the eyes of the early romantics was revelatory. History, the ruins of the past, partook of that revelation. So did the geological catastrophism of the early century. Men began to look behind self-evident nature, the fixed nature of the existing world, toward some mysterium not evident to the directly observant eye. The fixed scale of nature that satisfied the scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries showed signs of disintegration. Progress and innovation came to be regarded as ushering in a better world. The existent began to be replaced by process. As Emerson put it, "We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us which we seem to have ascended, there are stairs above us ... which go out of sight."
Though Darwin, in public moments, claimed his thinking to be inductive and purely Baconian, he was already as a youth being swept along in the romantic current which included enthusiasm for Odyssean voyages, evidences of past time, and the looming shadow, not just of tomorrow, but of a different tomorrow in some manner derived from today. When in 1831 he set sail in the Beagle all these matters were swirling in the heads of his contemporaries, however much the first discoverers would politely deny themselves in order to avert the wrath of the orthodox. In 1818, when Darwin was a boy of nine, Keats wrote about the struggle for existence, of which men were to hear so much after the publication of the Origin of Species:
I was at home
And should have been most happy-but I saw
Too far into the sea, where every maw
The greater on the less feeds evermore.
But I saw too distinct into the core
Of an eternal fierce destruction,
And so from happiness I was far gone.
Keats, the prescient romantic, saw what Darwin was later to see and what Emerson also glimpsed and recorded as "the virulence that still remains uncured in the universe."
As Darwin centered upon that "fierce destruction" whose creative role he sought to unravel, he appealed less to the tame logicians of his era and more and more to "speculative men," men with imagination, men who loved extremes of argument -- in short, romantic men. In a burst of enthusiasm Darwin himself once cried, shedding his Baconian mask for a moment, "I am but a gambler and love a wild experiment." In those words Darwin had revealed the soul of a romantic, a man willing to follow a dancing boglight through the obscurity of forgotten ages.
Nevertheless, when he came to write the conclusion of the Origin of Species, a certain orthodox benignity is allowed once more to conceal the ferocity of the world whose cruelty and waste he had once exclaimed over. "As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being," the author philosophizes, "all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection." "Thus," concludes Darwin, "from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved." Of this type of conclusion the mystical Emerson had remarked soberly on an earlier but similar occasion, "What is so ungodly as these polite bows to God in English books?"
The man whom reality eluded, or so it was said, produced in 1841 a statement that anticipates the full flowering of process philosophy in the twentieth century but would equally and more eloquently have graced Darwin's final paragraphs in the Origin of Species. "The method of nature," Emerson muses, "who could ever analyze it? That rushing stream will not stop to be observed. We can never surprise nature in a corner, never find the end of a thread, never tell where to set the first stone. The bird hastens to lay her egg. The egg hastens to be a bird. [Nature's] smoothness is the smoothness of the pitch of a cataract. Its permanence is a perpetual inchoation."
Unlike Darwin's somewhat sly intimations of perfection and progress it was the idealist, not the concealed materialist, who wrote: "That no single end may be selected and nature judged thereby, appears from this, that if man himself be considered as the end, and it be assumed that the final cause of the world is to make holy or wise or beautiful men, we see that it has not succeeded."
As a result of his contemplations, even though he did not possess the Darwinian key of natural selection, Emerson is aware of nature's infinite prodigality and wastefulness of suns and systems. He recognizes that nature can only be conceived as existing to a universal end, and not to a particular one, such as man. "To a universe of ends," Emerson adds as an afterthought, "a work of ecstasy." Nature, he maintained, is unspecific. "[It] knows neither palm nor oak, but only vegetable life, which sprouts into forests and festoons the globe." Nowhere is anything final. Nature has no private will; it will answer no private question. "The world," Emerson meditates, looking on with that far-reaching sun-struck eyeball which earned him critical derision, "leaves no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea."
And yet Emerson cared -- more, perhaps, than has been allowed. Crouched midway on that desperate stair whose steps pass from dark to dark, he spoke as Darwin chose not to speak in his final peroration. Emerson saw, with a terrible clairvoyance, the downward pull of the past. "The transmigration of souls is no fable," he wrote. ". would it were; but men and women are only half human. Every animal in the barnyard, the field and the forest, of the earth and of the waters ... has contrived to get a footing and to leave the print of its features and form in someone or other of these upright heaven-facing speakers." He could sense, not Darwin's automatic trend toward perfection, but the weary slipping, the sensed entropy, the ebbing away of the human spirit into fox and weasel as it struggled upward while all its past tugged upon it from below. This is the Gethsemane of the man whom Walt Whitman called, and rightly, "transcendental of limits, a pure American for daring."
III
When I was young, in a time of boyhood marked by a world as fresh and green and utterly marvelous as on the day of its creation, I found myself attracted by a huge tropical shell which lay upon my aunt's dressing table. The twentieth century was scarcely a decade old, and people did not travel or collect as they do now. My uncle and aunt lived far inland in the central states and what wandering relative had given them the beautiful iridescent shell I do not know. It was held up to my youthful ear and I was told to listen carefully and I would hear the sea. Out of the great shell, even in that silent bedroom, I, who had never seen the ocean, heard the whispered sibilance, the sigh of waves upon the beach, the little murmurs of moving water, the confused mewing of gulls in the sun-bright air. It was my first miracle, indeed perhaps my first awareness of the otherness of nature, of myself outside, in a sense, and listening, as though beyond light-years, to a remote event. Perhaps, in that Victorian bedroom with its knickknacks and curios, I had suddenly fallen out of the nature I inhabited and turned, for the first time, to survey her with surprise.
The sounds stayed with me through the years or I would not be able to recall them now. Neither does it matter that in my college days I learned that it was not the sea to which I had listened, but the vastly magnified whispers of my blood and the house around me. Either was marvel enough -- that a shell, a shell shaped in the seas' depths, should, without intent, so concentrate the essence of the world as to bring its absent images before me.
The taxonomists, the classifiers, have tried with Latin appellations to define man to their satisfaction. They have called him wise and raised up justifiable doubt, as did Freud. They have called him the tool user, the fabricator. They have, by turns, characterized him as the only being who laughs or who weeps. They have spoken of him as a time binder who transmits thought through the generations and thus reorients and changes the world. There are also those who have categorized him as the sole religious animal or, finally, as Homo duplex, the creature composed of flesh and spirit.
The appeal of this last definition gives me pause, even though I am a professional anthropologist who must employ the diction of his trade. For is it not true, as Emerson indicated before the rise of scientific anthropology, that man, in becoming aware of nature, has entered upon a confused and endless exploration, a transcendental search for order? Both the theologian and the scientist, each in his way, pursue that quest.
In one of the most profound and succinct analogies ever penned by a philosopher, George Santayana once ventured: "The universe is the true Adam, the creation the true fall." He saw, immured in his study, that in the instant when the universe was brought out of the void of non-being its particles, achieving such powers as are present in man, would yearn for understanding of their destiny. Alienated and alone, listening to the murmur in the shell, the individual would search his mind in vain. Primitively he would seek to placate the unseen spirits in running water, or the ghost that rules in the fir tree. Divorced from the whole, he would always be intimidated by those mocking questions from the whirlwind, "Where wast thou, where wast thou? Declare if thou knowest it all."
No clearer evidence is needed to refute Freud's argument that the great traumas from which man has suffered are the products of modern science. The fall out of nature into knowledge was sustained long ago in the caverns of mankind's birth. Between the telescope and the microscope the Adamic universe has widened, that is all. If we still suffer from renewed shocks of a scientific nature, we have, at the same time, been released from the bonds of barbarous superstition. If the particle cannot rejoin the mass, it has at least achieved, in twentieth-century quantum mechanics, a creative liberty not granted under the Newtonian Mechanic God.
When I first read Emerson's Method of Nature I was amazed at how much of a forerunner of process philosophy he was, and how, some twenty years before the Origin of Species, as I have noted, he had expressed so skillfully nature's lack of any single observable objective. Not for man, not for mouse. Total nature, as he put it, was coincident with no private will, yet it was "growing like a field of maize in July."
At the time I encountered those passages I was a young man steeped in the scientific tradition, and I was struck with Emerson's articulate insight. Why then, one might ponder, if Emerson glimpsed only a universe of ends, and if every natural object is only an emanation from another, and if -- I can put it in no other way -- each emanation explodes into another future, did Emerson, after beclouding human hope, direct so much of his attention toward the species he had so eloquently dismissed? For, along with fox and woodchuck, we would appear as but momentary and superficial tenants of the globe.
It was not until many years later, when I had abandoned certain of the logical disciplines of my youth, that I began to sense why Emerson, with seeming inconsistency, had rounded home in that same essay to extol the nature of man. I think it was upon encountering a phrase in Whitman, and knowing there was an intellectual affinity between the two men, that I paused. The lines read:
There was a child went forth every day
And the first object he looked upon, that object he became.
It is not alone that the species is an emanation, I considered; our very thoughts transform us from minute to minute, hour to hour. How powerfully this quotation reflects Emerson's earlier statement: "The termination of the world in a man appears to be the last victory of intelligence. The universal does not attract us until housed in an individual. Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility?
Who indeed, until the possibility is embodied, "not to be diffused," in Whitman's words, but to be realized. I had listened long ago to the impingement of secret and rumorous whispers from the air upon the coiled interior of a shell. Man it was who held and interpreted the shell, first in the romantic sea vision of youth, last as a symbol of all that the human ear might encompass from the resounding shores of the universe, as well as his own interior.
"We must admire in man," continued Emerson, who, in The Method of Nature, was careful not to admire him overmuch, "the form of the formless, the concentration of the vast, the house of reason, the cave of memory." The cave of memory! It is this, this echoing upheld shell, that enabled Emerson to interpose insignificant transitory man as the counterweight to stars and wasteful galaxies, to say, in fact, that man can carry the chemistry and the distance of a star inside his head. "What is a man," he jotted in his journals, "but nature's finer success in self-explication?" The explication is not eternal, any more than today is for always. The world, Emerson made clear, is in process, is departing, as men and ideas are similarly departing. The self-explication of today is approximate and will demand rearrangement as long as a critical and enlightened eye remains to examine nature. Nor does Emerson have illusions about the number of minds that can genuinely perceive nature. Furthermore, he is aware that what he terms nature's "suburbs and extremities" may contain truths that turn the world from a lumber room to an ordered creation. This observation was written in the same year that Darwin, home from probing such natural extremities as the Galapagos, conceived of the principle of natural selection.
Emerson had had, like Darwin, an illness and a voyage -- that strange road taken by so many of the nineteenth-century romantics -- romantics who were finally to displace the sedate white doorstone into nature by something wild and moon-haunted, whether in science or art. He may have had, as he himself once ventured, "an excess of faith" -- faith in man that may cause us to stir uneasily now, but which he expressed at a time when London was truly a city of dreadful night. Above all, he seemed to sense intuitively what Alfred Russel Wallace had believed -- that man possesses latent mental powers beyond what he might culturally express in a given epoch. In Ice Age caverns he had painted with an artist's eye; modern primitives can master music, writing, and machines they have never previously experienced. In the words of the eminent French biologist Jean Rostand, "Already at the origin of the species man was equal to what he was destined to become." A careful reading of the American transcendentalist would demonstrate that he had an intuitive grasp of this principle -- so firm that neither the size of the universe nor the imperfections of our common humanity distressed him overmuch. He knew, with a surety our age is in danger of losing, that if there was ever a good man there will be more. Nature strives at better than her actual creatures. We are, Emerson maintains, "a conditional population." If atavistic reptiles still swim in the depths of man's psyche, they are not the only inhabitants of that hidden region.
Tomorrow lurks in us, the latency to be all that was not achieved before. This is what led proto-man, five million years ago, to start upon a journey, at a time when night and day were strange and miraculous, as was the trumpeting of mammoths or the march of reindeer. It was for this that man adorned his caverns in the morning of time. It was for this that he worshiped the bear. For man had fallen out of the secure world of instinct into a place of wonder. That wonder is still expanding, changing as man's mind keeps pace with it. He stands and listens with a shell pressed to his ear. He is still a child before the infinite spaces but he is in no way frightened. It was thus that his journey began -- perhaps with a message drawn from an echoing shell. Now he listens with his own giant fabricated ear to messages from beyond infinity. In the old house of nature there are monsters in every cupboard. That is why, as nature's children, we are inveterate romantics and go visiting. This is why the great American essayist anticipated the whole of the unborn science of anthropology when he said, "The entrance of [nature] into his mind seems to be the birth of man." If it brought him fear it opened to his aroused curiosity every nook and cranny of the world. It left him, in fact, the inheritor of an echoing and ghost-ridden mansion. The shifting unseen potential that we call nature has left to man but one observable dictum, to grow. Only our unforeseeable tomorrow can determine whether we will grow in the wisdom Emerson anticipated.
I
Man against the universe. But who is man and how is the universe to be defined? Sigmund Freud, in the modern era, remarked that man's mind has suffered from the impact of three significant events. The first took place when Nicolaus Copernicus, over four centuries ago, succeeded in demonstrating that the earth revolved around the sun, thus removing man from his privileged position at the center of the cosmos. The second blow which man's religious sensitivity sustained might well be dated to Darwin's demonstration in 1859 that man was only one part of nature's living web and was akin to, indeed was descended from, the animal life of the past. Finally, Freud himself, the great conquistador of psychology, created the third trauma by revealing the subterranean irrational qualities of the human mind.
The five-hundredth anniversary of Copernicus's birth was only recently celebrated. In the 1970S science has lengthened out the period in which man was a mere wandering proto-homonid on the African savanna. Thanks to the researches of Harlow Shapley, for fifty years we have known we are not even located at the heart of our own galaxy but like a sand grain are drifting on a remote arm of a spiral nebula which contains uncounted members. In truth, we can find no center. As far as the eye can reach, the objects of our attention are fleeing outward through billions of light-years.
Yet to say that man's self-examination began with the dawn of Copernican science would be to ignore that tremendous confrontation between Job and the voice from the whirlwind, in which the humbled Job is asked where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid. Furthermore, the ancient Orient had always viewed the world as illusory and envisioned the good life as primarily a way of hastening one's escape from the suffering wheel of existence. Thus man's sense of alienation, his feelings of inadequacy and trepidation before the natural world about him, long preceded the psychical disturbances that Freud regarded as induced by modern science. As Robin Collingwood pointed out some years ago, Anicius Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, written in the sixth century A.D., had the distinction of being one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages. For a thousand years every literate individual sought solace and comfort in the Consolation. It was never a proscribed book. Nevertheless it touches upon the infinitesimal space occupied by man in the scheme of things. Copernicus, on the other hand, had actually opened the possibility that human power extended into the celestial realms. In no mean sense he was a necessary forerunner of the space voyagers.
Yet any great scholar or artist is likely to find his conceptions denigrated in some quarters. To say that the entirety of mankind has been overwhelmed and psychologically traumatized beyond recall is to overestimate the achievements of any single intellectual. Today there exist millions of people who are totally encapsulated in another era and to whom Darwin and Darwin's ideas mean nothing. The accretion of ideas through the centuries does change the intellectual climate. Rarely, however, is the contemporary mass conscious of the innovator in its midst. This was particularly true before the rise of the news-disseminating media, but even today the content of much of science and philosophy is confined to learned circles and only rarely reaches a wider audience. As our probes into nature become more sophisticated, the greater becomes our reliance upon the specialist, while he, in turn, appeals to a minute audience of his peers.
The truth is that no man expounds upon great ideas to a single audience. He speaks, instead, to audiences, and these in turn will be receiving his message, like the far-traveling light from a star, sometimes centuries after he has delivered it. Man is not one public; he is many and the messages he receives are likely to become garbled in transmission. Again, the ideas of the most honest and well-intentioned scholar may be distorted, reoriented, or trimmed to fit the public needs of a given epoch. In addition, it could be argued that no great act of scientific synthesis is really fixed in the public mind until that public has been prepared to receive it through anticipatory glimpses.
Darwin, for example, had the way partly prepared for his ideas by the geological and paleontological efforts of the generation before him. The fact that geological time had been vastly extended had been recognized. Animal breeders were beginning to discern a lurking dynamism, a potential for change concealed in their domestic creations. In the 1840s Robert Chambers, an enterprising journalist and amateur geologist, had written a widely circulated popular book espousing, albeit anonymously, the evolutionary cause. Even the concept of natural selection, Darwin's major claim to originality, had been anticipated, in admittedly firefly glimpses, by several previous writers. Without detracting in the least from Darwin's massive and major achievement, one may observe that the literate public was in some measure ready to receive his views. In spite of some contemporary furor, the educated world accepted him within his lifetime.
By contrast, Gregor Mendel, as significant in his own way as Darwin, never received serious recognition in scientific circles and had been dead for thirty-five years before his discoveries in genetics were appreciated. He was ahead of his century and was what today might be called a laboratory geneticist carrying out seemingly unspectacular experiments upon pea plants in a kitchen garden. He was a monk burdened with the religious duties of his monastery. He had no romantic aura of wealth, no spectacular world voyage, no eminent scientific colleagues and defenders to heighten his prestige. Mendel's discoveries, though essential to the full understanding of the evolutionary mechanism, were of a sufficiently mathematical cast to belong to the biological studies of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth.
Though his work could be regarded as leading on to a far more sophisticated understanding of the miracle of life and its interrelatedness, Mendel went unnoticed by the public. No philosopher has tried to describe what Mendel's discoveries might have done to our world view, in the way either of shock or of renewed uplift. Such horizons of thought are implicit in his work and need not be equated with a more simplistic nineteenth-century Darwinism. The simple point is, however, that Mendel never had the kind of philosophical attention that would have attracted Freud. His thought lay outside the stream of public attention and he never would have gained Freud's interest as the purveyor of psychological shock.
Freud gauged his own impact upon society, but I wonder, with all due respect to his discoveries in the basement depths of the intellect, whether his claim to having destroyed man's faith in the godlike attributes of reason is justified, or whether he has expressed merely the happy ardor of the triumphant psychiatrist. For out of the depths of unreason, the murkiness of the subconscious, have come also some of the most poignant works of great art and literature. Even scientists have, on occasion, acknowledged indebtedness to that subterranean river. Freud did not in actuality destroy man's faith in mind. He merely added to its mystery by the realization that it could create besides flawed half-idiot phantasms, a more incredible beauty than could be conjured up in daylight. Before Freud was born, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a man of no inconsiderable literary gifts, had written: "I conceive a man as always spoken to from behind, and unable to turn his head and see the speaker." From those words emerges the voice of nineteenth-century romanticism. With Emerson and Darwin as opposed yet converging forces in nineteenth-century thought I shall now concern myself.
II
George Boas, one of our most eminent intellectual historians, remarked, some thirty years ago, that there are always at least two philosophies in a country: one based upon the way people live, and the other upon the results of meditation upon the universe. In the end, one is apt to contend against the other. A perfect example of this may be observed in the rise of those doctrines labeled by critics as romanticism. They reached a peculiar intensity in the early nineteenth century, chiefly as a revolt against the formalism and social restraint of the eighteenth century.
One can venture that one of the first principles to emerge from the romantic revolt was the assertion of the self against the universe -- the self, "dirty and amused" or titillated with midnight terrors but for all that having escaped forever out of the constraining formal gardens of custom into a wilder nature of crags and leaping torrents. Reason gave way for the moment to the long-restrained but impassioned reality of the heart. People wept over the new poetry, and the new poetry -- that of Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge -- was full of picturesque revolutionaries and moon-haunted landscapes that would have seemed absurd to Lord Chesterfield and his contemporaries -- men who believed that gentlemen neither laughed nor wept, at least in public. So much was the nostalgic time-sense deepened that people of means began to replace their formal gardens with artificially constructed ruins in which to brood. The experience of nature became tinged with a belief in a higher awareness, as though in the observation of nature itself one saw into the mind of the Divinity. Something subjective, lingering behind one's casual impressions, was thus sensed in nature. An intensified empathy, a willingness to transcend the ordinary modes of thinking, became a part of the suddenly emancipated and magnified self.
This feeling for nature as a thought to be encompassed, a human ego sustained by a creative power greater than itself yet capable of assimilation by the individual, crossed the Atlantic and took on a peculiarly American tinge among Emerson and his followers, who became known as transcendentalists. The mystical aspect of this experience is described by Emerson early in his career. "Standing on bare ground," he says, "my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing, I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God."
If such remarks now seem a trifle grandiose it is because this first careless rapture, what we might call the utter intoxication with wild nature which descended upon the first romantics, has largely departed. These first innovators were dreamers, sleepwalkers upon mountain heights, who groped their way out of formal gardens to be hurried along through obscure lanes and falling leaves. One's destination mattered less than the sudden freedom from restraint.
In New England with its Puritan heritage it is not surprising that, instead of being engaged with the tale of the Ancient Mariner or the defiant acts of Byronic heroes, verse should remain spare and clipped, but that the granite hillsides should take on an unearthly light in the prose that flowered by Walden Pond. Emerson was the basic sustainer, teacher, and father of the American movement. He had traveled abroad, talked with Coleridge, visited Stonehenge with Carlyle. There he had remarked in a flash of insight that the huge broken slabs reminded him of some ancient egg out of which all the ecclesiastical structures and history of the British isles had proceeded. Unconsciously the great essayist's gift for words had forecast something of his own role in American thought. His utterance was destined to inspire the democratic embrace of Whitman, as well as the austerities of Thoreau.
Of all the Concord circle Emerson was perhaps the most widely read in science. He was familiar with Sir Charles Lyell's work in geology and was well aware that Christian chronology had become a mere "kitchen clock" compared with the vast time depths the earth sciences were beginning to reveal. "What terrible questions we are learning to ask," brooded the man sometimes accused of walking with his head in the clouds. He saw us as already divesting ourselves of the theism of our fathers.
No, it cannot be asserted that this romantic of the winds and stars did not comprehend true nature. Louis Agassiz, the exponent of the Ice Age, was his friend. Emerson could speak without reluctance of early man's chewed marrow bones, of pain and disillusion, of the exploration of dreams and their midnight revelations. Yet he remained deceptively aloof, and it is perhaps this quality which has led to much castigation and to assumptions that his puritanism could never tolerate a full evolutionary philosophy.
"I found," he once humorously remarked, "when I had finished my new lecture that it was a very good house, only the architect had unfortunately omitted the stairs." And so indeed Emerson had. For all that, however, the stairs, or the somewhat wispy and transparent ghost of them, exist. It is what he called the infinitude of the private man. But if the private man is to understand his infinitude he must be led to explore it, to clamber up any available ladder. This was Emerson's primary occupation and to it he brought not alone a truly prophetic glimpse of nature before Darwin, but also a remarkably clear perception of the fauna contained in man's own psyche.
To explain the intellectual relationship between such opposites as Darwin and Emerson is not easy. At first glance, though contemporaries in time, they appear poles apart in thought, even though both have derived much from the scientific discoveries of their elders. Darwin would never have compared himself to a transparent eyeball, neither would Emerson have ever used Darwin's words "on the clumsy ... blundering and horribly cruel works of Nature." Darwin was also willing to confess that nature was capable of telling "a direct lie," but in spite of his occasional protestations, weariness, and doubt I cannot quite visualize him confiding, as did Emerson, that his journals were full of disjointed dreams and all manner of rambling reveries and "audacities." "I delight in telling what I think," Emerson affirms in a letter, "but if you ask how I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men." Here Emerson is the honest romantic admitting that the voice of the speaker he was never destined to see pre-empted his thoughts. Yet he knew his own gifts well, and the powers he had "by the help of some fine words" to make "every old wagon and woodpile oscillate a little and threaten to dance."
