The Immense Journey. Loren Eiseley.

The Immense Journey.
Loren Eiseley.
New York: Random House. 1946/1957.

Series of essays concerned with the meaning of evolution. Eiseley views evolution as a continuing process, continuing to change to become--who knows what? Men and women as they are now will not be the men and women of the far future. We are working out what we are going to be. JW Krutch: "We think of ourselves as the climax of evolution, but we may be hardly more than its beginning."

Eiseley bridges the two cultures of science and art.

Eiseley's sentences are blends of metaphor, paradox and suggestiveness. He may seem to be speaking directly, but he almost never is.

Eiseley begins his essays with little incidents in his daily experience.

Eiseley believes that people who give their lives for something greater than themselves are Christlike.

Eiseley has tried to record and to understand and enjoy the miracles of this world. Water is the magic on this planet. Water takes the exquisite form of a snowflake, but it can strip living things to the barest bone. A snow crystal has no usefulness. It is simply beautiful.

Life is dissatisfied with what is, reaches out to new environments and adapts to fantastic circumstances. "The reaching out that began a billion years ago is still in process."

We know the ingredients of life; they can be found on any drug store shelf; but combining those ingredients does not produce living things.

Nature is dynamic, still busy with experiments. There is as much future as there is past, but one can't be sure of one's role in it. "Never make the mistake of thinking life is now adjusted for eternity." Man could have had the perfection of beautiful, intricate and mindless clocks like the animals. Man is only one of the appearances of the thing called life.

Francis Thompson: plucking a flower disturbs a star. We are indebted for life to the flower. We take our minds for granted. We have created an invisible world of ideas, beliefs, habits and customs that replace the precise instincts of the lower creatures. Our leap from animal to human still stirs in our unconscious mind. Many lines, not just the ape, have created mankind. Man has escaped the eternal present of the animal world into a knowledge of past and future.

"The story of Eden is a greater allegory than man has ever guessed."

"The hand that hefted the ax, out of some blind allegiance to the past, fondles the machine gun as lovingly. "

Man has been created from a specific environment and unless other planets have that same environment, the creatures they produce will not be the same as man.

"The world is a queer place, but we have grown so used to it that we take it for granted. We can only see miracles by chance."

Will the birds take over New York City after the last man has fled to the hills?

"To grasp the physico-chemical organization of the simplest cell is beyond our capacity."