Tuesday book reading

After the expansive optimism of Frank J. Tipler in last week’s reading, we begin this week with a more sombre post-apocalyptic vision, in which our world ends not with a bang so much as a whimper.

Perhaps, after all, the little we knew of love may linger a few seasons in the wild pack that roams the final rubble of the cities. For a century or two the pack may lift its ears to a rockfall or sniff with lifted hair at a rain-worn garment that touches an old racial memory and sets tails to wagging expectantly. Some dim hand that they all feel but have never known will pass away imperceptibly. And when that influence is no longer felt nor remembered, then man will in truth be gone.

• Loren C. Eiseley (1907-1977)
  All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life
  Ch. 14, p. 148.

Eiseley was a lifelong insomniac, and probably a melancholic to boot. His prose works range from deeply philosophical to deeply personal. The personal stuff emerges usually in the form of vignettes strewn often at random through his work. In All the Strange Hours, his only ‘autobiographical’ work, he gives an account of a death-bed visit to his father:

Leo was the son of my father’s youth, of a first love who had perished in her springtime, and of whom my father could never bring himself to speak. I was born when father was forty, of a marriage that had never been happy. I was loved, but I was also a changeling, an autumn child surrounded by falling leaves. My brother who had been summoned was the one true son, not I. For him my father had come the long way back, if only for a moment.

• Ch. 2, p. 13.

We learn of Eiseley’s rejection, as a child, of his “savage and stone-deaf” mother:

My comrades of the fields stood watching. I was ten years old by then. I sensed my status in this gang was at stake. I refused to come. I had refused a parental order that was arbitrary and uncalled for and, in addition, I was humiliated. My mother was behaving in the manner of a witch. She could not hear, she was violently gesticulating without dignity. ... And so in the end I broke my father’s injunction; I ran ... with the witch, her hair flying, her clothing disarrayed, stumbling after. Escape, escape, the first stirrings of the running man. Miles of escape.

• Ch. 3, pp. 31-2.

The “running man” refers to Eiseley’s interlude as a Depression-era drifter, from which he emerged to a life of study in science. His book Darwin’s Century, although hard to find, remains a seminal work in the history and philosophy of those sciences formerly known under the umbrella of natural history.

But with knowledge comes great sorrow...

There is a sense in which the experimental method of science might be said merely to have widened the area of man’s homelessness.

• “The Hidden Teacher” in The Star Thrower, p. 116.