Darwin was capable of perceiving, from the presence of vestigial organs in living creatures, the fact that they were engaged on an invisible journey. Animals slipped through the interstices between one medium and another, dragging with them evolutionary traces of the past in the shape of functionless claws or rudimentary teeth. Nevertheless, no professional biologist should be unaware of Emerson's pronouncement that "there is a crack in everything God has made." Emerson is perfectly aware that the oak glades about Concord present, at best, peripheral vistas into a nature whose "interiors are terrific, full of hydras and crocodiles." In his journals there is a hidden melancholy not always to be found in his published essays.
The Romantic Movement has been studied in many aspects -- its effects on the social order, its effects upon philosophy, literature, music, and the graphic arts. I know of no adequate treatment of its impact upon the science of the nineteenth century and I shall not attempt one here. It should be recognized, however, that nature in the eyes of the early romantics was revelatory. History, the ruins of the past, partook of that revelation. So did the geological catastrophism of the early century. Men began to look behind self-evident nature, the fixed nature of the existing world, toward some mysterium not evident to the directly observant eye. The fixed scale of nature that satisfied the scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries showed signs of disintegration. Progress and innovation came to be regarded as ushering in a better world. The existent began to be replaced by process. As Emerson put it, "We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us which we seem to have ascended, there are stairs above us ... which go out of sight."
Though Darwin, in public moments, claimed his thinking to be inductive and purely Baconian, he was already as a youth being swept along in the romantic current which included enthusiasm for Odyssean voyages, evidences of past time, and the looming shadow, not just of tomorrow, but of a different tomorrow in some manner derived from today. When in 1831 he set sail in the Beagle all these matters were swirling in the heads of his contemporaries, however much the first discoverers would politely deny themselves in order to avert the wrath of the orthodox. In 1818, when Darwin was a boy of nine, Keats wrote about the struggle for existence, of which men were to hear so much after the publication of the Origin of Species:
I was at home
And should have been most happy-but I saw
Too far into the sea, where every maw
The greater on the less feeds evermore.
But I saw too distinct into the core
Of an eternal fierce destruction,
And so from happiness I was far gone.
Keats, the prescient romantic, saw what Darwin was later to see and what Emerson also glimpsed and recorded as "the virulence that still remains uncured in the universe."
As Darwin centered upon that "fierce destruction" whose creative role he sought to unravel, he appealed less to the tame logicians of his era and more and more to "speculative men," men with imagination, men who loved extremes of argument -- in short, romantic men. In a burst of enthusiasm Darwin himself once cried, shedding his Baconian mask for a moment, "I am but a gambler and love a wild experiment." In those words Darwin had revealed the soul of a romantic, a man willing to follow a dancing boglight through the obscurity of forgotten ages.
Nevertheless, when he came to write the conclusion of the Origin of Species, a certain orthodox benignity is allowed once more to conceal the ferocity of the world whose cruelty and waste he had once exclaimed over. "As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being," the author philosophizes, "all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection." "Thus," concludes Darwin, "from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved." Of this type of conclusion the mystical Emerson had remarked soberly on an earlier but similar occasion, "What is so ungodly as these polite bows to God in English books?"
The man whom reality eluded, or so it was said, produced in 1841 a statement that anticipates the full flowering of process philosophy in the twentieth century but would equally and more eloquently have graced Darwin's final paragraphs in the Origin of Species. "The method of nature," Emerson muses, "who could ever analyze it? That rushing stream will not stop to be observed. We can never surprise nature in a corner, never find the end of a thread, never tell where to set the first stone. The bird hastens to lay her egg. The egg hastens to be a bird. [Nature's] smoothness is the smoothness of the pitch of a cataract. Its permanence is a perpetual inchoation."
Unlike Darwin's somewhat sly intimations of perfection and progress it was the idealist, not the concealed materialist, who wrote: "That no single end may be selected and nature judged thereby, appears from this, that if man himself be considered as the end, and it be assumed that the final cause of the world is to make holy or wise or beautiful men, we see that it has not succeeded."
As a result of his contemplations, even though he did not possess the Darwinian key of natural selection, Emerson is aware of nature's infinite prodigality and wastefulness of suns and systems. He recognizes that nature can only be conceived as existing to a universal end, and not to a particular one, such as man. "To a universe of ends," Emerson adds as an afterthought, "a work of ecstasy." Nature, he maintained, is unspecific. "[It] knows neither palm nor oak, but only vegetable life, which sprouts into forests and festoons the globe." Nowhere is anything final. Nature has no private will; it will answer no private question. "The world," Emerson meditates, looking on with that far-reaching sun-struck eyeball which earned him critical derision, "leaves no track in space, and the greatest action of man no mark in the vast idea."
And yet Emerson cared -- more, perhaps, than has been allowed. Crouched midway on that desperate stair whose steps pass from dark to dark, he spoke as Darwin chose not to speak in his final peroration. Emerson saw, with a terrible clairvoyance, the downward pull of the past. "The transmigration of souls is no fable," he wrote. ". would it were; but men and women are only half human. Every animal in the barnyard, the field and the forest, of the earth and of the waters ... has contrived to get a footing and to leave the print of its features and form in someone or other of these upright heaven-facing speakers." He could sense, not Darwin's automatic trend toward perfection, but the weary slipping, the sensed entropy, the ebbing away of the human spirit into fox and weasel as it struggled upward while all its past tugged upon it from below. This is the Gethsemane of the man whom Walt Whitman called, and rightly, "transcendental of limits, a pure American for daring."
III
When I was young, in a time of boyhood marked by a world as fresh and green and utterly marvelous as on the day of its creation, I found myself attracted by a huge tropical shell which lay upon my aunt's dressing table. The twentieth century was scarcely a decade old, and people did not travel or collect as they do now. My uncle and aunt lived far inland in the central states and what wandering relative had given them the beautiful iridescent shell I do not know. It was held up to my youthful ear and I was told to listen carefully and I would hear the sea. Out of the great shell, even in that silent bedroom, I, who had never seen the ocean, heard the whispered sibilance, the sigh of waves upon the beach, the little murmurs of moving water, the confused mewing of gulls in the sun-bright air. It was my first miracle, indeed perhaps my first awareness of the otherness of nature, of myself outside, in a sense, and listening, as though beyond light-years, to a remote event. Perhaps, in that Victorian bedroom with its knickknacks and curios, I had suddenly fallen out of the nature I inhabited and turned, for the first time, to survey her with surprise.
The sounds stayed with me through the years or I would not be able to recall them now. Neither does it matter that in my college days I learned that it was not the sea to which I had listened, but the vastly magnified whispers of my blood and the house around me. Either was marvel enough -- that a shell, a shell shaped in the seas' depths, should, without intent, so concentrate the essence of the world as to bring its absent images before me.
The taxonomists, the classifiers, have tried with Latin appellations to define man to their satisfaction. They have called him wise and raised up justifiable doubt, as did Freud. They have called him the tool user, the fabricator. They have, by turns, characterized him as the only being who laughs or who weeps. They have spoken of him as a time binder who transmits thought through the generations and thus reorients and changes the world. There are also those who have categorized him as the sole religious animal or, finally, as Homo duplex, the creature composed of flesh and spirit.
The appeal of this last definition gives me pause, even though I am a professional anthropologist who must employ the diction of his trade. For is it not true, as Emerson indicated before the rise of scientific anthropology, that man, in becoming aware of nature, has entered upon a confused and endless exploration, a transcendental search for order? Both the theologian and the scientist, each in his way, pursue that quest.
In one of the most profound and succinct analogies ever penned by a philosopher, George Santayana once ventured: "The universe is the true Adam, the creation the true fall." He saw, immured in his study, that in the instant when the universe was brought out of the void of non-being its particles, achieving such powers as are present in man, would yearn for understanding of their destiny. Alienated and alone, listening to the murmur in the shell, the individual would search his mind in vain. Primitively he would seek to placate the unseen spirits in running water, or the ghost that rules in the fir tree. Divorced from the whole, he would always be intimidated by those mocking questions from the whirlwind, "Where wast thou, where wast thou? Declare if thou knowest it all."
No clearer evidence is needed to refute Freud's argument that the great traumas from which man has suffered are the products of modern science. The fall out of nature into knowledge was sustained long ago in the caverns of mankind's birth. Between the telescope and the microscope the Adamic universe has widened, that is all. If we still suffer from renewed shocks of a scientific nature, we have, at the same time, been released from the bonds of barbarous superstition. If the particle cannot rejoin the mass, it has at least achieved, in twentieth-century quantum mechanics, a creative liberty not granted under the Newtonian Mechanic God.
When I first read Emerson's Method of Nature I was amazed at how much of a forerunner of process philosophy he was, and how, some twenty years before the Origin of Species, as I have noted, he had expressed so skillfully nature's lack of any single observable objective. Not for man, not for mouse. Total nature, as he put it, was coincident with no private will, yet it was "growing like a field of maize in July."
At the time I encountered those passages I was a young man steeped in the scientific tradition, and I was struck with Emerson's articulate insight. Why then, one might ponder, if Emerson glimpsed only a universe of ends, and if every natural object is only an emanation from another, and if -- I can put it in no other way -- each emanation explodes into another future, did Emerson, after beclouding human hope, direct so much of his attention toward the species he had so eloquently dismissed? For, along with fox and woodchuck, we would appear as but momentary and superficial tenants of the globe.
It was not until many years later, when I had abandoned certain of the logical disciplines of my youth, that I began to sense why Emerson, with seeming inconsistency, had rounded home in that same essay to extol the nature of man. I think it was upon encountering a phrase in Whitman, and knowing there was an intellectual affinity between the two men, that I paused. The lines read:
There was a child went forth every day
And the first object he looked upon, that object he became.
It is not alone that the species is an emanation, I considered; our very thoughts transform us from minute to minute, hour to hour. How powerfully this quotation reflects Emerson's earlier statement: "The termination of the world in a man appears to be the last victory of intelligence. The universal does not attract us until housed in an individual. Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility?
Who indeed, until the possibility is embodied, "not to be diffused," in Whitman's words, but to be realized. I had listened long ago to the impingement of secret and rumorous whispers from the air upon the coiled interior of a shell. Man it was who held and interpreted the shell, first in the romantic sea vision of youth, last as a symbol of all that the human ear might encompass from the resounding shores of the universe, as well as his own interior.
"We must admire in man," continued Emerson, who, in The Method of Nature, was careful not to admire him overmuch, "the form of the formless, the concentration of the vast, the house of reason, the cave of memory." The cave of memory! It is this, this echoing upheld shell, that enabled Emerson to interpose insignificant transitory man as the counterweight to stars and wasteful galaxies, to say, in fact, that man can carry the chemistry and the distance of a star inside his head. "What is a man," he jotted in his journals, "but nature's finer success in self-explication?" The explication is not eternal, any more than today is for always. The world, Emerson made clear, is in process, is departing, as men and ideas are similarly departing. The self-explication of today is approximate and will demand rearrangement as long as a critical and enlightened eye remains to examine nature. Nor does Emerson have illusions about the number of minds that can genuinely perceive nature. Furthermore, he is aware that what he terms nature's "suburbs and extremities" may contain truths that turn the world from a lumber room to an ordered creation. This observation was written in the same year that Darwin, home from probing such natural extremities as the Galapagos, conceived of the principle of natural selection.
Emerson had had, like Darwin, an illness and a voyage -- that strange road taken by so many of the nineteenth-century romantics -- romantics who were finally to displace the sedate white doorstone into nature by something wild and moon-haunted, whether in science or art. He may have had, as he himself once ventured, "an excess of faith" -- faith in man that may cause us to stir uneasily now, but which he expressed at a time when London was truly a city of dreadful night. Above all, he seemed to sense intuitively what Alfred Russel Wallace had believed -- that man possesses latent mental powers beyond what he might culturally express in a given epoch. In Ice Age caverns he had painted with an artist's eye; modern primitives can master music, writing, and machines they have never previously experienced. In the words of the eminent French biologist Jean Rostand, "Already at the origin of the species man was equal to what he was destined to become." A careful reading of the American transcendentalist would demonstrate that he had an intuitive grasp of this principle -- so firm that neither the size of the universe nor the imperfections of our common humanity distressed him overmuch. He knew, with a surety our age is in danger of losing, that if there was ever a good man there will be more. Nature strives at better than her actual creatures. We are, Emerson maintains, "a conditional population." If atavistic reptiles still swim in the depths of man's psyche, they are not the only inhabitants of that hidden region.
Tomorrow lurks in us, the latency to be all that was not achieved before. This is what led proto-man, five million years ago, to start upon a journey, at a time when night and day were strange and miraculous, as was the trumpeting of mammoths or the march of reindeer. It was for this that man adorned his caverns in the morning of time. It was for this that he worshiped the bear. For man had fallen out of the secure world of instinct into a place of wonder. That wonder is still expanding, changing as man's mind keeps pace with it. He stands and listens with a shell pressed to his ear. He is still a child before the infinite spaces but he is in no way frightened. It was thus that his journey began -- perhaps with a message drawn from an echoing shell. Now he listens with his own giant fabricated ear to messages from beyond infinity. In the old house of nature there are monsters in every cupboard. That is why, as nature's children, we are inveterate romantics and go visiting. This is why the great American essayist anticipated the whole of the unborn science of anthropology when he said, "The entrance of [nature] into his mind seems to be the birth of man." If it brought him fear it opened to his aroused curiosity every nook and cranny of the world. It left him, in fact, the inheritor of an echoing and ghost-ridden mansion. The shifting unseen potential that we call nature has left to man but one observable dictum, to grow. Only our unforeseeable tomorrow can determine whether we will grow in the wisdom Emerson anticipated.
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Re: Starthrower, by Loren Eiseley
by admin » Mon May 02, 2016 2:53 am
Thoreau's Vision of the Natural World
I
Somewhere in the coverts about Concord, a lynx was killed well over a century ago and examined by Henry David Thoreau; measured, in fact, and meditated upon from nose to tail. Others called it a Canadian lynx, far strayed from the northern wilds. No, insisted Thoreau positively, it is indigenous, indigenous but rare. It is a night haunter; it is a Concord lynx. On this he was adamant. Not long ago, over in Vermont, an intelligent college girl told me that, walking in the woods, her Labrador retriever had startled and been attacked by a Canadian lynx which she had been fully competent to recognize. I was too shy, however, to raise the question of whether the creature might have been, as Thoreau defiantly asserted, a genuine New England lynx, persisting but rare since colonial times.
Thoreau himself was a genuine Concord lynx. Of that there can be no doubt. We know the place of his birth, his rarity, something of his habits, his night travels, that he had, on occasion, a snarl transferred to paper, and that he frequented swamps, abandoned cellar holes, and woodlots. His temperament has been a subject of much uncertainty, as much, in truth, as the actual shape of those human figures which he was wont to examine looming in fogs or midsummer hazes. Thoreau sometimes had difficulty in seeing men or, by contrast, sometimes saw them too well. Others had difficulty in adjusting their vision to the Concord lynx himself, with the result that a varied and contentious literature has come down to us. Even the manner of his death is uncertain, for though the cause is known, some have maintained that he benefited a weak constitution by a rugged outdoor life. Others contend that he almost deliberately stoked the fires of consumption by prolonged exposure in inclement weather.
As is the case with most wild animals at the periphery of the human vision, Thoreau's precise temperament is equally a matter of conjecture even though he left several books and a seemingly ingenuous journal which one eminent critic, at least, regards as a cunningly contrived mythology. He has been termed a stoic, a contentious moralizer, a parasite, an arsonist, a misanthrope, a supreme egotist, a father-hater who projected his animus on the state, a banal writer who somehow managed to produce a classic work of literature. He has also been described as a philosophical anarchist and small-town failure, as well as an intellectual aristocrat. Some would classify him simply as a nature writer, others as a failed scientist who did not comprehend scientific method. Others speak of his worldwide influence upon the social movements of the twentieth century, of his exquisite insight and style, of his relentless searching for something never found -- a mystic in the best sense of the term. He has also been labeled a prig by a notable man of English letters. There remains from those young people who knew him the utterly distinct view that he was a friendly, congenial, and kindly man. At the time of his funeral, and long before fame attended his memory, the schools of Concord were dismissed in his honor.
In short, the Concord lynx did not go unwept to his grave. Much of the later controversy that has created a Browningesque Ring and the Book atmosphere about his intentions and character is the product of a sophisticated literary world he abhorred in life. Something malevolent frequently creeps into this atmosphere even though it is an inevitable accompaniment of the transmission of great books through the ages. Basically the sensitive writer should stay away from his own kind. Jealousies, tensions, feuds, unnecessary discourtesies that are hard to bear in print are frequently augmented by close contact, even if friendships begin well. The writer's life is a lonely one and doubtless should remain so, but a prurient curiosity allows no great artist to rest easy in his grave. Critical essays upon Thoreau now number hundreds of items, very little of which, I suspect, would move the Concord lynx to do more than retire farther into whatever thickets might remain to him. Neither science nor literature was his total concern. He was a fox at the wood's edge, regarding human preoccupations with doubt. Indeed he had rejected an early invitation to join the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The man had never entertained illusions about the course of technological progress and the only message that he, like an Indian, had gotten from the telegraph was the song of the wind through its wires.
As a naturalist he possessed the kind of memory which fixes certain scenes in the mind forever -- a feeling for the vastness and mystery contained in nature, a powerful aesthetic response when, in his own words, "a thousand bare twigs gleam like cobwebs in the sun." He had been imprinted, as it were, by his home landscape at an early age. Similarly, whatever I may venture upon the meaning of Thoreau must come basically from memory alone, with perhaps some examination of the tone of his first journal as contrasted with his last. My present thoughts convey only the residue of what, in the course of time, I have come to feel about his intellectual achievement -- the solitary memory that Thoreau himself might claim of a journey across austere uplands.
In addition, my observations come mostly from the realm of science, whereas the preponderance of what had been written about Thoreau has come from the region he appeared to inhabit: namely, literature. His scientific interests have frequently been denigrated, and he himself is known more than once to have deplored the "inhumanity of science." Surely then, one cannot, as a representative of this alien discipline, be accused of either undue tolerance or weak sympathy for a transcendental idealism that has largely fallen out of fashion. Yet it is an aspect of this philosophy, more particularly as it is found modified in Thoreau, that I wish to consider. For Thoreau, like Emerson, is an anticipator, a forerunner of the process philosophers who have so largely dominated the twentieth century. He stands at the border between existent and potential nature.
II
Behind all religions lurks the concept of nature. It persists equally in the burial cults of Neanderthal man, in Cro-Magnon hunting art, in the questions of Job and in the answering voice from the whirlwind. In the end it is the name of man's attempt to define and delimit his world, whether seen or unseen. He knows intuitively that nature is a reality which existed before him and will survive his individual death. He may include in his definition that which is, or that which may be. Nature remains an otherness which incorporates man, but which man instinctively feels contains secrets denied to him.
A professional atheist must still account for the fleeting particles that appear and vanish in the perfected cyclotrons of modern physics. We may see behind nature a divinity which rules it, or we may regard nature itself as a somewhat nebulous and ill-defined deity. Man knows that he springs from nature and not nature from him. This is very old and primitive knowledge. Man, as the "thinking reed," the memory beast, and the anticipator of things to come, has devised hundreds of cosmogonies and interpretations of nature. More lately, with the dawn of the scientific method, he has sought to probe nature's secrets by experiment rather than unbounded speculation.
Still, of all words coming easily to the tongue, none is more mysterious, none more elusive. Behind nature is hidden the chaos as well as the regularities of the world. And behind all that is evident to our senses is veiled the insubstantial deity that only man, of all earth's creatures, has had the power either to perceive or to project into nature.
As scientific agnostics we may draw an imaginary line beyond which we deny ourselves the right to pass. We may adhere to the tangible, but we will still be forced to speak of the "unknowable" or of "final causes" even if we proclaim such phrases barren and of no concern to science. In our minds we will acknowledge a line we have drawn, a definition to which we have arbitrarily restricted ourselves, a human limit that mayor may not coincide with reality. It will still be nature that concerns us as it concerned the Neanderthal. We cannot exorcise the word, refine it semantically though we may. Nature is the receptacle which contains man and into which he finally sinks to rest. It implies all, absolutely all, that man knows or can know. The word ramifies and runs through the centuries, assuming different connotations.
Sometimes it appears as ghostly as the unnamed shadow behind it; sometimes it appears harsh, prescriptive, and solid. Again matter becomes interchangeable with energy; fact becomes shadow, law becomes probability. Nature is a word that must have arisen with man. It is part of his otherness, his humanity. Other beasts live within nature. Only man has ceaselessly turned the abstraction around and around upon his tongue and found fault with every definition, found himself looking ceaselessly outside of nature toward something invisible to any eye but his own and indeed not surely to be glimpsed by him.
To propound that Henry David Thoreau is a process philosopher, it is necessary first to understand something of the concepts entertained by early nineteenth-century science and philosophy, and also to consider something of the way in which these intellectual currents were changing. New England's ties to English thought preponderated, although, as is well known, some of the ideas had their roots on the continent. An exhaustive analysis is unnecessary to the present purpose. Thoreau was a child of his time but he also reached beyond it.
In early-nineteenth-century British science there was a marked obsession with Baconian induction. The more conservative-minded, who dreaded the revelations of the new geology, sought, in their emphatic demand for facts, to drive wide-ranging and useful hypotheses out of currency. The thought of Bacon, actually one of the innovators of scientific method, was being perverted into a convenient barrier against the advance of irreligious science. Robert Chambers, an early evolutionist, had felt the weight of this criticism, and Darwin, later on, experienced it beyond the midcentury. In inexperienced hands it led to much aimless fact-gathering under the guise of proper inductive procedures for true scientists. Some, though not all, of Thoreau's compendiums and detailed observations suggest this view of science, just as do his occasional scornful remarks about museum taxonomy.
In a typical Thoreauvian paradox he could neither leave his bundles of accumulated fact alone, nor resist muttering "it is ebb tide with the scientific reports." Only toward the close of his journals does he seem to be inclining toward a 'more perceptive scientific use of his materials under the influence of later reading. It is necessary to remember that most of Thoreau's intellectual contacts were with literary men, though Emerson was a wide and eclectic reader who saw clearly that the new uniformitarian geology had transformed our conceptions of the world's antiquity.
The one striking exception to Thoreau's lack of direct contact with the scientific world was his meeting with Louis Agassiz after the European glaciologist, taxonomist, and teacher had joined the staff at Harvard in the 1840S. Brilliant and distinguished naturalist though he was, Louis Agassiz was probably not the best influence upon Thoreau. He traced the structural relations of living things, he introduced America to comparative taxonomy, he taught Thoreau to observe such oddities as frozen and revived caterpillars. His eye, if briefly, was added to Thoreau's eye, not always to the latter's detriment. Typically, Agassiz warned against hasty generalizations while pursuing relentlessly his own interpretation of nature.
The European poet of the Ice Age was, in a very crucial sense, at the same time an anachronism. He did not believe in evolution; he did not grasp the significance of natural selection. "Geology," he wrote in 1857, "only shows that at different periods there have existed different species; but no transition from those of a preceding into those of a following epoch has ever been noticed anywhere." He saw a beneficent intelligence behind nature; he was a Platonist at heart, dealing with the classification of the eternal forms, seeing in the vestigial organs noted by the evolutionist only the direct evidence of divine plan carried through for symmetry's sake even when the organ was functionless.
