Fox at the Wood's Edge: Loren Eiseley

Fox at the Wood's Edge: Loren Eiseley
Gale Christianson
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990.

Biography of a scientist, a paleontologist, who wrote essays on nature and its relationship to the far-distant, prehistoric past.

The haunting and melancholy style for which he is especially remembered. Early solitude and early love of poetry. Seemingly contradictory interests in science and literature. Father was a failure, mother was a terror.

Part of his training in writing came from school where he was required to compose at least five essays a semester, adopting the prose style of the authors assigned to the members of the class.

Huzley knew how to take simple things like a piece of chalk in a carpenter's pocket and to proceed from the known back into the mist of long-vanished geological eras. Eiseley became the Huxley of thirty years later.

Loren Eiseley's themes: desolation, loneliness, autumn winds, cold and death.... His notebook was ever present: "An idea comes like a gift and one must pursue it no matter its source." As usual, the title comes first. Begins with a personal anecdote.

Loren on himself in a letter to his niece Athena: "Just tell her he [Loren] was a guy who had his troubles, was a poor letter writer, couldn't stand most of his relatives and died by himself and to hell with it." Wrote everything in long hand; never learned to use a typewriter. Moves between science, religion, philosophy and poetry. For Eiseley, the ultimate test of word, sentence and paragraph was not how they appeared on the printed page but how they played upon the ear.

Hiram Haydn: "I still can't detect what it is about you that accounts for the magic of your writing." Another scientist commented, "It's cute, but is it science?" Loomis: "I think the author's [Eiseley's] real value is in his ability to make us aware, to shake up our egotistic complacency, of the unfathomable mystery of life and the wonder of the world."

Each page cries out to be quoted. His is the myth of the loner gazing down from the mountain slope, of the solitary hiker in the woods, of man against society, giving permanent form to Thoreau's dream of turning his back on an impoverished world of polluted skies and teeming cities. Projected a desire for solitude.

In college, he was a terrible administrator at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a good lecturer, but not a good teacher.

Eiseley on education: "We must never accept utility as the sole reason for education."

Eiseley on God's perspective: "How would it be, I wonder, to contain at once both the beginning and the end, and to hear, in helplessness, perhaps, the fall of worlds in the night?"

"Every sentence stood for a whole chapter in a book." Eiseley's ability to evoke powerful visual images. The beauty of language was paramount to him. The artist in Eiseley bridled whenever a serious attempt was made to pin him down. If you leave it open, people can then go on and create their own images and see things in their own way. Eiseley on Apollo 8: "Was it a search for knowledge only and not wisdom?"

Integrated poetry and prose; could hardly tell the difference.

Ultimate concern is human arrogance.

Although the tone of Chistianson's biography of Eiseley is deep melancholy, the actual tone of his essays was heartlifting. He makes us appreciate the things in nature that we take for granted, to see them anew.

Epitaph: "We loved the earth but could not stay."