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THE IMMENSE JOURNEY -- EDITOR'S PREFACE |
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Editor's Preface The fences of the imagination are buckling under the pressure brought against them by the facts and theories of modern science, but few scientists have the writer's imagination that is needed to describe the deepest meaning of their seeming miracles. Loren Corey Eiseley labors under no such limitation. As a distinguished anthropologist he has a full measure of academic rewards for genuine accomplishment. Yet many of his peers have accomplished as much and left the plain reader no wiser. What Eiseley has done in scores of articles and three books is to make the ideas and findings of his special fields not only radiantly comprehensible but almost spiritually meaningful to readers whose knowledge of science is slight. The Immense Journey is a striking instance of his rare talent. Anthropology may be broadly defined as the study of man and his works, past and present. But The Immense Journey involves not only anthropology but also archeology, paleontology, biology, geology and chemistry. Obviously such an interrelationship is difficult to sustain for either the scientist or the writer. Yet the experts find Eiseley's guidance impeccably accurate, while the common reader receives from him a rare insight into the long and wondrous tale of the evolution of life. Eiseley is a modest man who has responded with a thoughtful humility to the honors that have been showered upon his books. When The Immense Journey was published in 1957, it was praised as being "beautifully written" and "a delightful journey, full of beautiful images and fascinating ideas." One reviewer felt "like going out into the street and buttonholing passers-by into sharing his pleasure." Eiseley's two other books earned him the same kind of considered applause. For Darwin's Century, a lucidly panoramic account of the development of the concept of evolution, he won the first Phi Beta Kappa Science Prize for 1959's best book on science. In 1961 The Firmament of Time earned for him the Pierre Lecomte du Nouy American Foundation Award for the best book tending to reconcile science and religion. It also brought him the coveted John Burroughs Medal, which goes to a popular book on natural science blending accuracy, originality and good writing. A man who spends his life handling the bones, and fossils of his ancestors is bound to reflect on the ultimate significance of life. In dealing with this hazardous subject, Eiseley neither avoids the big questions nor offers glib reassurance for the apprehensive. He is first a scientist who has mastered as much as man knows about the life process through the ages measured by geology. But he is also a man of feeling who values life and the deepest feelings and instincts of his fellow creatures. He is by no means distressed, as were the proper Victorians of Darwin's day, to know that he is descended from a species of ape and before that from forms of life that make the ape seem sophisticated, On the contrary: "Think of the way we came and be a little proud." Above all, his massive knowledge of the evolution of life has left him neither blase nor inclined to express himself with perfunctory expertise. From beginning to end, The Immense Journey is suffused with what he has called his own "owl-eyed wonder." As Eiseley begins his account of the mysterious and immense journey of life on the planet, he is wedged in a deep sandstone crack on the edge of a western prairie where he is on a fossil hunt, "Staring straight out at me, as I slid farther and deeper into the green twilight, was a skull ... It was not, of course, human. I was deep, deep below the time of man in a remote age near the beginning of the reign of mammals. I squatted on my heels in the narrow ravine, and we stared a little blankly at each other, the skull and I." Right there the sense of wonder begins, and the thought comes that "I would never again excavate a fossil under conditions which led to so vivid an impression that I was already one myself." And to the wonder is linked the knowledge that succinctly gives the answer to those who expect of science the key to the riddle of existence: "The truth is that we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age," Here, indeed, begins "the final illumination that sometimes comes to a man when he is no longer careful of his pride." Eiseley is a big, broad-shouldered Nebraskan whose English and German ancestors homesteaded on the plains before statehood. The family had its ups and downs, and young Loren's father, a hardware salesman, "was at one time a wandering actor. Loren still remembers him walking about the house declaiming his Shakespearean lines. The Immense Journey is dedicated to this man "who lies in the grass of the prairie frontier but is not forgotten by his son." As a boy Eiseley became fascinated by the mammoth bones he saw on a visit to the University of Nebraska and soon set up a museum of his own discoveries. He went on to become preeminent in his field, head of the department of anthropology and provost of the University of Pennsylvania. But there was another side to the man. In his younger days he wrote and published verse, and in The Immense Journey it is the scientist with poetic insight who accounts for the reader's uncommon pleasure. The little incidents of his daily experience are what touch off his writing. A bird poised upside down to drink from a faucet brings on an essay. Much of The Immense Journey emerges from what might seem the trivia of his scientific expeditions. One of the most moving chapters recounts the capture of a hawk which he was supposed to give to a museum but which instead he somewhat uneasily (but not guiltily) turned loose to celebrate freedom with its mate. Eiseley is a great humanist among scientists, and this is what has given his books their special impact in an intensely scientific day. All his immense learning and research have failed to leach out his awareness of the beauty and wonder of life. As Joseph Wood Krutch, another passionate humanist and writer on natural history, remarks in his introduction to this special edition, Eiseley insists "that the mystery still exists." The wonders of the machine neither comfort nor too greatly impress him. A mechanical mouse that can reach its cheese faster and more accurately than a real one leaves him cold. "A mouse harvesting seeds on an autumn thistle is to me a fine sight and more complicated ...." And there is a growing air among the "computer people," he observes with characteristic wryness, that seems to imply: "We'll fix these computers one of these days where all you boys will be obsolete." Eiseley is concerned less about man conquering nature than about nature, in the form of God, conquering the human heart. As he has written elsewhere: "whether we speak of a God come down to earth or a man inspired toward God and betrayed upon a cross, the dream was great, and shook the world like a storm. I believe in Christ in every man who dies to contribute to a life beyond his life. I believe in Christ in all who defend the individual from the iron boot of the extending collective state .... I have been accused of woolly-mindedness for entertaining even hope for man. I can only respond that in the dim morning shadows of humanity, the inarticulate creature who first hesitantly formed the words for pity and love must have received similar guffaws around a fire. Yet some men listened, for the words survive." --THE EDITORS OF TIME
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