It is this preternatural intelligence which Thoreau is led to see in the protective arrangement of moth cocoons in winter. "What kind of understanding," he writes, "was there between the mind ... and that of the worm that fastened a few of these leaves to its cocoon in order to disguise it?" Plainly he is following in the footsteps of the great biologist, who, like many other scholars, recognized a spiritual succession of forms in the strata, but not the genuine organic transformations that had produced the living world. It may be noted in passing that this Platonic compromise with reality was one easily acceptable to most transcendentalists. They were part of a far-removed romantic movement which was to find the mechanistic aspects of nineteenth-century science increasingly intolerable. One need not align oneself totally with every aspect of the Darwinian universe, however, to see that Agassiz's particular teleological interpretation of nature could not be long sustained. Whatever might lie behind the incredible profusion of living forms would not so easily yield its secrets to man.
The mystery in nature Thoreau began to sense early. A granitic realism forced from him the recognition that the natural world is indifferent to human morality, just as the young Darwin had similarly brooded over the biological imperfections and savagery of the organic realm. "How can [man]" protested Thoreau, "perform that long journey who has not conceived whither he is bound, ... who has no passport to the end?" This is a far cry from the expressions of some of the contemporary transcendentalists who frequently confused nature with a hypostatized divine reason which man could activate within himself. By contrast, Thoreau remarks wearily, "Is not disease the rule of existence?" He had seen the riddled leaf and the worm-infested bud.
If one meditates upon the picture of nature presented by both the transcendental thinkers such as Emerson and the evolutionary doctrine drawn from Darwin, one is struck by the contrast between what appears to be a real and an ideal nature. The transcendentalist lived in two worlds at once, in one of which he was free to transform himself; he could escape the ugly determinism of the real. In Emerson's words, "two states of thought diverge every moment in wild contrast."
The same idea is echoed in the first volume of his journals when the young Thoreau ventures, "On one side of man is the actual and on the other the ideal." These peculiar worlds are simultaneously existent. Life is bifurcated between the observational world and another more ideal but realizable set of "instructions" implanted in our minds, again a kind of Platonic blueprint. We must be taught through the proper understanding of the powers within us. The transcendentalist possessed the strong optimism of the early Republic, the belief in an earthly Eden to be created.
If we examine the Darwinian world of change we recognize that the nature of the evolutionary process is such as to deny any relationships except those that can be established on purely phyletic grounds of uninterrupted descent. The Platonic abstract blueprint of successive types has been dismissed as a hopeful fiction. Vestigial organs are really what their name implies -- remnants lingering from a former state of existence. The tapeworm, the sleeping-sickness trypanosome, are as much a product of natural selection as man himself. All currently existing animals and plants have ancestral roots extending back into Archeozoic time. Every species is in some degree imperfect and scheduled to vanish by reason of the very processes which brought it into being. Even in this world of endless struggle, however, Darwin is forced to introduce a forlorn note of optimism which appears in the final pages of the Origin of Species. It is his own version of the ideal. Out of the war of nature, of strife unending, he declares, all things will progress toward perfection.
The remark rings somewhat hollowly upon the ear. Darwin's posited ideal world, such as it is, offers no immediate hope that man can embrace. Indeed, it is proffered on the same page where Darwin indicates that of the species now living very few will survive into the remote future. Teleological direction has been read out of the universe. It would re-emerge in the twentieth century in more sophisticated guises that would have entranced Thoreau, but for the moment the "Great Companion" was dead. The Darwinian circle had introduced process into nature but had never paused to examine nature itself. In the words of Alfred North Whitehead, "Science is concerned not with the causes but the coherence of nature." Something, in other words, held the thing called nature together, gave it duration in the midst of change and a queer kind of inhuman rationality.
It may be true enough that Thoreau in his last years never resolved his philosophical difficulties. (Indeed, what man has?) It may also be assumed that the confident and brilliant perceptions of the young writer began to give way in his middle years to a more patient search for truth. The scientist in him was taking the place of the artist. To some of the literary persuasion this may seem a great loss. Considering, however, the toils from which he freed himself, the hope that he renewed, his solitary achievement is remarkable.
One may observe that there are two reigning models involving human behavior today: a conservative and a progressive version. The first may be stated as regarding man in the mass as closely reflecting his primate origins. He is the "ape and tiger" of Huxley's writing. His origins are sufficiently bestial that they place limits upon his ethical possibilities. Latent aggression makes him an uncertain and dangerous creature.
Unconsciously, perhaps, the first evolutionists sought to link man more closely to the animal world from which he had arisen. Paradoxically this conception would literally freeze man upon his evolutionary pathway as thoroughly as though a similar argument had been projected upon him when he was a Cretaceous tree shrew. Certainly one may grant our imperfect nature. Man is in process, as is the whole of life. He may survive or he may not, but so long as he survives he will be part of the changing, onrushing future. He, too, will be subject to alteration. In fact, he may now be approaching the point of consciously inducing his own modification.
How did Thoreau, who matured under the influence of the transcendentalists and the design arguments of Louis Agassiz, react to this shifting, oncoming world of contingency and change? It is evident he was familiar with Charles Lyell's writings, that he knew about the development (that is, evolution) theories of Robert Chambers. The final volume of his journals even suggests that he may have meditated upon Darwin's views before his death in 1862.
Now, in the final years, he seems to gather himself for one last effort. "The development theory implies a greater vital force in nature," he writes, "because it is more flexible and accommodating and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation."
He recognizes the enormous waste in nature but tries carefully to understand its significance just as he grasps the struggle for existence. His eyes are open still to his tenderly cherished facts of snow and leaves and seasons. He counts tree rings and tries to understand forest succession. The world is perhaps vaster than he imagined, but, even from the first, nature was seen as lawless on occasion and capable of cherishing unimaginable potentials. That was where he chose to stand, at the very edge of the future, "to anticipate," as he says in Walden, "nature herself."
This is not the conservative paradigm of the neo-Darwinian circle. Instead it clearly forecasts the thought of twentieth-century Alfred North Whitehead. Thoreau strove with an unequaled intensity to observe nature in all its forms, whether in the raw shapes of mountains or the travelings of seeds and deer mice. His consciousness expanded like a sunflower. The more objects he beheld, the more immortal he became. "My senses," he wrote, "get no rest." It was as though he had foreseen Whitehead's dictum that "passage is a quality not only of nature, which is the thing known, but also of sense awareness, which is the procedure of knowing." Thoreau had constituted himself the Knower. "All change," he wrote, "is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle that is taking place every instant." He saw man thrust up through the crust of nature "like a wedge and not till the wound heals ... do we begin to discover where we are." He viewed us all as mere potential; shadowy, formless perhaps, but as though about to be formed. He had listened alone to the "unspeakable rain"; he had sought in his own way to lead others to a supernatural life in nature. He had succeeded. He had provided for others the passport that at first he thought did not exist; a passport, he finally noted, "earned from the elements."
III
To follow the involved saunterings of the journals is to observe a man sorting, selecting, questioning less nature than his own way into nature, to find, as Thoreau expressed it, "a patent for himself." Thoreau is never wholly a man of the transcendental camp. He is, in a sense, a double agent. He is drawn both to the spiritual life and to that of the savage. "Are we not all wreckers," he asks, "and do we not contract the habits of wreckers?" The term "wreckers," of course, he uses in the old evil sense of the shore scavengers who with false lights beckoned ships to their doom. And again he queries, "Is our life innocent enough?" It would appear he thinks otherwise, for he writes, "I have a murderer's experience ... " and he adds, a trifle scornfully, "there is no record of a great success in history."
Thoreau once said disconsolately that he awaited a Visitor who never came, one whom he referred to as the "Great Looker." Some have thought that pique or disappointment shows in these words and affects his subsequent work. I do not choose to follow this line of reasoning, since, on another page of Walden, he actually recollects receiving his guest as the "old settler and original proprietor who is reported to have dug Walden pond ... and fringed it with pine woods." As a somewhat heretical priest once observed, "God asks nothing of the highest soul but attention."
Supplementing that remark Thoreau had asserted, "There has been nothing but the sun and the eye since the beginning." That eye, in the instance of Thoreau, had missed nothing. Even in the depths of winter when nature's inscriptions lay all about him in the snow, he had not faltered to recognize among them the cruel marks of a farmer's whip, steadily, even monotonously, lashing his oxen down the drift-covered road. The sight wounded him. Nature, he knew, was not bound to be kind to man. In fact, there was a kind of doubleness in nature as in the writer. The inner eye was removed; its qualities were more than man, as natural man, could long sustain. The Visitor had come in human guise and looked out upon the world a few brief summers. It is remembered that when at last an acquaintance came to ask of Thoreau on his deathbed if he had made his peace with God, the Visitor in him responded simply, "We have never quarreled."
Thoreau had appropriated the snow as "the great revealer." On it were inscribed all the hieroglyphs that the softer seasons concealed. Last winter, trudging in the woods, I came to a spot where freezing, melting, and refreezing had lifted old footprints into little pinnacles of trapped oak leaves as though a shrub oak had walked upon some errand. Thoreau had recorded the phenomenon over a century ago. There was something uncanny about it, I thought, standing attentively in the snow. A visitor, perhaps the Visitor, had once more passed.
In the very first volume of his journals Thoreau had written, "There is always the possibility, the possibility, I say, of being all, or remaining a particle in the universe." He had, in the end, learned that nature was not an enlarged version of the human ego, that it was not, to use Emerson's phrase, "the immense shadow of man." Toward the close of his life he had turned from literature to the growing, formidable world of the new science -- the science that in the twentieth century was destined to reduce everything to infinitesimal particles and finally these to a universal vortex of wild energies.
But the eye persisted, the unexplainable eye that gave even Darwin a cold shudder. All it experienced were the secondary qualities, the illusions that physics had rejected, but the eye remained, just as Thoreau had asserted -- the sun and the eye from the beginning. Thoreau was gone, but the eye was multitudinous, ineradicable.
I advanced upon the fallen oak leaves. We were all the eye of the Visitor -- the eye whose reason no physics could explain. Generation after generation the eye was among us. We were particles but we were also the recording eye that saw the sunlight -- that which physics had reduced to cold waves in a cold void. Thoreau's life had been dedicated to the unexplainable eye.
I had been trained since youth against the illusions, the deceptions of that eye, against sunset as reality, against my own features as anything but a momentary midge swarm of particles. Even this momentary phantasm I saw by the mind's eye alone. I no longer resisted as I walked. I went slowly, making sure that the eye momentarily residing in me saw and recorded what was intended when Thoreau spoke of the quality of the eye as belonging more to God than man.
But there was a message Thoreau intended to transmit. "I suspect," he had informed his readers, "that if you should go to the end of the world, you would find somebody there going further." It is plain that he wanted a message carried that distance, but what was it? We are never entirely certain. He delighted in gnomic utterances such as that in which he pursued the summer on snowshoes.
"I do not think much of the actual," he had added. Is this then the only message of the great Walden traveler in the winter days when the years "came fast as snowflakes"? Perhaps it is so intended, but the words remain cryptic. Thoreau, as is evidenced by his final journals, had labored to lay the foundations of a then unnamed science -- ecology. In many ways he had outlived his century. He was always concerned with the actual, but it was the unrolling reality of the process philosopher, "the universe," as he says, "that will not wait to be explained."
For this reason he tended to see men at a distance. For the same reason he saw himself as a first settler in nature, his house the oldest in the settlement. Thoreau reflected in his mind the dreamers of the westward crossing; in this he is totally American.
Yet Thoreau preferred to the end his own white winter spaces. He lingers, curvetting gracefully, like the fox he saw on the river or the falcon in the morning air. He identifies, he enters them, he widens the circumference of life to its utmost bounds. "One world at a time," he jokes playfully on his deathbed, but it is not, in actuality, the world that any of us know or could reasonably endure. It is simply Thoreau's world, "a prairie for outlaws." Each one of us must seek his own way there. This is his final message, for each man is forever the eye and the eye is the Visitor. Whatever remedy exists for life is never to be found at Walden. It exists, if at all, where the real Walden exists, somewhere in the incredible dimensions of the universal Eye.
I
Somewhere in the coverts about Concord, a lynx was killed well over a century ago and examined by Henry David Thoreau; measured, in fact, and meditated upon from nose to tail. Others called it a Canadian lynx, far strayed from the northern wilds. No, insisted Thoreau positively, it is indigenous, indigenous but rare. It is a night haunter; it is a Concord lynx. On this he was adamant. Not long ago, over in Vermont, an intelligent college girl told me that, walking in the woods, her Labrador retriever had startled and been attacked by a Canadian lynx which she had been fully competent to recognize. I was too shy, however, to raise the question of whether the creature might have been, as Thoreau defiantly asserted, a genuine New England lynx, persisting but rare since colonial times.
Thoreau himself was a genuine Concord lynx. Of that there can be no doubt. We know the place of his birth, his rarity, something of his habits, his night travels, that he had, on occasion, a snarl transferred to paper, and that he frequented swamps, abandoned cellar holes, and woodlots. His temperament has been a subject of much uncertainty, as much, in truth, as the actual shape of those human figures which he was wont to examine looming in fogs or midsummer hazes. Thoreau sometimes had difficulty in seeing men or, by contrast, sometimes saw them too well. Others had difficulty in adjusting their vision to the Concord lynx himself, with the result that a varied and contentious literature has come down to us. Even the manner of his death is uncertain, for though the cause is known, some have maintained that he benefited a weak constitution by a rugged outdoor life. Others contend that he almost deliberately stoked the fires of consumption by prolonged exposure in inclement weather.
As is the case with most wild animals at the periphery of the human vision, Thoreau's precise temperament is equally a matter of conjecture even though he left several books and a seemingly ingenuous journal which one eminent critic, at least, regards as a cunningly contrived mythology. He has been termed a stoic, a contentious moralizer, a parasite, an arsonist, a misanthrope, a supreme egotist, a father-hater who projected his animus on the state, a banal writer who somehow managed to produce a classic work of literature. He has also been described as a philosophical anarchist and small-town failure, as well as an intellectual aristocrat. Some would classify him simply as a nature writer, others as a failed scientist who did not comprehend scientific method. Others speak of his worldwide influence upon the social movements of the twentieth century, of his exquisite insight and style, of his relentless searching for something never found -- a mystic in the best sense of the term. He has also been labeled a prig by a notable man of English letters. There remains from those young people who knew him the utterly distinct view that he was a friendly, congenial, and kindly man. At the time of his funeral, and long before fame attended his memory, the schools of Concord were dismissed in his honor.
In short, the Concord lynx did not go unwept to his grave. Much of the later controversy that has created a Browningesque Ring and the Book atmosphere about his intentions and character is the product of a sophisticated literary world he abhorred in life. Something malevolent frequently creeps into this atmosphere even though it is an inevitable accompaniment of the transmission of great books through the ages. Basically the sensitive writer should stay away from his own kind. Jealousies, tensions, feuds, unnecessary discourtesies that are hard to bear in print are frequently augmented by close contact, even if friendships begin well. The writer's life is a lonely one and doubtless should remain so, but a prurient curiosity allows no great artist to rest easy in his grave. Critical essays upon Thoreau now number hundreds of items, very little of which, I suspect, would move the Concord lynx to do more than retire farther into whatever thickets might remain to him. Neither science nor literature was his total concern. He was a fox at the wood's edge, regarding human preoccupations with doubt. Indeed he had rejected an early invitation to join the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The man had never entertained illusions about the course of technological progress and the only message that he, like an Indian, had gotten from the telegraph was the song of the wind through its wires.
As a naturalist he possessed the kind of memory which fixes certain scenes in the mind forever -- a feeling for the vastness and mystery contained in nature, a powerful aesthetic response when, in his own words, "a thousand bare twigs gleam like cobwebs in the sun." He had been imprinted, as it were, by his home landscape at an early age. Similarly, whatever I may venture upon the meaning of Thoreau must come basically from memory alone, with perhaps some examination of the tone of his first journal as contrasted with his last. My present thoughts convey only the residue of what, in the course of time, I have come to feel about his intellectual achievement -- the solitary memory that Thoreau himself might claim of a journey across austere uplands.
In addition, my observations come mostly from the realm of science, whereas the preponderance of what had been written about Thoreau has come from the region he appeared to inhabit: namely, literature. His scientific interests have frequently been denigrated, and he himself is known more than once to have deplored the "inhumanity of science." Surely then, one cannot, as a representative of this alien discipline, be accused of either undue tolerance or weak sympathy for a transcendental idealism that has largely fallen out of fashion. Yet it is an aspect of this philosophy, more particularly as it is found modified in Thoreau, that I wish to consider. For Thoreau, like Emerson, is an anticipator, a forerunner of the process philosophers who have so largely dominated the twentieth century. He stands at the border between existent and potential nature.
II
Behind all religions lurks the concept of nature. It persists equally in the burial cults of Neanderthal man, in Cro-Magnon hunting art, in the questions of Job and in the answering voice from the whirlwind. In the end it is the name of man's attempt to define and delimit his world, whether seen or unseen. He knows intuitively that nature is a reality which existed before him and will survive his individual death. He may include in his definition that which is, or that which may be. Nature remains an otherness which incorporates man, but which man instinctively feels contains secrets denied to him.
A professional atheist must still account for the fleeting particles that appear and vanish in the perfected cyclotrons of modern physics. We may see behind nature a divinity which rules it, or we may regard nature itself as a somewhat nebulous and ill-defined deity. Man knows that he springs from nature and not nature from him. This is very old and primitive knowledge. Man, as the "thinking reed," the memory beast, and the anticipator of things to come, has devised hundreds of cosmogonies and interpretations of nature. More lately, with the dawn of the scientific method, he has sought to probe nature's secrets by experiment rather than unbounded speculation.
Still, of all words coming easily to the tongue, none is more mysterious, none more elusive. Behind nature is hidden the chaos as well as the regularities of the world. And behind all that is evident to our senses is veiled the insubstantial deity that only man, of all earth's creatures, has had the power either to perceive or to project into nature.
As scientific agnostics we may draw an imaginary line beyond which we deny ourselves the right to pass. We may adhere to the tangible, but we will still be forced to speak of the "unknowable" or of "final causes" even if we proclaim such phrases barren and of no concern to science. In our minds we will acknowledge a line we have drawn, a definition to which we have arbitrarily restricted ourselves, a human limit that mayor may not coincide with reality. It will still be nature that concerns us as it concerned the Neanderthal. We cannot exorcise the word, refine it semantically though we may. Nature is the receptacle which contains man and into which he finally sinks to rest. It implies all, absolutely all, that man knows or can know. The word ramifies and runs through the centuries, assuming different connotations.
Sometimes it appears as ghostly as the unnamed shadow behind it; sometimes it appears harsh, prescriptive, and solid. Again matter becomes interchangeable with energy; fact becomes shadow, law becomes probability. Nature is a word that must have arisen with man. It is part of his otherness, his humanity. Other beasts live within nature. Only man has ceaselessly turned the abstraction around and around upon his tongue and found fault with every definition, found himself looking ceaselessly outside of nature toward something invisible to any eye but his own and indeed not surely to be glimpsed by him.
To propound that Henry David Thoreau is a process philosopher, it is necessary first to understand something of the concepts entertained by early nineteenth-century science and philosophy, and also to consider something of the way in which these intellectual currents were changing. New England's ties to English thought preponderated, although, as is well known, some of the ideas had their roots on the continent. An exhaustive analysis is unnecessary to the present purpose. Thoreau was a child of his time but he also reached beyond it.
In early-nineteenth-century British science there was a marked obsession with Baconian induction. The more conservative-minded, who dreaded the revelations of the new geology, sought, in their emphatic demand for facts, to drive wide-ranging and useful hypotheses out of currency. The thought of Bacon, actually one of the innovators of scientific method, was being perverted into a convenient barrier against the advance of irreligious science. Robert Chambers, an early evolutionist, had felt the weight of this criticism, and Darwin, later on, experienced it beyond the midcentury. In inexperienced hands it led to much aimless fact-gathering under the guise of proper inductive procedures for true scientists. Some, though not all, of Thoreau's compendiums and detailed observations suggest this view of science, just as do his occasional scornful remarks about museum taxonomy.
In a typical Thoreauvian paradox he could neither leave his bundles of accumulated fact alone, nor resist muttering "it is ebb tide with the scientific reports." Only toward the close of his journals does he seem to be inclining toward a 'more perceptive scientific use of his materials under the influence of later reading. It is necessary to remember that most of Thoreau's intellectual contacts were with literary men, though Emerson was a wide and eclectic reader who saw clearly that the new uniformitarian geology had transformed our conceptions of the world's antiquity.
The one striking exception to Thoreau's lack of direct contact with the scientific world was his meeting with Louis Agassiz after the European glaciologist, taxonomist, and teacher had joined the staff at Harvard in the 1840S. Brilliant and distinguished naturalist though he was, Louis Agassiz was probably not the best influence upon Thoreau. He traced the structural relations of living things, he introduced America to comparative taxonomy, he taught Thoreau to observe such oddities as frozen and revived caterpillars. His eye, if briefly, was added to Thoreau's eye, not always to the latter's detriment. Typically, Agassiz warned against hasty generalizations while pursuing relentlessly his own interpretation of nature.
The European poet of the Ice Age was, in a very crucial sense, at the same time an anachronism. He did not believe in evolution; he did not grasp the significance of natural selection. "Geology," he wrote in 1857, "only shows that at different periods there have existed different species; but no transition from those of a preceding into those of a following epoch has ever been noticed anywhere." He saw a beneficent intelligence behind nature; he was a Platonist at heart, dealing with the classification of the eternal forms, seeing in the vestigial organs noted by the evolutionist only the direct evidence of divine plan carried through for symmetry's sake even when the organ was functionless.
It is this preternatural intelligence which Thoreau is led to see in the protective arrangement of moth cocoons in winter. "What kind of understanding," he writes, "was there between the mind ... and that of the worm that fastened a few of these leaves to its cocoon in order to disguise it?" Plainly he is following in the footsteps of the great biologist, who, like many other scholars, recognized a spiritual succession of forms in the strata, but not the genuine organic transformations that had produced the living world. It may be noted in passing that this Platonic compromise with reality was one easily acceptable to most transcendentalists. They were part of a far-removed romantic movement which was to find the mechanistic aspects of nineteenth-century science increasingly intolerable. One need not align oneself totally with every aspect of the Darwinian universe, however, to see that Agassiz's particular teleological interpretation of nature could not be long sustained. Whatever might lie behind the incredible profusion of living forms would not so easily yield its secrets to man.
The mystery in nature Thoreau began to sense early. A granitic realism forced from him the recognition that the natural world is indifferent to human morality, just as the young Darwin had similarly brooded over the biological imperfections and savagery of the organic realm. "How can [man]" protested Thoreau, "perform that long journey who has not conceived whither he is bound, ... who has no passport to the end?" This is a far cry from the expressions of some of the contemporary transcendentalists who frequently confused nature with a hypostatized divine reason which man could activate within himself. By contrast, Thoreau remarks wearily, "Is not disease the rule of existence?" He had seen the riddled leaf and the worm-infested bud.
If one meditates upon the picture of nature presented by both the transcendental thinkers such as Emerson and the evolutionary doctrine drawn from Darwin, one is struck by the contrast between what appears to be a real and an ideal nature. The transcendentalist lived in two worlds at once, in one of which he was free to transform himself; he could escape the ugly determinism of the real. In Emerson's words, "two states of thought diverge every moment in wild contrast."
The same idea is echoed in the first volume of his journals when the young Thoreau ventures, "On one side of man is the actual and on the other the ideal." These peculiar worlds are simultaneously existent. Life is bifurcated between the observational world and another more ideal but realizable set of "instructions" implanted in our minds, again a kind of Platonic blueprint. We must be taught through the proper understanding of the powers within us. The transcendentalist possessed the strong optimism of the early Republic, the belief in an earthly Eden to be created.
If we examine the Darwinian world of change we recognize that the nature of the evolutionary process is such as to deny any relationships except those that can be established on purely phyletic grounds of uninterrupted descent. The Platonic abstract blueprint of successive types has been dismissed as a hopeful fiction. Vestigial organs are really what their name implies -- remnants lingering from a former state of existence. The tapeworm, the sleeping-sickness trypanosome, are as much a product of natural selection as man himself. All currently existing animals and plants have ancestral roots extending back into Archeozoic time. Every species is in some degree imperfect and scheduled to vanish by reason of the very processes which brought it into being. Even in this world of endless struggle, however, Darwin is forced to introduce a forlorn note of optimism which appears in the final pages of the Origin of Species. It is his own version of the ideal. Out of the war of nature, of strife unending, he declares, all things will progress toward perfection.
The remark rings somewhat hollowly upon the ear. Darwin's posited ideal world, such as it is, offers no immediate hope that man can embrace. Indeed, it is proffered on the same page where Darwin indicates that of the species now living very few will survive into the remote future. Teleological direction has been read out of the universe. It would re-emerge in the twentieth century in more sophisticated guises that would have entranced Thoreau, but for the moment the "Great Companion" was dead. The Darwinian circle had introduced process into nature but had never paused to examine nature itself. In the words of Alfred North Whitehead, "Science is concerned not with the causes but the coherence of nature." Something, in other words, held the thing called nature together, gave it duration in the midst of change and a queer kind of inhuman rationality.
It may be true enough that Thoreau in his last years never resolved his philosophical difficulties. (Indeed, what man has?) It may also be assumed that the confident and brilliant perceptions of the young writer began to give way in his middle years to a more patient search for truth. The scientist in him was taking the place of the artist. To some of the literary persuasion this may seem a great loss. Considering, however, the toils from which he freed himself, the hope that he renewed, his solitary achievement is remarkable.
One may observe that there are two reigning models involving human behavior today: a conservative and a progressive version. The first may be stated as regarding man in the mass as closely reflecting his primate origins. He is the "ape and tiger" of Huxley's writing. His origins are sufficiently bestial that they place limits upon his ethical possibilities. Latent aggression makes him an uncertain and dangerous creature.
Unconsciously, perhaps, the first evolutionists sought to link man more closely to the animal world from which he had arisen. Paradoxically this conception would literally freeze man upon his evolutionary pathway as thoroughly as though a similar argument had been projected upon him when he was a Cretaceous tree shrew. Certainly one may grant our imperfect nature. Man is in process, as is the whole of life. He may survive or he may not, but so long as he survives he will be part of the changing, onrushing future. He, too, will be subject to alteration. In fact, he may now be approaching the point of consciously inducing his own modification.
How did Thoreau, who matured under the influence of the transcendentalists and the design arguments of Louis Agassiz, react to this shifting, oncoming world of contingency and change? It is evident he was familiar with Charles Lyell's writings, that he knew about the development (that is, evolution) theories of Robert Chambers. The final volume of his journals even suggests that he may have meditated upon Darwin's views before his death in 1862.
Now, in the final years, he seems to gather himself for one last effort. "The development theory implies a greater vital force in nature," he writes, "because it is more flexible and accommodating and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation."
He recognizes the enormous waste in nature but tries carefully to understand its significance just as he grasps the struggle for existence. His eyes are open still to his tenderly cherished facts of snow and leaves and seasons. He counts tree rings and tries to understand forest succession. The world is perhaps vaster than he imagined, but, even from the first, nature was seen as lawless on occasion and capable of cherishing unimaginable potentials. That was where he chose to stand, at the very edge of the future, "to anticipate," as he says in Walden, "nature herself."
This is not the conservative paradigm of the neo-Darwinian circle. Instead it clearly forecasts the thought of twentieth-century Alfred North Whitehead. Thoreau strove with an unequaled intensity to observe nature in all its forms, whether in the raw shapes of mountains or the travelings of seeds and deer mice. His consciousness expanded like a sunflower. The more objects he beheld, the more immortal he became. "My senses," he wrote, "get no rest." It was as though he had foreseen Whitehead's dictum that "passage is a quality not only of nature, which is the thing known, but also of sense awareness, which is the procedure of knowing." Thoreau had constituted himself the Knower. "All change," he wrote, "is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle that is taking place every instant." He saw man thrust up through the crust of nature "like a wedge and not till the wound heals ... do we begin to discover where we are." He viewed us all as mere potential; shadowy, formless perhaps, but as though about to be formed. He had listened alone to the "unspeakable rain"; he had sought in his own way to lead others to a supernatural life in nature. He had succeeded. He had provided for others the passport that at first he thought did not exist; a passport, he finally noted, "earned from the elements."
III
To follow the involved saunterings of the journals is to observe a man sorting, selecting, questioning less nature than his own way into nature, to find, as Thoreau expressed it, "a patent for himself." Thoreau is never wholly a man of the transcendental camp. He is, in a sense, a double agent. He is drawn both to the spiritual life and to that of the savage. "Are we not all wreckers," he asks, "and do we not contract the habits of wreckers?" The term "wreckers," of course, he uses in the old evil sense of the shore scavengers who with false lights beckoned ships to their doom. And again he queries, "Is our life innocent enough?" It would appear he thinks otherwise, for he writes, "I have a murderer's experience ... " and he adds, a trifle scornfully, "there is no record of a great success in history."
Thoreau once said disconsolately that he awaited a Visitor who never came, one whom he referred to as the "Great Looker." Some have thought that pique or disappointment shows in these words and affects his subsequent work. I do not choose to follow this line of reasoning, since, on another page of Walden, he actually recollects receiving his guest as the "old settler and original proprietor who is reported to have dug Walden pond ... and fringed it with pine woods." As a somewhat heretical priest once observed, "God asks nothing of the highest soul but attention."
Supplementing that remark Thoreau had asserted, "There has been nothing but the sun and the eye since the beginning." That eye, in the instance of Thoreau, had missed nothing. Even in the depths of winter when nature's inscriptions lay all about him in the snow, he had not faltered to recognize among them the cruel marks of a farmer's whip, steadily, even monotonously, lashing his oxen down the drift-covered road. The sight wounded him. Nature, he knew, was not bound to be kind to man. In fact, there was a kind of doubleness in nature as in the writer. The inner eye was removed; its qualities were more than man, as natural man, could long sustain. The Visitor had come in human guise and looked out upon the world a few brief summers. It is remembered that when at last an acquaintance came to ask of Thoreau on his deathbed if he had made his peace with God, the Visitor in him responded simply, "We have never quarreled."
Thoreau had appropriated the snow as "the great revealer." On it were inscribed all the hieroglyphs that the softer seasons concealed. Last winter, trudging in the woods, I came to a spot where freezing, melting, and refreezing had lifted old footprints into little pinnacles of trapped oak leaves as though a shrub oak had walked upon some errand. Thoreau had recorded the phenomenon over a century ago. There was something uncanny about it, I thought, standing attentively in the snow. A visitor, perhaps the Visitor, had once more passed.
In the very first volume of his journals Thoreau had written, "There is always the possibility, the possibility, I say, of being all, or remaining a particle in the universe." He had, in the end, learned that nature was not an enlarged version of the human ego, that it was not, to use Emerson's phrase, "the immense shadow of man." Toward the close of his life he had turned from literature to the growing, formidable world of the new science -- the science that in the twentieth century was destined to reduce everything to infinitesimal particles and finally these to a universal vortex of wild energies.
But the eye persisted, the unexplainable eye that gave even Darwin a cold shudder. All it experienced were the secondary qualities, the illusions that physics had rejected, but the eye remained, just as Thoreau had asserted -- the sun and the eye from the beginning. Thoreau was gone, but the eye was multitudinous, ineradicable.
I advanced upon the fallen oak leaves. We were all the eye of the Visitor -- the eye whose reason no physics could explain. Generation after generation the eye was among us. We were particles but we were also the recording eye that saw the sunlight -- that which physics had reduced to cold waves in a cold void. Thoreau's life had been dedicated to the unexplainable eye.
I had been trained since youth against the illusions, the deceptions of that eye, against sunset as reality, against my own features as anything but a momentary midge swarm of particles. Even this momentary phantasm I saw by the mind's eye alone. I no longer resisted as I walked. I went slowly, making sure that the eye momentarily residing in me saw and recorded what was intended when Thoreau spoke of the quality of the eye as belonging more to God than man.
But there was a message Thoreau intended to transmit. "I suspect," he had informed his readers, "that if you should go to the end of the world, you would find somebody there going further." It is plain that he wanted a message carried that distance, but what was it? We are never entirely certain. He delighted in gnomic utterances such as that in which he pursued the summer on snowshoes.
"I do not think much of the actual," he had added. Is this then the only message of the great Walden traveler in the winter days when the years "came fast as snowflakes"? Perhaps it is so intended, but the words remain cryptic. Thoreau, as is evidenced by his final journals, had labored to lay the foundations of a then unnamed science -- ecology. In many ways he had outlived his century. He was always concerned with the actual, but it was the unrolling reality of the process philosopher, "the universe," as he says, "that will not wait to be explained."
For this reason he tended to see men at a distance. For the same reason he saw himself as a first settler in nature, his house the oldest in the settlement. Thoreau reflected in his mind the dreamers of the westward crossing; in this he is totally American.
Yet Thoreau preferred to the end his own white winter spaces. He lingers, curvetting gracefully, like the fox he saw on the river or the falcon in the morning air. He identifies, he enters them, he widens the circumference of life to its utmost bounds. "One world at a time," he jokes playfully on his deathbed, but it is not, in actuality, the world that any of us know or could reasonably endure. It is simply Thoreau's world, "a prairie for outlaws." Each one of us must seek his own way there. This is his final message, for each man is forever the eye and the eye is the Visitor. Whatever remedy exists for life is never to be found at Walden. It exists, if at all, where the real Walden exists, somewhere in the incredible dimensions of the universal Eye.
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Walden: Thoreau's Unfinished Business
I
The life of Henry David Thoreau has been thoroughly explored for almost a century by critics and biographers, yet the mystery of this untraveled man who read travel literature has nowhere been better expressed than by his own old walking companion Ellery Channing, who once wrote: "I have never been able to understand what he meant by his life. Why was he so disappointed with everybody else? Why was he so interested in the river and the woods ... ? Something peculiar here I judge."
If Channing, his personal friend, was mystified, it is only to be expected that as Thoreau's literary stature has grown, the ever-present enigma of his life and thought has grown with it. Wright Morris, the distinguished novelist and critic, has asked, almost savagely, the same question in another form. Putting Channing's question in a less personal but more formidable and timeless literary context he ventures, quoting from Thoreau who spent two years upon the Walden experiment and then abandoned it, "If we are alive let us go about our business." "But," counters Morris brutally, "what business?" Thoreau fails to inform us. In the words of Morris, Walden was the opening chapter of a life, one that enthralls us, but with the remaining chapters missing.
For more than a decade after Walden was composed, Thoreau continued his intensive exploration of Concord, its inhabitants and its fields, but upon the "business" for which he left Walden he is oddly cryptic. Once, it is true, he muses in his journal that "the utmost possible novelty would be the difference between me and myself a year ago." He must then have been about some business, even though the perceptive critic Morris felt he had already performed it and was at loose ends and groping. The truth is that the critic, in a timeless sense, can be right and in another way wrong, for looking is in itself the business of art.
In a studied paragraph Carl Jung, with no reference to Thoreau, perhaps pierced closest to Thoreau's purpose without ever revealing it. He says in his alchemical studies, "Medieval alchemy prepared the greatest attack on the divine order of the universe which mankind has ever dared. Alchemy is the dawn of the age of natural sciences which, through the daemonium of the scientific spirit, drove nature and her forces into the service of mankind to a hitherto unheard of degree .... Technics and science have indeed conquered the world, but whether the soul has gained thereby is another matter."
Thoreau was indeed a spiritual wanderer through the deserts of the modern world. Almost by instinct he rejected that beginning wave of industrialism which was later to so entrance his century. He also rejected the peace he had found on the shores of Walden Pond, the alternate glazing and reflection of that great natural eye which impartially received the seasons. It was, in the end, too great for his endurance, too timeless. He was a restless pacer of fields, a reader who, in spite of occasional invective directed against those who presumed to neglect their homes for far places, nevertheless was apt with allusions drawn from travel literature, and quick to discern in man uncharted spaces.
"Few adults," once remarked Emerson, Thoreau's one-time mentor and friend, "can see nature." Thoreau was one of those who could. Moreover he saw nature as another civilization, a thing of vaster laws and vagaries than that encompassed by the human mind. When he visited the Maine woods he felt its wind upon him like the closing of a dank door from some forgotten cellar of the past.
Was it some curious midnight impulse to investigate such matters that led Thoreau to abandon the sunny hut at Walden for "other business"? Even at Walden he had heard, at midnight, the insistent fox, the "rudimental man," barking beyond his lighted window in the forest. The universe was in motion, nothing was fixed. Nature was "a prairie for outlaws:' violent, unpredictable. Alone in the environs of Walden Thoreau wandered in the midst of that greater civilization he had discovered as surely as some monstrous edifice come suddenly upon in the Mayan jungles. He never exclaimed about the Indian trails seen just at dusk in a winter snowfall -- neither where they went, nor upon what prairie they vanished or in what direction. He never ventured to tell us, but he was one of those great artist-scientists who could pursue the future through its past. This is why he lives today in the heart of young and old alike, "a man of surfaces," one critic has said, but such surfaces -- the arrowhead, the acorn, the oak leaf, the indestructible thought-print headed toward eternity -- plowed and replowed in the same field. Truly another civilization beyond man, nature herself, a vast lawless mindprint shattering traditional conceptions.
Thoreau, in his final journals, had said that the ancients with their gorgons and sphinxes could imagine more than existed. Modern men, by contrast, could not imagine so much as exists. For more than one hundred years that statement has stood to taunt us. Every succeeding year has proved Thoreau right. The one great hieroglyph, nature, is as unreadable as it ever was and so is her equally wild and unpredictable offspring, man. Like Thoreau, the examiner of lost and fragile surfaces of flint, we are only by indirection students of man. We are, in actuality, students of that greater order known as nature. It is into nature that man vanishes. "Wildness is a civilization other than our own:' Thoreau had ventured. Out of it man's trail had wandered. He had come with the great ice, drifting before its violence, scavenging the flints it had dropped. Whatever he was now, the ice had made him, the breath from the dank door, great cold, and implacable winters.
Thoreau in the final pages of Walden creates a myth about a despised worm who surmounts death and bursts from his hidden chamber in a wooden table. Was the writer dreaming of man, man freed at last from the manacles of the ice? No word of his intention remains, save of his diligent experiments with frozen caterpillars in his study -- a man preoccupied with the persistent flame of life trapped in the murderous cold. Is not the real business of the artist to seek for man's salvation, and by understanding his ingredients to make him less of an outlaw to himself, civilize him, in fact, back into that titanic otherness, that star's substance from which he had arisen? Perhaps encamped sufficiently in the great living web we might emerge again, not into the blind snow-covered eye of Walden's winter, but into the eternal spring man dreams of everywhere and nowhere finds.
Man, himself, is Walden's eye of ice and eye of summer. What now makes man an outlaw, with the fox urgent at his heels, is the fact that one of his eyes is gray and wintry and blind, while with the other is glimpsed another world just tantalizingly visible and dismissed as an illusion. What we know with certainty is that a creature with such disparate vision cannot long survive. It was that knowledge which led Thoreau to strain his eyesight till it ached and to record all he saw. A flower might open a man's mind, a box tortoise endow him with mercy, a mist enable him to see his own shifting and uncertain configuration. But the alchemist's touchstone in Thoreau was to give him sight, not power. Only man's own mind, the artist's mind, can change the winter in man.
II
There are persons who, because of youthful associations, prefer harsh-etched things before their eyes at morning. The foot of an iron bedstead perhaps, or a weathered beam on the ceiling, an abandoned mine tipple, or even a tombstone. On July 14 of the year 1973, I awoke at dawn and saw above my head the chisel marks on an eighteenth-century beam in the Concord Inn. As I strolled up the street toward the cemetery I saw a few drifters, black and white, stirring from their illegal night's sleep among the gravestones. Later I came to the Thoreau family plot and saw the little yellow stone marked "Henry" that no one is any longer sure indicates the precise place where he lies. Perhaps there is justice in this obscurity because the critics are also unsure of the contradictions and intentions of his journal, even of the classic Walden. A ghost then, of shifting features, peers out from between the gravestones, unreal, perhaps uninterpreted still.
I turned away from the early morning damp for a glimpse of the famous pond which in the country of my youth would have been called a lake. I walked its whole blue circumference with an erudite citizen of Concord. It was still an unearthly reflection of the sky, even if here and there beer bottles were bobbing in the shallows. I walked along the tracks of the old railroad where Thoreau used to listen to the telegraph wires. He had an eye for the sharp-edged artifact, I thought. The bobbing bottles, the keys to beer cans, he would have transmitted into cosmic symbols just as he had sensed all past time in the odors of a swamp. "All the ages are represented still," he had said, with nostrils flaring above the vegetation-choked water, "and you can smell them out."
It was the same, he found, with the ashes of Indian campfires, with old bricks and cellarholes. As for arrowheads, he says in a memorable passage, "I landed on two spots this afternoon and picked up a dozen. You would say it had rained arrowheads for they lie all over the surface of America. They lie in the meeting house cellar, and they lie in the distant cowpasture. They are sown like grain ... over the earth. Each one;' Thoreau writes, "yields me a thought. ... It is humanity inscribed on the face of the earth. It is a footprint -- rather a mindprint -- left everywhere .... They are not fossil bones, but, as it were, fossil thoughts forever reminding me of the mind that shaped them. I am on the trail of mind."
Some time ago in a graduate seminar met in honor of the visit of an eminent prehistorian I watched the scholar and his listeners try to grapple with the significance of an anciently shaped stone. Not one of those present, involved as they were with semantic involutions, could render up so simple an expression as "mindprint." The lonely follower of the plow at Concord had provided both art and anthropology with an expression of horizon-reaching application which it has inexplicably chosen to ignore.
Mindprints are what the first men left, mindprints will be what the last man leaves, even if it is only a beer can dropped rolling from the last living hand, or a sagging picture in a ruined house. Cans, too, have their edges, a certain harshness; they too represent a structure of the mind, perhaps even an attitude. Thoreau might have seen that, too. Indeed he had written long ago: "If the outside of a man is so variegated and extensive, what must the inside be? You are high up the Platte river," he admonished, "traversing deserts, plains covered with soda, with no deeper hollow than a prairie dog hole tenanted by owls.... "
Perhaps in those lines he had seen the most of man's journey through the centuries. At all events he had coined two incomparable phrases, the "mindprint" which marked man's strange passage through the millennia and which differentiated him completely from the bones of all those creatures that lay strewn in the basement rocks of the planet, and that magnificent expression "another civilization," coined to apply to nature. That "civilization" contained for Thoreau the mysterious hieroglyphs left by a deer mouse, or the preternatural winter concealment of a moth's cocoon in which leaves were made to cooperate. He saw in the dancing of a fox on snow-whipped Walden ice "the fluctuations of some mind."
Thoreau had extended his thought-prints to something beyond what we of this age would call the natural. He would read them into nature itself, see, in other words, some kind of trail through that prairie for outlaws that had always intimidated him. On mountain tops, he had realized a star's substance, sensed a nature "not bound to be kind to man." Nevertheless he confided firmly to his diary, "the earth which I have seen cannot bury me." He searches desperately, all senses alert, for a way to read these greater hieroglyphs in which the tiny interpretable minds of our forerunners are embedded. We, with a sharper knowledge of human limitations and a devotion to the empirical fact, may deny to ourselves the reality of this other civilization within whose laws and probabilities we exist. Thoreau reposed faith in the consistency of nature's habits, but only up to a point, for he was a student of change.
As Alfred North Whitehead was to remark long afterward, "We are in the world and the world is in us" -- a phrase that all artists should contemplate. Something, some law of a greater civilization, sustains nature from moment to moment within and above the void of non-being. "I hold," maintains the process philosopher, "that these unities of existence, these occasions of experience are the really real things which in their collective unity compose the evolving universe." In spite of today's emphasis upon the erratic nature of the submicroscopic particle there is, warns Whitehead the mathematician, "no valid inference from mere possibility to matter of fact; or, in other words, from mere mathematics to concrete nature .... Apart from metaphysical presupposition there can be no civilization." I doubt if Whitehead had ever perused Thoreau's journals, yet both return to the word "civilization," that strange on-going otherness of interlinked connections that makes up the nature that we know, just as human society and its artistic productions represent it in miniature, even to its eternal novelty.
Now Thoreau was a stay-at-home who traveled much in his mind, both in travel literature and beside Walden Pond. I, by circumstance, directly after delivering a lecture at Concord and gazing in my turn at Walden, was forced immediately to turn and fly west to the badlands and dinosaur-haunted gulches of Montana, some of its natives wild, half-civilized, still, in the way that Thoreau had viewed one of his Indian guides in Maine: "He shall spend a sunny day, and in this century be my contemporary. Why read history, then, if the ages and the generations are now? He lives three thousand years deep into time, an age not yet described by poets." As I followed our mixed-breed Cheyenne, as ambivalent toward us as the savage blood in his veins demanded, it came to me, as it must have come to many others, that seeing is not the same thing as understanding.
One man sees with indifference a leaf fall; another with the vision of Thoreau invokes the whole of that nostalgic world which we call autumn. One man sees a red fox running through a shaft of sunlight and lifts a rifle; another lays a restraining hand upon his companion's arm and says, "Please. There goes the last wild gaiety in the world. Let it live, let it run." This is the role of the alchemist, the true, if sometimes inarticulate artist. He transmutes the cricket's song in an autumn night to an aching void in the heart; snowflakes become the flying years. And when, as archaeologist, he lifts from the encrusting earth those forgotten objects Thoreau called "fossil thoughts," he is giving depth and tragedy and catharsis to the one great drama that concerns us most, the supreme mystery, man. Only man is capable of comprehending all he was and all that he has failed to be.
On those sun-beaten uplands over which we wandered, every chip of quartzite, every patinized flint, gleamed in our eyes as large as the monuments of other lands. Our vision in that thin air was incredibly enhanced and prolonged. Thoreau had conceived of nature as a single reflecting eye, the Walden eye of which he strove to be a solitary part, to apprehend with an his being. It was chance that had brought me in the span of a day to the dinosaur beds of Montana. Thoreau would have liked that. He had always regarded such places as endowed with the vapors of Nox, places where rules were annulled. He had caned arrowheads mindprints. What then would he have termed a tooth of Tyrannosaurus rex held in my palm? The sign of another civilization, another order of mind? Or that tiny Cretaceous mammal which was a step on the way to ourselves? Surely it represented mind in embryo, our mind, but not of our devising. What would he have caned it -- that miracle of a bygone moment, the annulment of what had been, to be replaced by an eye, the artist's eye, that nature had never heretofore produced among her creatures? Would these have answered for him on this giant upland, itself sleeping like some tired dinosaur with outspread claws? Would he have simply caned it "nature," as we sometimes do, scarcely knowing how to interpret the looming inchoate power out of which we have been born? Or would he have labeled nature itself a mindprint beyond our power to read or to interpret?
A man might sketch Triceratops, but the alphabet from which it was assembled had long since disappeared. As for man, how had his own alphabet been constructed? The nature in which he momentarily resided was a journal in which the script was always changing, like the dancing footprints of the fox on icy Walden Pond. Here, exposed about me, was the great journal Thoreau had striven to read, the business, in the end, that had taken him beyond Walden. He would have been too wise, too close to earth, too intimidated, to have caned such a journal human. It was palpably inscribed from a star's substance. Tiny and brief in that journal were the hieroglyphs of man. Like Thoreau, we had come to the world's end, but not to the end of nature, not to the end of time. An that could be read was that we had a past; that was something no other life on the planet had learned. There was, we had also ascertained, a future.
In the meantime, Thoreau would have protested, there is the eye, the sun and the eye. "Nothing must be postponed; find eternity in each moment." But how few of us are endowed to sustain Thoreau's almost diabolical vision. Here and here alone the true alchemist of Jung's thought must come to exist in each of us. It is ours to transmute, not iron, not copper, not gold, but our tracks through nature, see them final1yattended by self-knowledge, by the vision of the universal eye, that faculty possessed by the alchemist at Walden Pond.
"Miasma and infection come from within," he once wrote. It was as if he sought the cleanliness of flint patinized by the sun of ages, the artifact, the mindprint from which the mind itself had departed. It is something that perhaps only a few artists like Piranesi have understood amidst cromlechs, shards, and broken cities. It is man's final act as an alchemist to find the philosopher's stone in a desert-varnished flint and to watch himself, his mind, his species, evaporate into the air and sun that once had nourished the dinosaurs. Man alone knows the way he came; man alone is the alchemical animal who can vaporize himself in an utter cleansing, either by the powers of art alone, or, more terribly, by that dread device which began its active life at Los Alamos more than thirty years ago.
On a great hill in Montana on the day I had flown from Walden, I picked up a quartz knife that had the look of ten thousand years about it. It was as clean as the sun and I knew suddenly what Thoreau had been thinking about his arrowheads, his mindprints. They were free at last. They had aged out of human history, out of corruption. They were joined to that other civilization, evidence of some power that ran al1 through nature. They were a sign now beyond man, like al1those other traceries of the frost that Thoreau had studied so avidly for evidence of some greater intel1igence.
For just a moment I was back at Walden with a mind beyond infection by man, the mind of an alchemist who knew instinctively how laws might be annulled and great civilizations rise evanescent as toadstools on an autumn night. I too had taken on a desert varnish. I might have been a man but, if so, a man from whom centuries had been flayed away. I was being transmuted, worn down. There was flint by my hand that had not moved for millennia. It had ceased to radiate a message and whatever message I, as man, had carried there from Walden was also forgotten.
I lay among logs of petrified wood and found myself already stiffening. Nature was bound somewhere; the great mind was readying some new experiment but not, perhaps, for man. I sighed a little with the cleanliness of that release. I slept deep under the great sky. I slept sound. For a moment as I drowsed I thought of the little stone marked "Henry" in the Concord cemetery. He would have known, I thought -- the great alchemist had always known -- and then I slept. It was Henry who had once written "the best philosophy is all untrue," untrue, that is, for man. Across an untamed prairie one's footprints must always be altering, that was the condition of the world, the only one that mattered, the only one for art.
III
But why, some midnight questioner persisted in my brain, why had he left that sunny doorway of his hut in Walden for unknown mysterious business? Had he not written as though he had settled down forever? Why had Channing chronicled Thoreau's grievous disappointments? What had he been seeking and how had it affected him? If Walden was the opening chapter of a life, might not there still be a lurking message, a termination, a final chapter beyond his recorded death?
It was evident that he had seen the whole of American culture as copper-tinted by its antecedents, its people shadowy and gigantic as figures looming indistinctly in some Indian-summer haze. He had written of an old tree near Concord penetrated by a flying arrow with the shaft still attached. Some of the driving force of that flint projectile still persisted in his mind. Perhaps indeed those points that had once sung their message through every glade of the eastern woodland had spoken louder than the telegraph harp to which his ears had been attuned at Walden. Protest as he would, cultivate sauntering as he would, abhor as he would the rootless travelers whose works he read by lamplight, he was himself the eternal traveler. On the mountains of New Hampshire he had found "small and almost uninhabited ponds, apparently without fish, sources of rivers, still and cold, strange as condensed clouds." He had wandered without realizing it back into the time of the first continental ice recession.
"It is not worth the while to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar," he once castigated some luckless explorer, but why then this peering into lifeless tarns or engrossing himself with the meteoritic detritus of the Appalachians? Did he secretly wish to come to a place of no more life, where a man might stiffen into immobility as I had found myself freezing into the agate limbs of petrified trees in Montana? A divided man, one might say with surety. The bold man of abrasive village argument, the defender of John Brown, the advocate of civil disobedience, the spokesman who supplied many of the phrases which youthful revolutionaries hurled at their elders in the sixties of this century, felt the world too large for him.
As a college graduate he wept at the thought of leaving Concord. Emerson's well-meant efforts to launch him into the intellectual life of New York had failed completely. He admitted that he would gladly fall "into some crevice along with leaves and acorns." To Emerson's dismay he captained huckleberry parties among children and was content to be a rural surveyor, wandering over the farms and woodlots he could not own, save for his all-embracing eye. "There is no more fatal blunderer," he protested, "than he who consumes the greater part of life getting a living." He had emphasized that contemplative view at Walden, lived it, in fact, to the point where the world came finally to accept him as a kind of rural Robinson Crusoe who, as the cities grew, it might prove wise to emulate.
"I sat in my sunny doorway," he ruminated, "from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night."
This passage would seem to stand for the serene and timeless life of an Oriental sage, a well-adjusted man, as the psychiatrists of our day would have it. Nevertheless this benign facade is deceptive. There is no doubt that Thoreau honestly meant what he said at the time he said it, but the man was storm-driven. He would not be content with the first chapter of his life; he would, like a true artist, dredge up dreams even from the bottom of a pond.
In the year 1837 Thoreau confided abruptly to his journal: "Truth strikes us from behind, and in the dark." Thoreau's life was to be comparatively short and ill-starred. Our final question must, therefore, revolve, not about wanderings in autumn fields, not the drowsing in pleasant doorways where time stood still forever, but rather upon the leap of that lost arrow left quivering in an ancient oak. It was, in symbol, the hurtling purposeful arrow of a seemingly aimless life. It has been overlooked by Thoreau's biographers, largely because they have been men of the study or men of the forest. They have not been men of the seashore, or men gifted with the artist's eye. They have not trudged the naturalist's long miles through sea sand, where the war between two elements leaves even the smallest object magnified, as the bleached bone or broken utensil can be similarly magnified only on the dead lake beaches of the west.
Thoreau had been drawn to Cape Cod in 1849, a visit he had twice repeated. It was not the tourist resort it is today. It was still the country of men on impoverished farms, who went to sea or combed the beaches like wreckers seeking cargo. On those beaches, commented Thoreau, in a posthumous work which he was never destined to see in print, "a house was rarely visible ... and the solitude was that of the ocean and the desert combined." The ceaseless roar of the surf, the strands of devil's-apron, the sun jellies, the stories of the drowned cast on the winter coast awoke in Thoreau what must have been memories of Emerson's shipwrecked friend Margaret Fuller. Here, recorded the chronicler, was a wilder, less human nature. Objects on the beach, he noted, were always more grotesque and dilated than upon approach they proved to be. A cast-up pair of gloves suggested the reality of hands.
Thoreau's account in Cape Cod of the Charity House to which his wanderings led him takes on a special meaning. I think it embodies something of a final answer to Channing's question about Thoreau's disappointment in his fellow men. Published two years after his death, it contains his formulation of the end of his business, or perhaps I should say of his quest. Hidden in what has been dismissed as a mere book of travel is an episode as potentially fabulous as Melville's great white whale.
First, however, I must tell the story of another coast because it will serve to illuminate Thoreau's final perception. A man, a shore dweller on Long Island Sound, told me of his discovery in a winter dawn. All night there had been a heavy surf and freezing wind. When he came to stroll along his beach at morning he had immediately seen a lifeboat cast upon the shingle and a still, black figure with the eastern sun behind it on the horizon. Gripped by a premonition he ran forward. The seaman in oilskins was alone and stiffly upright. A compass was clutched in his numb fingers. The man was sheeted in ice. Ice over his beard, his clothing, his hands, ice over his fixed, open eyes. Had he made the shore alive but too frozen to move? No one would ever know, just as no one would ever know his name or the sinking vessel from which he came. With desperate courage he had steered a true course through a wild night of breakers only to freeze within sight of help.
In those fishing days on Cape Cod, Thoreau came to know many such stories -- vessels without weather warnings smashed in the winter seas, while a pittance of soaked men, perhaps, gained the shore. The sea, the intolerable sea, tumbled with total indifference the bodies of the dead or the living who were tossed up through the grinding surf of winter. These were common events in the days of sail.
The people who gained a scant living along that coast entertained, early in the nineteenth century, the thought that a few well-stocked sheds, or "Charity Houses," might enable lost seamen who made the shore to warm and feed themselves among the dunes till rescued. The idea was to provide straw and matches and provender, supervised and checked at intervals by some responsible person. Impressed at first by this signal beneficence of landsmen, Thoreau noted the instructions set down for the benefit of mariners. Finally, he approached one such Charity House. It appeared, he commented, "but a stage to the grave." The chimney had fallen. As he and his companion wished to gain an idea of a "humane house," they put their eyes, by turns, to a knothole in the door. "We had," Thoreau comments ironically, "some practice at looking inward -- the pupil becomes enlarged. Nature is never so dark that a patient eye may not prevail over it."
So there, at last, he saw the end of his journey, of the business begun at Walden. He was peering into the Charity House of man, upon a Cape Cod beach. For frozen, shipwrecked mariners he saw a fireplace with no matches, no provisions, no straw upon the floor. "We looked," he said, "into the bowels of mercy, and for bread we found a stone." Shivering like castaways, "we looked through the knothole into that night without a star, until we concluded it was not a humane house at all." The arrow Thoreau had followed away from Walden had pierced as deep as Captain Ahab's lance. No wonder the demoniacal foxes leaping at Thoreau's window had urged him to begone. He had always looked for a crevice into the future. He had peered inward instead. It was ourselves who were rudimental men.
Recently I had a letter from one of my students who is working in the Arctic and who has a cat acquired somewhere in his travels. The cat, he explained to me, hunts in the barrens behind the Eskimo village. Occasionally it proudly brings in a lemming or a bird to his hut. The Eskimo were curious about the unfamiliar creature.
"Why does he do that?" my friend was asked.
"Because he is a good cat," my student explained. "He shares his game."
"So, so." The old men nodded wisely. "It is true for the man and for the beast -- the good man and the good beast. They share, yes indeed. They share the game."
I think my young quick-witted friend had momentarily opened the eye of winter. Before laying aside his letter, I thought of the eye of Walden as I had seen it under the summer sun. It was the sharing that had impressed the people of the ice and it was a great sharing of things seen that Thoreau had attempted at his pond. A hundred years after his death people were still trying to understand what he was about. They were still trying to get both eyes open. They were still trying to understand that the town surveyor had brought something to share with his fellows, something that, if they partook of it, might transpose them to another world.
I had thought, staring across an angular gravestone at Concord and again as I held my wind-varnished flint in Montana, that "sharing" could be the word. It was appropriate, even though Thoreau in a final bitterness had felt sharing to be as impoverished as the Charity House for sailors -- a knothole glimpse into the human condition. How then should the artist see? By an eye applied to a knothole? By a magnification of sand-filled gloves washed up on a beach? Could this be the solitary business that led Thoreau on his deathbed to mutter, whether in irony or confusion, "one world at a time"?
This is the terror of our age. How should we see? In what world are we? For we have fallen out of nature and see sometimes more and sometimes less. We see the past, the looming future, and then, so fearfully is the eye confused, that it stares inverted into a Charity House that appears to reflect a less than human heart. Is this Thoreau's final surrealist vision, his glance through the knothole into the "humane house"? It would appear at least to be a glimpse from one of those two great alternating eyes at Walden Pond from which in the end he had fled -- the blind eye of winter and that innocent blue pupil beside which he had once drowsed when time seemed endless. Both are equally real, as the great poets and prophets have always known, but it was Thoreau's tragic destiny to see with eyes strained beyond endurance man subsiding into two wrinkled gloves grasping at the edge of infinity. It is his final contribution to literature, the final hidden conclusion of an unwritten life whose first chapter Morris had rightly diagnosed as Walden.
There is an old Biblical saying that our days are prolonged and every vision fails us. This I would dispute. The vision of the great artist does not fail. It sharpens and refines with age until everything extraneous is pared away. "Simplify," Thoreau had advocated. Two gloves, devoid of flesh, clutching the stones of the ebbing tide become, transmuted, the most dreadful object in the world.
"There has been nothing but the sun and eye from the beginning," Thoreau had written when his only business was looking and he grew, as he expressed it, "like corn in the night." The sun and the eye are the two aspects of nature which are irremediably linked. But the eye of man constitutes an awesome crystal whose diffractions are far greater than those of any Newtonian prism.
We see, as artists, as scientists, each in his own way, through the inexorable lens we cannot alter. In a nature which Thoreau recognized as unfixed and lawless anything might happen. The artist's endeavor is to make it happen -- the unlawful, the oncoming world, whether endurable or mad, but shaped, shaped always by the harsh angles of truth, the truth as glimpsed through the terrible crystal of genius. This is the one sure rule of that other civilization which we have come to know is greater than our own. Thoreau called it, from the first, "unfinished business," when he turned and walked away from his hut at Walden Pond.
I
The life of Henry David Thoreau has been thoroughly explored for almost a century by critics and biographers, yet the mystery of this untraveled man who read travel literature has nowhere been better expressed than by his own old walking companion Ellery Channing, who once wrote: "I have never been able to understand what he meant by his life. Why was he so disappointed with everybody else? Why was he so interested in the river and the woods ... ? Something peculiar here I judge."
If Channing, his personal friend, was mystified, it is only to be expected that as Thoreau's literary stature has grown, the ever-present enigma of his life and thought has grown with it. Wright Morris, the distinguished novelist and critic, has asked, almost savagely, the same question in another form. Putting Channing's question in a less personal but more formidable and timeless literary context he ventures, quoting from Thoreau who spent two years upon the Walden experiment and then abandoned it, "If we are alive let us go about our business." "But," counters Morris brutally, "what business?" Thoreau fails to inform us. In the words of Morris, Walden was the opening chapter of a life, one that enthralls us, but with the remaining chapters missing.
For more than a decade after Walden was composed, Thoreau continued his intensive exploration of Concord, its inhabitants and its fields, but upon the "business" for which he left Walden he is oddly cryptic. Once, it is true, he muses in his journal that "the utmost possible novelty would be the difference between me and myself a year ago." He must then have been about some business, even though the perceptive critic Morris felt he had already performed it and was at loose ends and groping. The truth is that the critic, in a timeless sense, can be right and in another way wrong, for looking is in itself the business of art.
In a studied paragraph Carl Jung, with no reference to Thoreau, perhaps pierced closest to Thoreau's purpose without ever revealing it. He says in his alchemical studies, "Medieval alchemy prepared the greatest attack on the divine order of the universe which mankind has ever dared. Alchemy is the dawn of the age of natural sciences which, through the daemonium of the scientific spirit, drove nature and her forces into the service of mankind to a hitherto unheard of degree .... Technics and science have indeed conquered the world, but whether the soul has gained thereby is another matter."
Thoreau was indeed a spiritual wanderer through the deserts of the modern world. Almost by instinct he rejected that beginning wave of industrialism which was later to so entrance his century. He also rejected the peace he had found on the shores of Walden Pond, the alternate glazing and reflection of that great natural eye which impartially received the seasons. It was, in the end, too great for his endurance, too timeless. He was a restless pacer of fields, a reader who, in spite of occasional invective directed against those who presumed to neglect their homes for far places, nevertheless was apt with allusions drawn from travel literature, and quick to discern in man uncharted spaces.
"Few adults," once remarked Emerson, Thoreau's one-time mentor and friend, "can see nature." Thoreau was one of those who could. Moreover he saw nature as another civilization, a thing of vaster laws and vagaries than that encompassed by the human mind. When he visited the Maine woods he felt its wind upon him like the closing of a dank door from some forgotten cellar of the past.
Was it some curious midnight impulse to investigate such matters that led Thoreau to abandon the sunny hut at Walden for "other business"? Even at Walden he had heard, at midnight, the insistent fox, the "rudimental man," barking beyond his lighted window in the forest. The universe was in motion, nothing was fixed. Nature was "a prairie for outlaws:' violent, unpredictable. Alone in the environs of Walden Thoreau wandered in the midst of that greater civilization he had discovered as surely as some monstrous edifice come suddenly upon in the Mayan jungles. He never exclaimed about the Indian trails seen just at dusk in a winter snowfall -- neither where they went, nor upon what prairie they vanished or in what direction. He never ventured to tell us, but he was one of those great artist-scientists who could pursue the future through its past. This is why he lives today in the heart of young and old alike, "a man of surfaces," one critic has said, but such surfaces -- the arrowhead, the acorn, the oak leaf, the indestructible thought-print headed toward eternity -- plowed and replowed in the same field. Truly another civilization beyond man, nature herself, a vast lawless mindprint shattering traditional conceptions.
Thoreau, in his final journals, had said that the ancients with their gorgons and sphinxes could imagine more than existed. Modern men, by contrast, could not imagine so much as exists. For more than one hundred years that statement has stood to taunt us. Every succeeding year has proved Thoreau right. The one great hieroglyph, nature, is as unreadable as it ever was and so is her equally wild and unpredictable offspring, man. Like Thoreau, the examiner of lost and fragile surfaces of flint, we are only by indirection students of man. We are, in actuality, students of that greater order known as nature. It is into nature that man vanishes. "Wildness is a civilization other than our own:' Thoreau had ventured. Out of it man's trail had wandered. He had come with the great ice, drifting before its violence, scavenging the flints it had dropped. Whatever he was now, the ice had made him, the breath from the dank door, great cold, and implacable winters.
Thoreau in the final pages of Walden creates a myth about a despised worm who surmounts death and bursts from his hidden chamber in a wooden table. Was the writer dreaming of man, man freed at last from the manacles of the ice? No word of his intention remains, save of his diligent experiments with frozen caterpillars in his study -- a man preoccupied with the persistent flame of life trapped in the murderous cold. Is not the real business of the artist to seek for man's salvation, and by understanding his ingredients to make him less of an outlaw to himself, civilize him, in fact, back into that titanic otherness, that star's substance from which he had arisen? Perhaps encamped sufficiently in the great living web we might emerge again, not into the blind snow-covered eye of Walden's winter, but into the eternal spring man dreams of everywhere and nowhere finds.
Man, himself, is Walden's eye of ice and eye of summer. What now makes man an outlaw, with the fox urgent at his heels, is the fact that one of his eyes is gray and wintry and blind, while with the other is glimpsed another world just tantalizingly visible and dismissed as an illusion. What we know with certainty is that a creature with such disparate vision cannot long survive. It was that knowledge which led Thoreau to strain his eyesight till it ached and to record all he saw. A flower might open a man's mind, a box tortoise endow him with mercy, a mist enable him to see his own shifting and uncertain configuration. But the alchemist's touchstone in Thoreau was to give him sight, not power. Only man's own mind, the artist's mind, can change the winter in man.
II
There are persons who, because of youthful associations, prefer harsh-etched things before their eyes at morning. The foot of an iron bedstead perhaps, or a weathered beam on the ceiling, an abandoned mine tipple, or even a tombstone. On July 14 of the year 1973, I awoke at dawn and saw above my head the chisel marks on an eighteenth-century beam in the Concord Inn. As I strolled up the street toward the cemetery I saw a few drifters, black and white, stirring from their illegal night's sleep among the gravestones. Later I came to the Thoreau family plot and saw the little yellow stone marked "Henry" that no one is any longer sure indicates the precise place where he lies. Perhaps there is justice in this obscurity because the critics are also unsure of the contradictions and intentions of his journal, even of the classic Walden. A ghost then, of shifting features, peers out from between the gravestones, unreal, perhaps uninterpreted still.
I turned away from the early morning damp for a glimpse of the famous pond which in the country of my youth would have been called a lake. I walked its whole blue circumference with an erudite citizen of Concord. It was still an unearthly reflection of the sky, even if here and there beer bottles were bobbing in the shallows. I walked along the tracks of the old railroad where Thoreau used to listen to the telegraph wires. He had an eye for the sharp-edged artifact, I thought. The bobbing bottles, the keys to beer cans, he would have transmitted into cosmic symbols just as he had sensed all past time in the odors of a swamp. "All the ages are represented still," he had said, with nostrils flaring above the vegetation-choked water, "and you can smell them out."
It was the same, he found, with the ashes of Indian campfires, with old bricks and cellarholes. As for arrowheads, he says in a memorable passage, "I landed on two spots this afternoon and picked up a dozen. You would say it had rained arrowheads for they lie all over the surface of America. They lie in the meeting house cellar, and they lie in the distant cowpasture. They are sown like grain ... over the earth. Each one;' Thoreau writes, "yields me a thought. ... It is humanity inscribed on the face of the earth. It is a footprint -- rather a mindprint -- left everywhere .... They are not fossil bones, but, as it were, fossil thoughts forever reminding me of the mind that shaped them. I am on the trail of mind."
Some time ago in a graduate seminar met in honor of the visit of an eminent prehistorian I watched the scholar and his listeners try to grapple with the significance of an anciently shaped stone. Not one of those present, involved as they were with semantic involutions, could render up so simple an expression as "mindprint." The lonely follower of the plow at Concord had provided both art and anthropology with an expression of horizon-reaching application which it has inexplicably chosen to ignore.
Mindprints are what the first men left, mindprints will be what the last man leaves, even if it is only a beer can dropped rolling from the last living hand, or a sagging picture in a ruined house. Cans, too, have their edges, a certain harshness; they too represent a structure of the mind, perhaps even an attitude. Thoreau might have seen that, too. Indeed he had written long ago: "If the outside of a man is so variegated and extensive, what must the inside be? You are high up the Platte river," he admonished, "traversing deserts, plains covered with soda, with no deeper hollow than a prairie dog hole tenanted by owls.... "
Perhaps in those lines he had seen the most of man's journey through the centuries. At all events he had coined two incomparable phrases, the "mindprint" which marked man's strange passage through the millennia and which differentiated him completely from the bones of all those creatures that lay strewn in the basement rocks of the planet, and that magnificent expression "another civilization," coined to apply to nature. That "civilization" contained for Thoreau the mysterious hieroglyphs left by a deer mouse, or the preternatural winter concealment of a moth's cocoon in which leaves were made to cooperate. He saw in the dancing of a fox on snow-whipped Walden ice "the fluctuations of some mind."
Thoreau had extended his thought-prints to something beyond what we of this age would call the natural. He would read them into nature itself, see, in other words, some kind of trail through that prairie for outlaws that had always intimidated him. On mountain tops, he had realized a star's substance, sensed a nature "not bound to be kind to man." Nevertheless he confided firmly to his diary, "the earth which I have seen cannot bury me." He searches desperately, all senses alert, for a way to read these greater hieroglyphs in which the tiny interpretable minds of our forerunners are embedded. We, with a sharper knowledge of human limitations and a devotion to the empirical fact, may deny to ourselves the reality of this other civilization within whose laws and probabilities we exist. Thoreau reposed faith in the consistency of nature's habits, but only up to a point, for he was a student of change.
As Alfred North Whitehead was to remark long afterward, "We are in the world and the world is in us" -- a phrase that all artists should contemplate. Something, some law of a greater civilization, sustains nature from moment to moment within and above the void of non-being. "I hold," maintains the process philosopher, "that these unities of existence, these occasions of experience are the really real things which in their collective unity compose the evolving universe." In spite of today's emphasis upon the erratic nature of the submicroscopic particle there is, warns Whitehead the mathematician, "no valid inference from mere possibility to matter of fact; or, in other words, from mere mathematics to concrete nature .... Apart from metaphysical presupposition there can be no civilization." I doubt if Whitehead had ever perused Thoreau's journals, yet both return to the word "civilization," that strange on-going otherness of interlinked connections that makes up the nature that we know, just as human society and its artistic productions represent it in miniature, even to its eternal novelty.
Now Thoreau was a stay-at-home who traveled much in his mind, both in travel literature and beside Walden Pond. I, by circumstance, directly after delivering a lecture at Concord and gazing in my turn at Walden, was forced immediately to turn and fly west to the badlands and dinosaur-haunted gulches of Montana, some of its natives wild, half-civilized, still, in the way that Thoreau had viewed one of his Indian guides in Maine: "He shall spend a sunny day, and in this century be my contemporary. Why read history, then, if the ages and the generations are now? He lives three thousand years deep into time, an age not yet described by poets." As I followed our mixed-breed Cheyenne, as ambivalent toward us as the savage blood in his veins demanded, it came to me, as it must have come to many others, that seeing is not the same thing as understanding.
One man sees with indifference a leaf fall; another with the vision of Thoreau invokes the whole of that nostalgic world which we call autumn. One man sees a red fox running through a shaft of sunlight and lifts a rifle; another lays a restraining hand upon his companion's arm and says, "Please. There goes the last wild gaiety in the world. Let it live, let it run." This is the role of the alchemist, the true, if sometimes inarticulate artist. He transmutes the cricket's song in an autumn night to an aching void in the heart; snowflakes become the flying years. And when, as archaeologist, he lifts from the encrusting earth those forgotten objects Thoreau called "fossil thoughts," he is giving depth and tragedy and catharsis to the one great drama that concerns us most, the supreme mystery, man. Only man is capable of comprehending all he was and all that he has failed to be.
On those sun-beaten uplands over which we wandered, every chip of quartzite, every patinized flint, gleamed in our eyes as large as the monuments of other lands. Our vision in that thin air was incredibly enhanced and prolonged. Thoreau had conceived of nature as a single reflecting eye, the Walden eye of which he strove to be a solitary part, to apprehend with an his being. It was chance that had brought me in the span of a day to the dinosaur beds of Montana. Thoreau would have liked that. He had always regarded such places as endowed with the vapors of Nox, places where rules were annulled. He had caned arrowheads mindprints. What then would he have termed a tooth of Tyrannosaurus rex held in my palm? The sign of another civilization, another order of mind? Or that tiny Cretaceous mammal which was a step on the way to ourselves? Surely it represented mind in embryo, our mind, but not of our devising. What would he have caned it -- that miracle of a bygone moment, the annulment of what had been, to be replaced by an eye, the artist's eye, that nature had never heretofore produced among her creatures? Would these have answered for him on this giant upland, itself sleeping like some tired dinosaur with outspread claws? Would he have simply caned it "nature," as we sometimes do, scarcely knowing how to interpret the looming inchoate power out of which we have been born? Or would he have labeled nature itself a mindprint beyond our power to read or to interpret?
A man might sketch Triceratops, but the alphabet from which it was assembled had long since disappeared. As for man, how had his own alphabet been constructed? The nature in which he momentarily resided was a journal in which the script was always changing, like the dancing footprints of the fox on icy Walden Pond. Here, exposed about me, was the great journal Thoreau had striven to read, the business, in the end, that had taken him beyond Walden. He would have been too wise, too close to earth, too intimidated, to have caned such a journal human. It was palpably inscribed from a star's substance. Tiny and brief in that journal were the hieroglyphs of man. Like Thoreau, we had come to the world's end, but not to the end of nature, not to the end of time. An that could be read was that we had a past; that was something no other life on the planet had learned. There was, we had also ascertained, a future.
In the meantime, Thoreau would have protested, there is the eye, the sun and the eye. "Nothing must be postponed; find eternity in each moment." But how few of us are endowed to sustain Thoreau's almost diabolical vision. Here and here alone the true alchemist of Jung's thought must come to exist in each of us. It is ours to transmute, not iron, not copper, not gold, but our tracks through nature, see them final1yattended by self-knowledge, by the vision of the universal eye, that faculty possessed by the alchemist at Walden Pond.
"Miasma and infection come from within," he once wrote. It was as if he sought the cleanliness of flint patinized by the sun of ages, the artifact, the mindprint from which the mind itself had departed. It is something that perhaps only a few artists like Piranesi have understood amidst cromlechs, shards, and broken cities. It is man's final act as an alchemist to find the philosopher's stone in a desert-varnished flint and to watch himself, his mind, his species, evaporate into the air and sun that once had nourished the dinosaurs. Man alone knows the way he came; man alone is the alchemical animal who can vaporize himself in an utter cleansing, either by the powers of art alone, or, more terribly, by that dread device which began its active life at Los Alamos more than thirty years ago.
On a great hill in Montana on the day I had flown from Walden, I picked up a quartz knife that had the look of ten thousand years about it. It was as clean as the sun and I knew suddenly what Thoreau had been thinking about his arrowheads, his mindprints. They were free at last. They had aged out of human history, out of corruption. They were joined to that other civilization, evidence of some power that ran al1 through nature. They were a sign now beyond man, like al1those other traceries of the frost that Thoreau had studied so avidly for evidence of some greater intel1igence.
For just a moment I was back at Walden with a mind beyond infection by man, the mind of an alchemist who knew instinctively how laws might be annulled and great civilizations rise evanescent as toadstools on an autumn night. I too had taken on a desert varnish. I might have been a man but, if so, a man from whom centuries had been flayed away. I was being transmuted, worn down. There was flint by my hand that had not moved for millennia. It had ceased to radiate a message and whatever message I, as man, had carried there from Walden was also forgotten.
I lay among logs of petrified wood and found myself already stiffening. Nature was bound somewhere; the great mind was readying some new experiment but not, perhaps, for man. I sighed a little with the cleanliness of that release. I slept deep under the great sky. I slept sound. For a moment as I drowsed I thought of the little stone marked "Henry" in the Concord cemetery. He would have known, I thought -- the great alchemist had always known -- and then I slept. It was Henry who had once written "the best philosophy is all untrue," untrue, that is, for man. Across an untamed prairie one's footprints must always be altering, that was the condition of the world, the only one that mattered, the only one for art.
III
But why, some midnight questioner persisted in my brain, why had he left that sunny doorway of his hut in Walden for unknown mysterious business? Had he not written as though he had settled down forever? Why had Channing chronicled Thoreau's grievous disappointments? What had he been seeking and how had it affected him? If Walden was the opening chapter of a life, might not there still be a lurking message, a termination, a final chapter beyond his recorded death?
It was evident that he had seen the whole of American culture as copper-tinted by its antecedents, its people shadowy and gigantic as figures looming indistinctly in some Indian-summer haze. He had written of an old tree near Concord penetrated by a flying arrow with the shaft still attached. Some of the driving force of that flint projectile still persisted in his mind. Perhaps indeed those points that had once sung their message through every glade of the eastern woodland had spoken louder than the telegraph harp to which his ears had been attuned at Walden. Protest as he would, cultivate sauntering as he would, abhor as he would the rootless travelers whose works he read by lamplight, he was himself the eternal traveler. On the mountains of New Hampshire he had found "small and almost uninhabited ponds, apparently without fish, sources of rivers, still and cold, strange as condensed clouds." He had wandered without realizing it back into the time of the first continental ice recession.
"It is not worth the while to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar," he once castigated some luckless explorer, but why then this peering into lifeless tarns or engrossing himself with the meteoritic detritus of the Appalachians? Did he secretly wish to come to a place of no more life, where a man might stiffen into immobility as I had found myself freezing into the agate limbs of petrified trees in Montana? A divided man, one might say with surety. The bold man of abrasive village argument, the defender of John Brown, the advocate of civil disobedience, the spokesman who supplied many of the phrases which youthful revolutionaries hurled at their elders in the sixties of this century, felt the world too large for him.
As a college graduate he wept at the thought of leaving Concord. Emerson's well-meant efforts to launch him into the intellectual life of New York had failed completely. He admitted that he would gladly fall "into some crevice along with leaves and acorns." To Emerson's dismay he captained huckleberry parties among children and was content to be a rural surveyor, wandering over the farms and woodlots he could not own, save for his all-embracing eye. "There is no more fatal blunderer," he protested, "than he who consumes the greater part of life getting a living." He had emphasized that contemplative view at Walden, lived it, in fact, to the point where the world came finally to accept him as a kind of rural Robinson Crusoe who, as the cities grew, it might prove wise to emulate.
"I sat in my sunny doorway," he ruminated, "from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night."
This passage would seem to stand for the serene and timeless life of an Oriental sage, a well-adjusted man, as the psychiatrists of our day would have it. Nevertheless this benign facade is deceptive. There is no doubt that Thoreau honestly meant what he said at the time he said it, but the man was storm-driven. He would not be content with the first chapter of his life; he would, like a true artist, dredge up dreams even from the bottom of a pond.
In the year 1837 Thoreau confided abruptly to his journal: "Truth strikes us from behind, and in the dark." Thoreau's life was to be comparatively short and ill-starred. Our final question must, therefore, revolve, not about wanderings in autumn fields, not the drowsing in pleasant doorways where time stood still forever, but rather upon the leap of that lost arrow left quivering in an ancient oak. It was, in symbol, the hurtling purposeful arrow of a seemingly aimless life. It has been overlooked by Thoreau's biographers, largely because they have been men of the study or men of the forest. They have not been men of the seashore, or men gifted with the artist's eye. They have not trudged the naturalist's long miles through sea sand, where the war between two elements leaves even the smallest object magnified, as the bleached bone or broken utensil can be similarly magnified only on the dead lake beaches of the west.
Thoreau had been drawn to Cape Cod in 1849, a visit he had twice repeated. It was not the tourist resort it is today. It was still the country of men on impoverished farms, who went to sea or combed the beaches like wreckers seeking cargo. On those beaches, commented Thoreau, in a posthumous work which he was never destined to see in print, "a house was rarely visible ... and the solitude was that of the ocean and the desert combined." The ceaseless roar of the surf, the strands of devil's-apron, the sun jellies, the stories of the drowned cast on the winter coast awoke in Thoreau what must have been memories of Emerson's shipwrecked friend Margaret Fuller. Here, recorded the chronicler, was a wilder, less human nature. Objects on the beach, he noted, were always more grotesque and dilated than upon approach they proved to be. A cast-up pair of gloves suggested the reality of hands.
Thoreau's account in Cape Cod of the Charity House to which his wanderings led him takes on a special meaning. I think it embodies something of a final answer to Channing's question about Thoreau's disappointment in his fellow men. Published two years after his death, it contains his formulation of the end of his business, or perhaps I should say of his quest. Hidden in what has been dismissed as a mere book of travel is an episode as potentially fabulous as Melville's great white whale.
First, however, I must tell the story of another coast because it will serve to illuminate Thoreau's final perception. A man, a shore dweller on Long Island Sound, told me of his discovery in a winter dawn. All night there had been a heavy surf and freezing wind. When he came to stroll along his beach at morning he had immediately seen a lifeboat cast upon the shingle and a still, black figure with the eastern sun behind it on the horizon. Gripped by a premonition he ran forward. The seaman in oilskins was alone and stiffly upright. A compass was clutched in his numb fingers. The man was sheeted in ice. Ice over his beard, his clothing, his hands, ice over his fixed, open eyes. Had he made the shore alive but too frozen to move? No one would ever know, just as no one would ever know his name or the sinking vessel from which he came. With desperate courage he had steered a true course through a wild night of breakers only to freeze within sight of help.
In those fishing days on Cape Cod, Thoreau came to know many such stories -- vessels without weather warnings smashed in the winter seas, while a pittance of soaked men, perhaps, gained the shore. The sea, the intolerable sea, tumbled with total indifference the bodies of the dead or the living who were tossed up through the grinding surf of winter. These were common events in the days of sail.
The people who gained a scant living along that coast entertained, early in the nineteenth century, the thought that a few well-stocked sheds, or "Charity Houses," might enable lost seamen who made the shore to warm and feed themselves among the dunes till rescued. The idea was to provide straw and matches and provender, supervised and checked at intervals by some responsible person. Impressed at first by this signal beneficence of landsmen, Thoreau noted the instructions set down for the benefit of mariners. Finally, he approached one such Charity House. It appeared, he commented, "but a stage to the grave." The chimney had fallen. As he and his companion wished to gain an idea of a "humane house," they put their eyes, by turns, to a knothole in the door. "We had," Thoreau comments ironically, "some practice at looking inward -- the pupil becomes enlarged. Nature is never so dark that a patient eye may not prevail over it."
So there, at last, he saw the end of his journey, of the business begun at Walden. He was peering into the Charity House of man, upon a Cape Cod beach. For frozen, shipwrecked mariners he saw a fireplace with no matches, no provisions, no straw upon the floor. "We looked," he said, "into the bowels of mercy, and for bread we found a stone." Shivering like castaways, "we looked through the knothole into that night without a star, until we concluded it was not a humane house at all." The arrow Thoreau had followed away from Walden had pierced as deep as Captain Ahab's lance. No wonder the demoniacal foxes leaping at Thoreau's window had urged him to begone. He had always looked for a crevice into the future. He had peered inward instead. It was ourselves who were rudimental men.
Recently I had a letter from one of my students who is working in the Arctic and who has a cat acquired somewhere in his travels. The cat, he explained to me, hunts in the barrens behind the Eskimo village. Occasionally it proudly brings in a lemming or a bird to his hut. The Eskimo were curious about the unfamiliar creature.
"Why does he do that?" my friend was asked.
"Because he is a good cat," my student explained. "He shares his game."
"So, so." The old men nodded wisely. "It is true for the man and for the beast -- the good man and the good beast. They share, yes indeed. They share the game."
I think my young quick-witted friend had momentarily opened the eye of winter. Before laying aside his letter, I thought of the eye of Walden as I had seen it under the summer sun. It was the sharing that had impressed the people of the ice and it was a great sharing of things seen that Thoreau had attempted at his pond. A hundred years after his death people were still trying to understand what he was about. They were still trying to get both eyes open. They were still trying to understand that the town surveyor had brought something to share with his fellows, something that, if they partook of it, might transpose them to another world.
I had thought, staring across an angular gravestone at Concord and again as I held my wind-varnished flint in Montana, that "sharing" could be the word. It was appropriate, even though Thoreau in a final bitterness had felt sharing to be as impoverished as the Charity House for sailors -- a knothole glimpse into the human condition. How then should the artist see? By an eye applied to a knothole? By a magnification of sand-filled gloves washed up on a beach? Could this be the solitary business that led Thoreau on his deathbed to mutter, whether in irony or confusion, "one world at a time"?
This is the terror of our age. How should we see? In what world are we? For we have fallen out of nature and see sometimes more and sometimes less. We see the past, the looming future, and then, so fearfully is the eye confused, that it stares inverted into a Charity House that appears to reflect a less than human heart. Is this Thoreau's final surrealist vision, his glance through the knothole into the "humane house"? It would appear at least to be a glimpse from one of those two great alternating eyes at Walden Pond from which in the end he had fled -- the blind eye of winter and that innocent blue pupil beside which he had once drowsed when time seemed endless. Both are equally real, as the great poets and prophets have always known, but it was Thoreau's tragic destiny to see with eyes strained beyond endurance man subsiding into two wrinkled gloves grasping at the edge of infinity. It is his final contribution to literature, the final hidden conclusion of an unwritten life whose first chapter Morris had rightly diagnosed as Walden.
There is an old Biblical saying that our days are prolonged and every vision fails us. This I would dispute. The vision of the great artist does not fail. It sharpens and refines with age until everything extraneous is pared away. "Simplify," Thoreau had advocated. Two gloves, devoid of flesh, clutching the stones of the ebbing tide become, transmuted, the most dreadful object in the world.
"There has been nothing but the sun and eye from the beginning," Thoreau had written when his only business was looking and he grew, as he expressed it, "like corn in the night." The sun and the eye are the two aspects of nature which are irremediably linked. But the eye of man constitutes an awesome crystal whose diffractions are far greater than those of any Newtonian prism.
We see, as artists, as scientists, each in his own way, through the inexorable lens we cannot alter. In a nature which Thoreau recognized as unfixed and lawless anything might happen. The artist's endeavor is to make it happen -- the unlawful, the oncoming world, whether endurable or mad, but shaped, shaped always by the harsh angles of truth, the truth as glimpsed through the terrible crystal of genius. This is the one sure rule of that other civilization which we have come to know is greater than our own. Thoreau called it, from the first, "unfinished business," when he turned and walked away from his hut at Walden Pond.
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Re: Starthrower, by Loren Eiseley
by admin » Mon May 02, 2016 2:57 am
The Lethal Factor
The Great Olduvai Gorge in East Africa has been appropriately called the Grand Canyon of human evolution. Here a million, perhaps two million, years of human history are recorded in the shape of successive skulls and deposits of stone tools. The elusive story of the long road man has traveled is glimpsed momentarily in eroded strata and faded bone. Olduvai is now famous all over the world. Only to those who have the habit of searching beyond the obvious, however, may it have occurred that this precipitous rift through time parallels and emphasizes a similar rift in ourselves -- a rift that lies like a defacing crack across our minds and consequently many of our institutions. From its depths we can hear the rumble of the torrent from which we have ascended and sense the disastrous ease with which both individual men and civilizations can topple backward and be lost.
Brooding upon the mysteries of time and change, a great and thoughtful scholar, Alfred North Whitehead, many years ago recorded his thoughts in a cryptic yet profound observation. He said, in brief, "We are ... of infinite importance, because as we perish we are immortal." Whitehead was not speaking in ordinary theological terms. He was not concerned in this passage with the survival of the human personality after death -- at least as a religious conception. He was, instead, struggling with that difficult idea which he describes as the "prehension of the past," the fact that the world we know, even as it perishes, remains an elusive, unfixed element in the oncoming future.
The organic world, as well as that superorganic state which exists in the realm of thought, is, in truth, prehensile in a way that the inorganic world is not. The individual animal or plant in the course of its development moves always in relation to an unseen future toward which its forces are directed: the egg is broken and a snake writhes away into the grass; the acorn seedling, through many seasons, contorts itself slowly into a gnarled, gigantic oak. Similarly, life moves against the future in another, an evolutionary, sense. The creature existing now -- this serpent, this bird, this man -- has only to leave progeny in order to stretch out a gray, invisible hand into the evolutionary future, into the nonexistent.
With time, the bony fin is transformed into a paw, a round, insectivore eye into the near-sighted gaze of a scholar. Moreover, all along this curious animal extension into time, parts of ourselves are flaking off, breaking away into unexpected and unforeseen adventures. One insectivore fragment has taken to the air and become a vampire bat, while another fragment draws pictures in a cave and creates a new prehensile realm where the shadowy fingers of lost ideas reach forward into time to affect our world view and, with it, our future destinies and happiness.
Thus, since the dawn of life on the planet, the past has been figuratively fingering the present. There is in reality no clearly separable past and future either in the case of nerve and bone or within the less tangible but equally real world of history. Even the extinct dead have plucked the great web of life in such a manner that the future still vibrates to their presence. The mammalian world was for a long time constricted and impoverished by the dominance of the now vanished reptiles. Similarly, who knows today what beautiful creature remains potential only because of man's continued existence, or what renewed manifestations of creative energy his presence inhibits or has indeed destroyed forever.
As the history of the past unrolls itself before the eyes of both paleontologists and archaeologists, however, it becomes evident, so far as the biological realm is concerned, that by far the greater proportion of once-living branches on the tree of life are dead, and to this the archaeologist and historian must add dead stone, dead letters, dead ideas, and dead civilizations. As one gropes amid all this attic dust it becomes ever more apparent that some lethal factor, some arsenical poison, seems to lurk behind the pleasant show of the natural order or even the most enticing cultural edifices that man has been able to erect.
In the organic world of evolution three facts, so far as we can perceive, today seem to determine the death of species: the irreversibility of the organic process in time; high specialization which, in the end, limits new adaptive possibilities; the sudden emergence of spectacular enemies or other environmental circumstances which overwhelm or ambush a living form so suddenly that the slow adjustive process of natural selection cannot be made to function. This third principle, one could say, is the factor which, given the other two limitations upon all forms of life, will result in extinction. As a drastic example one could point to the destruction of many of the larger creatures as man has abruptly extended his sway over both hemispheres and into many different environmental zones.
The past century has seen such great accessions of knowledge in relation to these natural events, as well as a growing consciousness of man's exposure to similar dangers, that there is an increasing tendency to speculate upon our own possibilities for survival. The great life web which man has increasingly plucked with an abruptness unusual in nature shows signs of "violence in the return," to use a phrase of Francis Bacon's. The juvenile optimism about progress which characterized our first scientific years was beginning early in this century to be replaced by doubts which the widely circulated Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler documents only too well. As the poet J. C. Squire says, we can turn
the great wheel backward until Troy unburn,
... and seven Troys below
Rise out of death and dwindle ...
We can go down through the layers of dead cities until the gold becomes stone, until the jewels become shells, until the palace is a hovel, until the hovel becomes a heap of gnawed bones.
Are the comparisons valid? The historians differ. Is there hope? A babble of conflicting voices confuses us. Are we safe? On this point I am sure that every person of cultivation and intelligence would answer with a resounding "No!" Spengler -- not the optimist -- was right in prophesying that this century would be one marked by the rise of dictators, great wars, and augmented racial troubles. Whether he was also right in foreseeing this century as the onsetting winter of Western civilization is a more difficult problem.
Faustian, space-loving man still hurls his missiles skyward. His tentacular space probes seem destined to palpate the farthest rim of the solar system. Yet honesty forces us to confess that this effort is primarily the product of conflict, that millions are now employed in the institutions erected to serve that conflict, that government and taxes are increasingly geared to it, that in another generation, if not now, it will have become traditional. Men who have spent their lives in the service of these institutions will be reluctant to dissolve them. A vested interest will exist on both sides of the iron curtain. The growing involution of this aspect of Western culture may well come to resemble the ingrowth and fantasies of that ritualized belief in mana which characterized late Polynesian society.
It is upon this anthropological note that I should like to examine the nature of the human species -- the creature who at first glance appears to have escaped from the specialized cul-de-sac which has left his late-existing primate relative, the gorilla, peering sullenly from the little patch of sheltered bush that yet remains to him. I have said that some lethal factor seems to linger in man's endeavors. It is for this reason that I venture these words from a discipline which has long concerned itself with the origins, the illusions, the symbols, and the folly as well as the grandeur of civilizations whose records are lost and whose temples are fallen. Yet the way is not easy. As Herman Melville has written in one great perceptive passage:
By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by
horrible gropings we come to the central room;
with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift
the lid -- and no body is there! -- appallingly
vacant, as vast, is the soul of man!
I have spent a sizable number of my adult years among the crude stones of man's Ice Age adventurings. The hard, clean flint in the mountain spring defines and immortalizes the race that preceded us better than our own erratic fabrications distinguish our time. There is as yet no sharp edge to our image. Will it be, in the end, the twisted gantrys on the rocket bases, or telephone wires winding voiceless through the high Sierras, or the glass from space-searching observatories pounded into moonstones in the surf on a sinking coast?
What makes the symbol, finally, for another age as the pyramids for theirs -- writing for five thousand years man's hope against the sky? Before we pass, it is well to think of what our final image as a race may be -- the image that will give us a kind of earthly immortality or represent, perhaps, our final collective visage in eternity. But it is to the seeds of death within us that we must address ourselves before we dare ask this other final question of what may stand for us when all else is fallen and gone down. We shall not begin with Western society, we shall begin with man. We shall open that symbolic sepulcher of which Melville speaks. We shall grope in the roiling, tumultuous darkness for that unplumbed vacancy which Melville termed so ironically the soul of man.
Since the days of Lyell and Hutton, who perceived, beneath the romantic geological catastrophism of their age, that the prosaic and unnoticed works of wind and sun and water were the real shapers of the planet, science has been adverse to the recognition of discontinuity in natural events. (It should be said in justice to Sir Charles Lyell, however, that in combating the paroxysmal theories which preoccupied his contemporaries he maintained, nevertheless, that "minor convulsions and changes are ... a vera causa, a force and mode of operation which we know to be true.") Nevertheless the rise of modern physics, with its emphasis on quantum theory in the realm of particles, and even certain aspects of Mendelian genetics serve to remind us that there are still abroad in nature hidden powers which, on occasion, manifest themselves in an unpredictable fashion. On a more dramatic scale no one to date has been quite able to account satisfactorily for that series of rhythmic and overwhelming catastrophes which we call the Ice Age. It is true that we no longer cloak such mysteries in an aura of supernaturalism, but they continue to remind us, nevertheless, of the latent forces still lurking within nature.
Another of these episodes is reflected in the origins of the human mind. It represents, in a sense, a quantum step: the emergence of genuine novelty. It does so because the brain brought into being what would have been, up until the time of its appearance, an inconceivable event -- the world of culture. The mundus alter -- this other intangible, faery world of dreams, fantasies, invention -- has been flowing through the heads of men since the first ape-man succeeded in cutting out a portion of his environment and delineating it in a transmissible word. With that word a world arose which will die only when the last man utters the last meaningful sound.
It is a world that lurks, real enough, behind the foreheads of men; it has transformed their natural environment. It has produced history, the unique act out of the natural world about us. "The foxes have their holes," the words are recorded of the apostle Matthew, "the wild birds have their nests, but the Son of Man has no where to lay his head." Two thousand years ago in the Judean desert men recognized that the instinctive world of the animals had been lost to man. Henceforward he would pass across the landscape as a wanderer who, in a sense, was outside of nature. His shadow would grow large in the night beside the glare of his red furnaces. Fickle, erratic, dangerous, he would wrest from stone and deep-veined metal powers hitherto denied to living things. His restless mind would try all paths, all horrors, all betrayals. In the strange individual talents nourished in his metropolises, great music would lift him momentarily into some pure domain of peace. Art would ennoble him; temptation and terror pluck his sleeve. He would believe all things and believe nothing. He would kill for shadowy ideas more ferociously than other creatures kill for food, then, in a generation or less, forget what bloody dream had so oppressed him.
Man stands, in other words, between the two most disparate kingdoms upon earth: the flesh and the spirit. He is lost between an instinctive mental domain he has largely abandoned and a realm of thought through which still drift ghostly shadows of his primordial past. Like all else that lingers along the borders of one world while gazing into another, he is imperfectly adapted. It is not only the sea lion from the deep waters that inches itself painfully up the shore into the unfamiliar sunlight. So does man in the deep interior of his mind occasionally clamber far up into sunlit meadows where his world is changed and where, in the case of some few, for such is the way of evolution, there is no return to lower earth. It has taken us far longer to discover the scars of evolution in our brains than to interpret the vestigial organs tucked into odd crannies of our bodies or the wounds and aches that reveal to us that we have not always walked upon two feet.
Alfred Russel Wallace perceived in 1864 that in man the rise of the most remarkable specialization in the organic world -- the human brain -- had to a considerable degree outmoded the evolution of specialized organs. The creature who could clothe himself in fur or take it off at will, who could, by extension of himself into machines, fly, swim, or roll at incredible speeds, had simultaneously mastered all of earth's environments with the same physical body. Paradoxically, this profound biological specialization appeared to have produced an organ devoted to the sole purpose of escaping specialization. No longer could man be trapped in a single skin, a single climate, a single continent, or even a single culture. He had become ubiquitous. The wind wafted his little craft to the ends of the earth, seeds changed their substance under his hands, the plague hesitated and drew back before his cities. Even his body appeared destined to remain relatively stable since he had become the supremely generalized animal whose only mutability lay in his intelligence as expressed upon his instruments and weapons.
A creature who sets out upon a new road in the wilderness, however, is apt to encounter unexpected dangers, particularly if he ventures into that invisible and mysterious environmental zone, that "other world" which has been conjured up by the sheer power of thought. Man, when he moved from the animal threshold into dawning intellectual consciousness, no longer could depend upon the instinctive promptings that carry a bird upon the wing.
Although it is difficult to penetrate into that half-world of the past, it is evident that order, simple order, must have rapidly become a necessity for survival in human groups across whose members the inchoate thoughts and impulses of the freed mind must have run as alarming vagaries. Man must, in fact, have walked the knife edge of extinction for untold years. As he defined his world he also fell victim to the shadows that lay behind it. He did not accept it, like the animal, as a thing given. He bowed to stone and heard sprites in running water. The entire universe was talking about him and his destiny. He knew the powers and heard the voices. He formulated their wishes for himself. He shaped out of his own drives and timidities the rules and regulations which reintroduced into his world a kind of facsimile of his lost instinctive animal order and simplicity.
By means of custom, strengthened by supernatural enforcement, the violent and impulsive were forced into conformity. There was a way -- the way of the tribe. The individual conformed or perished. There was only one way, and one people, the tribe. That there were many tribes and many ways into the future no one knew, and at first in the wide emptiness of the world it scarcely mattered. It was enough that there was some kind of way or path. Even the Neanderthals had known this and had provided meat and tools that the dead might need upon their journey.
If we pause and contemplate this dim and unhistorical age for a moment it is, as I have intimated, with the thought that it reveals a rift or schism in man's endeavors that runs through his life in many aspects and throughout his history. The great historians have spoken of universal history as, in the words of Lord Acton, "an illumination of the soul." They have ventured to foresee the eventual reunion of man and the meeting of many little histories, ultimately, in the great history of man's final unification. It may be so. Yet whether we peer backward into the cloudy mirror of the past or look around us at the moment, it appears that behind every unifying effort in the life of man there is an opposite tendency to disruption, as if the force symbolized in the story of the Tower of Babel had been felt by man since the beginning. Eternally he builds, and across the smooth facade of his institutional structures there runs this ancient crack, this primordial flaw out of old time. We of this age have not escaped it.
Scarcely had man begun dimly and uncertainly to shape his new- found world of culture than it split into many facets. Its "universal" laws were unfortunately less than those of the nature out of which he had emerged. The customs were, in reality, confined to this island, that hill fort, or the little tribe by the river bank. The people's conception of themselves was similarly circumscribed. They were the people. Those who made strange sounds in a different tongue or believed in other gods were queer and, at best, tolerated for trading purposes if they did not encroach upon tribal territory.
In some parts of the world this remote life, untouched by self-questioning of any sort, this ancient way of small magical dealings with animals and wood spirits and man, has persisted into modern times. It is a comparatively harmless but ensorcelled world in which man's innate capacities are shut up in a very tiny ring and held latent through the long passage of millennia. There are times when one wonders whether it is only a very rare accident that releases man from the ancient, hypnotic sleep into which he so promptly settled after triumphing in his first human endeavor -- that of organizing a way of life, controlling the seasons, and, in general, setting up his own microscopic order in the vast shadow of the natural world. It is worth a passing thought upon primitive capacities that perhaps no existing society has built so much upon so little.
Nevertheless the rift persisted and ran on. The great neolithic empires arose and extended across the old tribal boundaries. The little peoples were becoming the great people. The individual inventor and artist, released from the restrictions of a low-energy society, enriched the whole culture. The arts of government increased. As wealth arose, however, so war, in a modern sense, also arose. Conquest empires, neolithic and classic, largely erased the old tribalism, but a long train of miseries followed in their wake. Slavery, merciless exploitation such as our paleolithic ancestors never imagined in their wildest dreams, disrupted the society and in the end destroyed both the individual and the state.
There began to show across the face of these new empires not alone the symptoms of a bottomless greed but what, in the light of times to come, was more alarming: the very evident fact that, as human rule passed from the village to the empire, the number of men who could successfully wield power for long-term social pur- poses grew less. Moreover, the long chain of bureaucracy from the ruler to the ruled made for greater inefficiency and graft. Man was beginning to be afflicted with bigness in his affairs, and with bigness there often emerges a dogmatic rigidity. The system, if bad, may defy individual strength to change it and simply run its inefficient way until it collapses. It is here that what we may call involution in the human drama becomes most apparent.
There tend to arise in human civilization institutions which monopolize, in one direction or another, the wealth and attention of the society, frequently to its eventual detriment and increasing rigidity. These are, in a sense, cultural overgrowths, excessively ornate societal excrescences as exaggerated as some of the armor plate that adorned the gigantic bodies of the last dinosaurs. Such complications may be as relatively harmless as a hyperdeveloped caste system in which no social fluidity exists, or as dangerous as military institutions that employ increasingly a disproportionate amount of the capital and attention of the state and its citizens.
In one of those profound morality plays which C. S. Lewis is capable of tossing off lightly in the guise of science fiction, one of his characters remarks that in the modern era the good appears to be getting better and the evil more terrifying. It is as though two antipathetic elements in the universe were slowly widening the gap between them. Man, in some manner, stands at the heart of this growing rift. Perhaps he contains it within himself. Perhaps he feels the crack slowly widening in his mind and his institutions. He sees the finest intellects, which in the previous century concerned themselves with electric light and telephonic communication, devote themselves as wholeheartedly to missiles and supersonic bombers. He finds that the civilization which once assumed that only barbarians would think of attacking helpless civilian populations from the air has, by degrees, come to accept the inevitability of such barbarism.
Hope, if it is expressed by the potential candidates for mass extermination in this age of advanced destruction, is expressed, not in terms of living, but in those of survival, such hope being largely premised on confidence in one's own specialists to provide a nuclear blanket capable of exceeding that of the enemy. All else gives way before the technician and the computer specialist running his estimates as to how many million deaths it takes, and in how many minutes, before the surviving fragment of a nation -- if any -- sues for peace. Nor, in the scores of books analyzing these facts, is it easy to find a word spared to indicate concern for the falling sparrow, the ruined forest, the contaminated spring -- all, in short, that still spells to man a life in nature.
One of these technicians wrote in another connection involving the mere use of insecticides, which I here shorten and paraphrase: "Balance of nature? An outmoded biological concept. There is no room for sentiment in modem science. We shall learn to get along without birds if necessary. After all, the dinosaurs disappeared. Man merely makes the process go faster. Everything changes with time." And so it does. But let us be as realistic as the gentleman would wish. It may be we who go. I am just primitive enough to hope that somehow, somewhere, a cardinal may still be whistling on a green bush when the last man goes blind before his man-made sun. If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure.
To perpetrate this final act of malice seems somehow disproportionate, beyond endurance. It is like tampering with the secret purposes of the universe itself and involving not only man but life in the final holocaust -- an act of petulant, deliberate blasphemy.
It is for this reason that Lewis's remark about the widening gap between good and evil takes on such horrifying significance in our time. The evil man may do has this added significance about it: it is not merely the evil of one tribe seeking to exterminate another. It is, instead, the thought-out willingness to make the air unbreathable to neighboring innocent nations and to poison, in one's death throes, the very springs of life itself. No greater hypertrophy of the institution of war has ever been observed in the West. To make the situation more ironic, the sole desire of every fifth-rate nascent nationalism is to emulate Russia and America, to rattle rockets, and, if these are too expensive, then at least to possess planes and a parade of tanks. For the first time in history a divisive nationalism, spread like a contagion from the West, has increased in virulence and blown around the world.
A multitude of states are now swept along in a passionate hunger for arms as the only important symbol of prestige. Yearly their number increases. For the first time in human history the involutional disease of a single civilization, that of the West, shows signs of becoming the disease of all contemporary societies. Such, it would appear, is one of the less beneficial aspects of the communications network that we have flung around the world. The universal understanding which has been the ultimate goal sought by the communications people, that shining Telstar through which we were to promote the transmission of wisdom, bids fair, instead, to promote unsatisfied hunger and the enthusiastic reception of irrationalities that embed themselves all too readily in the minds of the illiterate.
Man may have ceased to teeter uncertainly upon his hind legs; his strange physical history may be almost over. But within his mind he is still hedged about by the shadows of his own fear and uncertainty; he still lingers at the borders of his dark and tree-filled world. He fears the sunlight, he fears truth, he fears himself. In the words of Thomas Beddoes, who looked long into that world of shadows:
Nature's polluted.
There's man in every secret corner of her
Doing damned wicked deeds. Thou art, old world,
A hoary, atheistic, murdering star.
This is the dark murmur that rises from the abyss beneath us and that draws us with uncanny fascination.
If I were to attempt to spell out in a sentence the single lethal factor at the root of declining or lost civilizations up to the present, I would be forced to say adaptability. I would have to remark, paradoxically, that the magnificent specialization of gray matter which has opened to us all the climates of the earth, which has given us music, surrounded us with luxury, entranced us with great poetry, has this one flaw: it is too adaptable. In breaking free from instinct and venturing naked into a universe which demands constant trial and experiment, a world whose possibilities were unexplored and are unlimited, man's hunger for experience became unlimited also. He has the capacity to veer with every wind or, stubbornly, to insert himself into some fantastically elaborated and irrational social institution only to perish with it.
It may well be that some will not call this last piece of behavior adaptation. Yet it is to be noted that only extreme, if unwise, adaptability would have allowed man to contrive and inhabit such strange structures. When men in the mass have once attached themselves to a cultural excrescence that grows until it threatens the life of the society, it is almost impossible to modify their behavior without violence. Yet along with this, as I have remarked, fervid waves of religious or military enthusiasm may sweep through a society and then vanish with scarcely a trace.
It would take volumes to chronicle the many facets of this problem. It is almost as though man had at heart no image, but only images, that his soul was truly as vacant and vast as Melville intimated in the passage I quoted earlier. Man is mercurial and shifting. He can look down briefly into the abyss and say, smiling, "We are beasts from the dark wood. We will never be anything else. We are not to be trusted. Never on this earth. We have come from down there." This view is popular in our time. We speak of the fossil ape encrusted in our hearts. This is one image of many that man entertains of himself. Another was left by a man who died 2000 years ago.
I have mentioned before the collective symbol that a civilization sometimes leaves to posterity and the difficulty one has with our own because of the rapidity with which our technology has altered and the restless flickering of our movement from one domain of life to another. A few months ago I read casually in my evening newspaper that our galaxy is dying. That great wheel of fire of which our planetary system is an infinitesimal part was, so the report ran, proceeding to its end. The detailed evidence was impressive. Probably, though I have not attempted to verify the figures, the spiral arm on which we drift is so vast that it has not made one full circle of the wheel since the first man-ape picked up and used a stone.
I saw no use in whispering behind my hand at the club, next morning, "They say the galaxy is dying." I knew well enough that man, being more perishable than stars, would be gone billions of years before the edge of the Milky Way grew dark. It was not that aspect of the human episode which moved me. Instead it was the sudden realization of what man could do on so gigantic a scale even if, as yet, his personal fate eluded him. Out there millions of light-years away from earth, man's hands were already fumbling in the coal-scuttle darkness of a future universe. The astronomer was foreshortening time -- just as on a shorter scale eclipses can be foretold, or an apparently empty point in space can be shown as destined to receive an invisibly moving body. So man, the short-lived midge, is reaching into and observing events he will never witness in the flesh. In a psychological second, on this elusive point we call the present, we can watch the galaxy drift into darkness.
The materiality of the universe, Alfred North Whitehead somewhere remarks, is measured "in proportion to the restriction of memory and anticipation." With consciousness, memory, extended through the written word and the contributions of science, penetrates further and further into both aspects of time's unknown domain -- that is, the past and the future. Although individual men do not live longer, we might say that the reach of mind in the universe and its potential control of the natural order is enormously magnified.
Material substance no longer dominates the spiritual life. There is not space here to explore all aspects of this fascinating subject, or the paradoxes with which our burgeoning technology have presented us. This strange capacity of the mind upon which we exercise so little thought, however, means that man both remains within the historical order, and, at the same time, passes beyond it.
We are present in history, we may see history as meaningless or purposeful, but as the heightened consciousness of time invades our thinking, our ability to free our intellects from a narrow and self-centered immediacy should be intensified. It is this toward which Whitehead was directing his thought: that all responsible decisions are acts of compassion and disinterest; they exist within time and history but they are also outside of it, unique and individual and, because individual, spiritually free. In the words of Erich Frank, "History and the world do not change, but man's attitude to the world changes."
I wonder if we understand this point, for it is the crux of this essay, and though I have mentioned modern thinkers, it leads straight back to the New Testament. A number of years ago in a troubled period of my life I chanced to take a cab from an airport outside a large eastern city. My route passed through the back streets of a run-down area of dilapidated buildings. I remember passing a pathetic little cemetery whose smudged crosses, dating from another era, were now being encroached upon and overshadowed by the huge gray tanks of an oil refinery. The shadow of giant machines now fell daily across the hill of the dead. It was almost a visible struggle of the symbols to which I have earlier referred -- the cross that marks two thousand years of Western culture, shrinking, yet still holding its little acre in the midst of hulking beams and shadows where now no sunlight ever fell.
I felt an unreasoned distaste as we jounced deeper into these narrow alleyways, or roared beneath giant bridges toward a distant throughway. Finally, as we cut hastily through a slightly more open section, I caught a glimpse of a neighborhood church -- a church of evident poverty, of a sect unknown, and destined surely to vanish from that unsavory spot. It was an anachronism as doomed as the cemetery. We passed, and a moment later, as though the sign had been hanging all that time in the cab before me, instead of standing neatly in the yard outside the church, my conscious mind unwillingly registered the words:
Christ died to save mankind.
Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?
I looked at that invisible hanging sign with surprise, if not annoyance. By some I have been castigated because I am an evolutionist. In one church which I had attended as the guest of a member I had been made the covert object of a sermon in which I had recognizably played the role of a sinning scientist. I cannot deny that the role may have fitted me, but I could not feel that the hospitality, under the circumstances, was Christian. I had seen fanatical sectarian signs of ignorant and contentious sects painted on rocks all over America, particularly in desert places. I had gazed unmoved on them all.
But here on a plain white board that would not remove itself from my eyes, an unknown man in the shadow of one of the ugliest neighborhoods in America had in some manner lifted that falling symbol from the shadow of the refinery tanks and thrust it relentlessly before my eyes. There was no evading it. "Is it nothing to you?" I was being asked -- I who passed by, who had indeed already passed and would again ignore much more sophisticated approaches to religion.
But the symbol, one symbol of many in the wilderness of modern America, still exerted its power over me; a dozen lines of thinking, past and present, drew in upon me. Nothing eventful happened in the outside world. Whatever took place happened within myself. The cab sped on down the throughway.
But before my mind's eye, like an ineradicable mote, persisted the vision of that lost receding figure on the dreadful hill of Calvary who whispered with his last breath, "It is finished." It was not for himself he cried -- it was for man against eternity, for us of every human generation who perform against the future the acts which justify creation or annul it. This is the power in the mind of man, a mindprint, if you will, an insubstantial symbol which holds like a strained cable the present from falling into the black abyss of nothingness. This is why, if we possess great fortitude, each one of us can say against the future he has not seen, "It is finished."
At that moment we will have passed beyond the reach of time into a still and hidden place where it was said, "He who loses his life will find it." And in that place we will have found an ancient and an undistorted way.
The Great Olduvai Gorge in East Africa has been appropriately called the Grand Canyon of human evolution. Here a million, perhaps two million, years of human history are recorded in the shape of successive skulls and deposits of stone tools. The elusive story of the long road man has traveled is glimpsed momentarily in eroded strata and faded bone. Olduvai is now famous all over the world. Only to those who have the habit of searching beyond the obvious, however, may it have occurred that this precipitous rift through time parallels and emphasizes a similar rift in ourselves -- a rift that lies like a defacing crack across our minds and consequently many of our institutions. From its depths we can hear the rumble of the torrent from which we have ascended and sense the disastrous ease with which both individual men and civilizations can topple backward and be lost.
Brooding upon the mysteries of time and change, a great and thoughtful scholar, Alfred North Whitehead, many years ago recorded his thoughts in a cryptic yet profound observation. He said, in brief, "We are ... of infinite importance, because as we perish we are immortal." Whitehead was not speaking in ordinary theological terms. He was not concerned in this passage with the survival of the human personality after death -- at least as a religious conception. He was, instead, struggling with that difficult idea which he describes as the "prehension of the past," the fact that the world we know, even as it perishes, remains an elusive, unfixed element in the oncoming future.
The organic world, as well as that superorganic state which exists in the realm of thought, is, in truth, prehensile in a way that the inorganic world is not. The individual animal or plant in the course of its development moves always in relation to an unseen future toward which its forces are directed: the egg is broken and a snake writhes away into the grass; the acorn seedling, through many seasons, contorts itself slowly into a gnarled, gigantic oak. Similarly, life moves against the future in another, an evolutionary, sense. The creature existing now -- this serpent, this bird, this man -- has only to leave progeny in order to stretch out a gray, invisible hand into the evolutionary future, into the nonexistent.
With time, the bony fin is transformed into a paw, a round, insectivore eye into the near-sighted gaze of a scholar. Moreover, all along this curious animal extension into time, parts of ourselves are flaking off, breaking away into unexpected and unforeseen adventures. One insectivore fragment has taken to the air and become a vampire bat, while another fragment draws pictures in a cave and creates a new prehensile realm where the shadowy fingers of lost ideas reach forward into time to affect our world view and, with it, our future destinies and happiness.
Thus, since the dawn of life on the planet, the past has been figuratively fingering the present. There is in reality no clearly separable past and future either in the case of nerve and bone or within the less tangible but equally real world of history. Even the extinct dead have plucked the great web of life in such a manner that the future still vibrates to their presence. The mammalian world was for a long time constricted and impoverished by the dominance of the now vanished reptiles. Similarly, who knows today what beautiful creature remains potential only because of man's continued existence, or what renewed manifestations of creative energy his presence inhibits or has indeed destroyed forever.
As the history of the past unrolls itself before the eyes of both paleontologists and archaeologists, however, it becomes evident, so far as the biological realm is concerned, that by far the greater proportion of once-living branches on the tree of life are dead, and to this the archaeologist and historian must add dead stone, dead letters, dead ideas, and dead civilizations. As one gropes amid all this attic dust it becomes ever more apparent that some lethal factor, some arsenical poison, seems to lurk behind the pleasant show of the natural order or even the most enticing cultural edifices that man has been able to erect.
In the organic world of evolution three facts, so far as we can perceive, today seem to determine the death of species: the irreversibility of the organic process in time; high specialization which, in the end, limits new adaptive possibilities; the sudden emergence of spectacular enemies or other environmental circumstances which overwhelm or ambush a living form so suddenly that the slow adjustive process of natural selection cannot be made to function. This third principle, one could say, is the factor which, given the other two limitations upon all forms of life, will result in extinction. As a drastic example one could point to the destruction of many of the larger creatures as man has abruptly extended his sway over both hemispheres and into many different environmental zones.
The past century has seen such great accessions of knowledge in relation to these natural events, as well as a growing consciousness of man's exposure to similar dangers, that there is an increasing tendency to speculate upon our own possibilities for survival. The great life web which man has increasingly plucked with an abruptness unusual in nature shows signs of "violence in the return," to use a phrase of Francis Bacon's. The juvenile optimism about progress which characterized our first scientific years was beginning early in this century to be replaced by doubts which the widely circulated Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler documents only too well. As the poet J. C. Squire says, we can turn
the great wheel backward until Troy unburn,
... and seven Troys below
Rise out of death and dwindle ...
We can go down through the layers of dead cities until the gold becomes stone, until the jewels become shells, until the palace is a hovel, until the hovel becomes a heap of gnawed bones.
Are the comparisons valid? The historians differ. Is there hope? A babble of conflicting voices confuses us. Are we safe? On this point I am sure that every person of cultivation and intelligence would answer with a resounding "No!" Spengler -- not the optimist -- was right in prophesying that this century would be one marked by the rise of dictators, great wars, and augmented racial troubles. Whether he was also right in foreseeing this century as the onsetting winter of Western civilization is a more difficult problem.
Faustian, space-loving man still hurls his missiles skyward. His tentacular space probes seem destined to palpate the farthest rim of the solar system. Yet honesty forces us to confess that this effort is primarily the product of conflict, that millions are now employed in the institutions erected to serve that conflict, that government and taxes are increasingly geared to it, that in another generation, if not now, it will have become traditional. Men who have spent their lives in the service of these institutions will be reluctant to dissolve them. A vested interest will exist on both sides of the iron curtain. The growing involution of this aspect of Western culture may well come to resemble the ingrowth and fantasies of that ritualized belief in mana which characterized late Polynesian society.
It is upon this anthropological note that I should like to examine the nature of the human species -- the creature who at first glance appears to have escaped from the specialized cul-de-sac which has left his late-existing primate relative, the gorilla, peering sullenly from the little patch of sheltered bush that yet remains to him. I have said that some lethal factor seems to linger in man's endeavors. It is for this reason that I venture these words from a discipline which has long concerned itself with the origins, the illusions, the symbols, and the folly as well as the grandeur of civilizations whose records are lost and whose temples are fallen. Yet the way is not easy. As Herman Melville has written in one great perceptive passage:
By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by
horrible gropings we come to the central room;
with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift
the lid -- and no body is there! -- appallingly
vacant, as vast, is the soul of man!
I have spent a sizable number of my adult years among the crude stones of man's Ice Age adventurings. The hard, clean flint in the mountain spring defines and immortalizes the race that preceded us better than our own erratic fabrications distinguish our time. There is as yet no sharp edge to our image. Will it be, in the end, the twisted gantrys on the rocket bases, or telephone wires winding voiceless through the high Sierras, or the glass from space-searching observatories pounded into moonstones in the surf on a sinking coast?
What makes the symbol, finally, for another age as the pyramids for theirs -- writing for five thousand years man's hope against the sky? Before we pass, it is well to think of what our final image as a race may be -- the image that will give us a kind of earthly immortality or represent, perhaps, our final collective visage in eternity. But it is to the seeds of death within us that we must address ourselves before we dare ask this other final question of what may stand for us when all else is fallen and gone down. We shall not begin with Western society, we shall begin with man. We shall open that symbolic sepulcher of which Melville speaks. We shall grope in the roiling, tumultuous darkness for that unplumbed vacancy which Melville termed so ironically the soul of man.
Since the days of Lyell and Hutton, who perceived, beneath the romantic geological catastrophism of their age, that the prosaic and unnoticed works of wind and sun and water were the real shapers of the planet, science has been adverse to the recognition of discontinuity in natural events. (It should be said in justice to Sir Charles Lyell, however, that in combating the paroxysmal theories which preoccupied his contemporaries he maintained, nevertheless, that "minor convulsions and changes are ... a vera causa, a force and mode of operation which we know to be true.") Nevertheless the rise of modern physics, with its emphasis on quantum theory in the realm of particles, and even certain aspects of Mendelian genetics serve to remind us that there are still abroad in nature hidden powers which, on occasion, manifest themselves in an unpredictable fashion. On a more dramatic scale no one to date has been quite able to account satisfactorily for that series of rhythmic and overwhelming catastrophes which we call the Ice Age. It is true that we no longer cloak such mysteries in an aura of supernaturalism, but they continue to remind us, nevertheless, of the latent forces still lurking within nature.
Another of these episodes is reflected in the origins of the human mind. It represents, in a sense, a quantum step: the emergence of genuine novelty. It does so because the brain brought into being what would have been, up until the time of its appearance, an inconceivable event -- the world of culture. The mundus alter -- this other intangible, faery world of dreams, fantasies, invention -- has been flowing through the heads of men since the first ape-man succeeded in cutting out a portion of his environment and delineating it in a transmissible word. With that word a world arose which will die only when the last man utters the last meaningful sound.
It is a world that lurks, real enough, behind the foreheads of men; it has transformed their natural environment. It has produced history, the unique act out of the natural world about us. "The foxes have their holes," the words are recorded of the apostle Matthew, "the wild birds have their nests, but the Son of Man has no where to lay his head." Two thousand years ago in the Judean desert men recognized that the instinctive world of the animals had been lost to man. Henceforward he would pass across the landscape as a wanderer who, in a sense, was outside of nature. His shadow would grow large in the night beside the glare of his red furnaces. Fickle, erratic, dangerous, he would wrest from stone and deep-veined metal powers hitherto denied to living things. His restless mind would try all paths, all horrors, all betrayals. In the strange individual talents nourished in his metropolises, great music would lift him momentarily into some pure domain of peace. Art would ennoble him; temptation and terror pluck his sleeve. He would believe all things and believe nothing. He would kill for shadowy ideas more ferociously than other creatures kill for food, then, in a generation or less, forget what bloody dream had so oppressed him.
Man stands, in other words, between the two most disparate kingdoms upon earth: the flesh and the spirit. He is lost between an instinctive mental domain he has largely abandoned and a realm of thought through which still drift ghostly shadows of his primordial past. Like all else that lingers along the borders of one world while gazing into another, he is imperfectly adapted. It is not only the sea lion from the deep waters that inches itself painfully up the shore into the unfamiliar sunlight. So does man in the deep interior of his mind occasionally clamber far up into sunlit meadows where his world is changed and where, in the case of some few, for such is the way of evolution, there is no return to lower earth. It has taken us far longer to discover the scars of evolution in our brains than to interpret the vestigial organs tucked into odd crannies of our bodies or the wounds and aches that reveal to us that we have not always walked upon two feet.
Alfred Russel Wallace perceived in 1864 that in man the rise of the most remarkable specialization in the organic world -- the human brain -- had to a considerable degree outmoded the evolution of specialized organs. The creature who could clothe himself in fur or take it off at will, who could, by extension of himself into machines, fly, swim, or roll at incredible speeds, had simultaneously mastered all of earth's environments with the same physical body. Paradoxically, this profound biological specialization appeared to have produced an organ devoted to the sole purpose of escaping specialization. No longer could man be trapped in a single skin, a single climate, a single continent, or even a single culture. He had become ubiquitous. The wind wafted his little craft to the ends of the earth, seeds changed their substance under his hands, the plague hesitated and drew back before his cities. Even his body appeared destined to remain relatively stable since he had become the supremely generalized animal whose only mutability lay in his intelligence as expressed upon his instruments and weapons.
A creature who sets out upon a new road in the wilderness, however, is apt to encounter unexpected dangers, particularly if he ventures into that invisible and mysterious environmental zone, that "other world" which has been conjured up by the sheer power of thought. Man, when he moved from the animal threshold into dawning intellectual consciousness, no longer could depend upon the instinctive promptings that carry a bird upon the wing.
Although it is difficult to penetrate into that half-world of the past, it is evident that order, simple order, must have rapidly become a necessity for survival in human groups across whose members the inchoate thoughts and impulses of the freed mind must have run as alarming vagaries. Man must, in fact, have walked the knife edge of extinction for untold years. As he defined his world he also fell victim to the shadows that lay behind it. He did not accept it, like the animal, as a thing given. He bowed to stone and heard sprites in running water. The entire universe was talking about him and his destiny. He knew the powers and heard the voices. He formulated their wishes for himself. He shaped out of his own drives and timidities the rules and regulations which reintroduced into his world a kind of facsimile of his lost instinctive animal order and simplicity.
By means of custom, strengthened by supernatural enforcement, the violent and impulsive were forced into conformity. There was a way -- the way of the tribe. The individual conformed or perished. There was only one way, and one people, the tribe. That there were many tribes and many ways into the future no one knew, and at first in the wide emptiness of the world it scarcely mattered. It was enough that there was some kind of way or path. Even the Neanderthals had known this and had provided meat and tools that the dead might need upon their journey.
If we pause and contemplate this dim and unhistorical age for a moment it is, as I have intimated, with the thought that it reveals a rift or schism in man's endeavors that runs through his life in many aspects and throughout his history. The great historians have spoken of universal history as, in the words of Lord Acton, "an illumination of the soul." They have ventured to foresee the eventual reunion of man and the meeting of many little histories, ultimately, in the great history of man's final unification. It may be so. Yet whether we peer backward into the cloudy mirror of the past or look around us at the moment, it appears that behind every unifying effort in the life of man there is an opposite tendency to disruption, as if the force symbolized in the story of the Tower of Babel had been felt by man since the beginning. Eternally he builds, and across the smooth facade of his institutional structures there runs this ancient crack, this primordial flaw out of old time. We of this age have not escaped it.
Scarcely had man begun dimly and uncertainly to shape his new- found world of culture than it split into many facets. Its "universal" laws were unfortunately less than those of the nature out of which he had emerged. The customs were, in reality, confined to this island, that hill fort, or the little tribe by the river bank. The people's conception of themselves was similarly circumscribed. They were the people. Those who made strange sounds in a different tongue or believed in other gods were queer and, at best, tolerated for trading purposes if they did not encroach upon tribal territory.
In some parts of the world this remote life, untouched by self-questioning of any sort, this ancient way of small magical dealings with animals and wood spirits and man, has persisted into modern times. It is a comparatively harmless but ensorcelled world in which man's innate capacities are shut up in a very tiny ring and held latent through the long passage of millennia. There are times when one wonders whether it is only a very rare accident that releases man from the ancient, hypnotic sleep into which he so promptly settled after triumphing in his first human endeavor -- that of organizing a way of life, controlling the seasons, and, in general, setting up his own microscopic order in the vast shadow of the natural world. It is worth a passing thought upon primitive capacities that perhaps no existing society has built so much upon so little.
Nevertheless the rift persisted and ran on. The great neolithic empires arose and extended across the old tribal boundaries. The little peoples were becoming the great people. The individual inventor and artist, released from the restrictions of a low-energy society, enriched the whole culture. The arts of government increased. As wealth arose, however, so war, in a modern sense, also arose. Conquest empires, neolithic and classic, largely erased the old tribalism, but a long train of miseries followed in their wake. Slavery, merciless exploitation such as our paleolithic ancestors never imagined in their wildest dreams, disrupted the society and in the end destroyed both the individual and the state.
There began to show across the face of these new empires not alone the symptoms of a bottomless greed but what, in the light of times to come, was more alarming: the very evident fact that, as human rule passed from the village to the empire, the number of men who could successfully wield power for long-term social pur- poses grew less. Moreover, the long chain of bureaucracy from the ruler to the ruled made for greater inefficiency and graft. Man was beginning to be afflicted with bigness in his affairs, and with bigness there often emerges a dogmatic rigidity. The system, if bad, may defy individual strength to change it and simply run its inefficient way until it collapses. It is here that what we may call involution in the human drama becomes most apparent.
There tend to arise in human civilization institutions which monopolize, in one direction or another, the wealth and attention of the society, frequently to its eventual detriment and increasing rigidity. These are, in a sense, cultural overgrowths, excessively ornate societal excrescences as exaggerated as some of the armor plate that adorned the gigantic bodies of the last dinosaurs. Such complications may be as relatively harmless as a hyperdeveloped caste system in which no social fluidity exists, or as dangerous as military institutions that employ increasingly a disproportionate amount of the capital and attention of the state and its citizens.
In one of those profound morality plays which C. S. Lewis is capable of tossing off lightly in the guise of science fiction, one of his characters remarks that in the modern era the good appears to be getting better and the evil more terrifying. It is as though two antipathetic elements in the universe were slowly widening the gap between them. Man, in some manner, stands at the heart of this growing rift. Perhaps he contains it within himself. Perhaps he feels the crack slowly widening in his mind and his institutions. He sees the finest intellects, which in the previous century concerned themselves with electric light and telephonic communication, devote themselves as wholeheartedly to missiles and supersonic bombers. He finds that the civilization which once assumed that only barbarians would think of attacking helpless civilian populations from the air has, by degrees, come to accept the inevitability of such barbarism.
Hope, if it is expressed by the potential candidates for mass extermination in this age of advanced destruction, is expressed, not in terms of living, but in those of survival, such hope being largely premised on confidence in one's own specialists to provide a nuclear blanket capable of exceeding that of the enemy. All else gives way before the technician and the computer specialist running his estimates as to how many million deaths it takes, and in how many minutes, before the surviving fragment of a nation -- if any -- sues for peace. Nor, in the scores of books analyzing these facts, is it easy to find a word spared to indicate concern for the falling sparrow, the ruined forest, the contaminated spring -- all, in short, that still spells to man a life in nature.
One of these technicians wrote in another connection involving the mere use of insecticides, which I here shorten and paraphrase: "Balance of nature? An outmoded biological concept. There is no room for sentiment in modem science. We shall learn to get along without birds if necessary. After all, the dinosaurs disappeared. Man merely makes the process go faster. Everything changes with time." And so it does. But let us be as realistic as the gentleman would wish. It may be we who go. I am just primitive enough to hope that somehow, somewhere, a cardinal may still be whistling on a green bush when the last man goes blind before his man-made sun. If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure.
To perpetrate this final act of malice seems somehow disproportionate, beyond endurance. It is like tampering with the secret purposes of the universe itself and involving not only man but life in the final holocaust -- an act of petulant, deliberate blasphemy.
It is for this reason that Lewis's remark about the widening gap between good and evil takes on such horrifying significance in our time. The evil man may do has this added significance about it: it is not merely the evil of one tribe seeking to exterminate another. It is, instead, the thought-out willingness to make the air unbreathable to neighboring innocent nations and to poison, in one's death throes, the very springs of life itself. No greater hypertrophy of the institution of war has ever been observed in the West. To make the situation more ironic, the sole desire of every fifth-rate nascent nationalism is to emulate Russia and America, to rattle rockets, and, if these are too expensive, then at least to possess planes and a parade of tanks. For the first time in history a divisive nationalism, spread like a contagion from the West, has increased in virulence and blown around the world.
A multitude of states are now swept along in a passionate hunger for arms as the only important symbol of prestige. Yearly their number increases. For the first time in human history the involutional disease of a single civilization, that of the West, shows signs of becoming the disease of all contemporary societies. Such, it would appear, is one of the less beneficial aspects of the communications network that we have flung around the world. The universal understanding which has been the ultimate goal sought by the communications people, that shining Telstar through which we were to promote the transmission of wisdom, bids fair, instead, to promote unsatisfied hunger and the enthusiastic reception of irrationalities that embed themselves all too readily in the minds of the illiterate.
Man may have ceased to teeter uncertainly upon his hind legs; his strange physical history may be almost over. But within his mind he is still hedged about by the shadows of his own fear and uncertainty; he still lingers at the borders of his dark and tree-filled world. He fears the sunlight, he fears truth, he fears himself. In the words of Thomas Beddoes, who looked long into that world of shadows:
Nature's polluted.
There's man in every secret corner of her
Doing damned wicked deeds. Thou art, old world,
A hoary, atheistic, murdering star.
This is the dark murmur that rises from the abyss beneath us and that draws us with uncanny fascination.
If I were to attempt to spell out in a sentence the single lethal factor at the root of declining or lost civilizations up to the present, I would be forced to say adaptability. I would have to remark, paradoxically, that the magnificent specialization of gray matter which has opened to us all the climates of the earth, which has given us music, surrounded us with luxury, entranced us with great poetry, has this one flaw: it is too adaptable. In breaking free from instinct and venturing naked into a universe which demands constant trial and experiment, a world whose possibilities were unexplored and are unlimited, man's hunger for experience became unlimited also. He has the capacity to veer with every wind or, stubbornly, to insert himself into some fantastically elaborated and irrational social institution only to perish with it.
It may well be that some will not call this last piece of behavior adaptation. Yet it is to be noted that only extreme, if unwise, adaptability would have allowed man to contrive and inhabit such strange structures. When men in the mass have once attached themselves to a cultural excrescence that grows until it threatens the life of the society, it is almost impossible to modify their behavior without violence. Yet along with this, as I have remarked, fervid waves of religious or military enthusiasm may sweep through a society and then vanish with scarcely a trace.
It would take volumes to chronicle the many facets of this problem. It is almost as though man had at heart no image, but only images, that his soul was truly as vacant and vast as Melville intimated in the passage I quoted earlier. Man is mercurial and shifting. He can look down briefly into the abyss and say, smiling, "We are beasts from the dark wood. We will never be anything else. We are not to be trusted. Never on this earth. We have come from down there." This view is popular in our time. We speak of the fossil ape encrusted in our hearts. This is one image of many that man entertains of himself. Another was left by a man who died 2000 years ago.
I have mentioned before the collective symbol that a civilization sometimes leaves to posterity and the difficulty one has with our own because of the rapidity with which our technology has altered and the restless flickering of our movement from one domain of life to another. A few months ago I read casually in my evening newspaper that our galaxy is dying. That great wheel of fire of which our planetary system is an infinitesimal part was, so the report ran, proceeding to its end. The detailed evidence was impressive. Probably, though I have not attempted to verify the figures, the spiral arm on which we drift is so vast that it has not made one full circle of the wheel since the first man-ape picked up and used a stone.
I saw no use in whispering behind my hand at the club, next morning, "They say the galaxy is dying." I knew well enough that man, being more perishable than stars, would be gone billions of years before the edge of the Milky Way grew dark. It was not that aspect of the human episode which moved me. Instead it was the sudden realization of what man could do on so gigantic a scale even if, as yet, his personal fate eluded him. Out there millions of light-years away from earth, man's hands were already fumbling in the coal-scuttle darkness of a future universe. The astronomer was foreshortening time -- just as on a shorter scale eclipses can be foretold, or an apparently empty point in space can be shown as destined to receive an invisibly moving body. So man, the short-lived midge, is reaching into and observing events he will never witness in the flesh. In a psychological second, on this elusive point we call the present, we can watch the galaxy drift into darkness.
The materiality of the universe, Alfred North Whitehead somewhere remarks, is measured "in proportion to the restriction of memory and anticipation." With consciousness, memory, extended through the written word and the contributions of science, penetrates further and further into both aspects of time's unknown domain -- that is, the past and the future. Although individual men do not live longer, we might say that the reach of mind in the universe and its potential control of the natural order is enormously magnified.
Material substance no longer dominates the spiritual life. There is not space here to explore all aspects of this fascinating subject, or the paradoxes with which our burgeoning technology have presented us. This strange capacity of the mind upon which we exercise so little thought, however, means that man both remains within the historical order, and, at the same time, passes beyond it.
We are present in history, we may see history as meaningless or purposeful, but as the heightened consciousness of time invades our thinking, our ability to free our intellects from a narrow and self-centered immediacy should be intensified. It is this toward which Whitehead was directing his thought: that all responsible decisions are acts of compassion and disinterest; they exist within time and history but they are also outside of it, unique and individual and, because individual, spiritually free. In the words of Erich Frank, "History and the world do not change, but man's attitude to the world changes."
I wonder if we understand this point, for it is the crux of this essay, and though I have mentioned modern thinkers, it leads straight back to the New Testament. A number of years ago in a troubled period of my life I chanced to take a cab from an airport outside a large eastern city. My route passed through the back streets of a run-down area of dilapidated buildings. I remember passing a pathetic little cemetery whose smudged crosses, dating from another era, were now being encroached upon and overshadowed by the huge gray tanks of an oil refinery. The shadow of giant machines now fell daily across the hill of the dead. It was almost a visible struggle of the symbols to which I have earlier referred -- the cross that marks two thousand years of Western culture, shrinking, yet still holding its little acre in the midst of hulking beams and shadows where now no sunlight ever fell.
I felt an unreasoned distaste as we jounced deeper into these narrow alleyways, or roared beneath giant bridges toward a distant throughway. Finally, as we cut hastily through a slightly more open section, I caught a glimpse of a neighborhood church -- a church of evident poverty, of a sect unknown, and destined surely to vanish from that unsavory spot. It was an anachronism as doomed as the cemetery. We passed, and a moment later, as though the sign had been hanging all that time in the cab before me, instead of standing neatly in the yard outside the church, my conscious mind unwillingly registered the words:
Christ died to save mankind.
Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?
I looked at that invisible hanging sign with surprise, if not annoyance. By some I have been castigated because I am an evolutionist. In one church which I had attended as the guest of a member I had been made the covert object of a sermon in which I had recognizably played the role of a sinning scientist. I cannot deny that the role may have fitted me, but I could not feel that the hospitality, under the circumstances, was Christian. I had seen fanatical sectarian signs of ignorant and contentious sects painted on rocks all over America, particularly in desert places. I had gazed unmoved on them all.
But here on a plain white board that would not remove itself from my eyes, an unknown man in the shadow of one of the ugliest neighborhoods in America had in some manner lifted that falling symbol from the shadow of the refinery tanks and thrust it relentlessly before my eyes. There was no evading it. "Is it nothing to you?" I was being asked -- I who passed by, who had indeed already passed and would again ignore much more sophisticated approaches to religion.
But the symbol, one symbol of many in the wilderness of modern America, still exerted its power over me; a dozen lines of thinking, past and present, drew in upon me. Nothing eventful happened in the outside world. Whatever took place happened within myself. The cab sped on down the throughway.
But before my mind's eye, like an ineradicable mote, persisted the vision of that lost receding figure on the dreadful hill of Calvary who whispered with his last breath, "It is finished." It was not for himself he cried -- it was for man against eternity, for us of every human generation who perform against the future the acts which justify creation or annul it. This is the power in the mind of man, a mindprint, if you will, an insubstantial symbol which holds like a strained cable the present from falling into the black abyss of nothingness. This is why, if we possess great fortitude, each one of us can say against the future he has not seen, "It is finished."
At that moment we will have passed beyond the reach of time into a still and hidden place where it was said, "He who loses his life will find it." And in that place we will have found an ancient and an undistorted way.
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