"The Immense Journey" -Is the Human Species on Evolution's Fast Track?

“It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes. This is the final paradox, which men call evolution.”

Loren Eiseley -The Immense Journey

Loren Eiseley was born on the bleak plains of Nebraska in 1907, a haunted man who grew up in a haunted house, dominated by the stony silence of a deaf, mentally unstable mother- a cosmic outcast whose etched sense ''aloneness in the universe'' infused his brilliant essays on science and man's place in the universe with a stark, terrifying beauty.

The literature of the American plains is largely a literature of suffering, madness, purification by fire and "bones under the sun, failed and buried lives" that Eiseley captured in his writing. His empathy with life in all its forms, and particularly with its lost outcasts -a ''the love that transcends the boundaries of species''- flowed from his recognition of the odds against any life in an indifferent and constantly shifting cosmos be it unearthing the skull of a long-dead Plains Indian to his description a dog washed up on a beach in Curacao, ''mingling the little lime of his bones with all else that had once stood upright on these shores.''

In his journals he wrote of our immense journey as a species that "eventually man would learn, to his humiliation, that his road was the road of other creatures, that it was marked with all the cryptic ambiguities which constantly beset the evolutionary pathway - that through these same rents and fissures, biological failures, or seeming failures, might tumble through the life-withholding mesh into paradoxical success."

Eiseley (1907-1977) was one of our most  highly respected anthropologists. He was also, perhaps, one of our greatest writers about nature, evolution, and man's place in the universe. His great masterpiece, The Immense Journey.

I read Eiseley more for his poetic insights than for hard science- he's one of our foremost masters of what is known as the "hidden essay," which he used this to explain complex scientific ideas, such as human evolution, to the general public. Among his other books are  Darwin's Century, The Unexpected Universe, The Night Country, and the memoir All the Strange Hours.

Eiseley writes about nature with the eyes of a haunted poet who sees the natural world slipping away even as we view it.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Related Galaxy posts:

Homo Sapiens -The "Time Travelers" -A Galaxy Classic
“Hyper-Speed” Evolution Discovered
Bringing Ancient Human Viruses Back to Life: A Jurassic Park or Salvation?

Immense Journey

Comments

[R.W.]

A while ago I read an article on this website on the very same book. I was intrigued, and so I hunted down "The Immense Journey". I now believe it is one of the greatest books I have read.

The mixture of science, philosophy and Eiseley's beautiful style of writing change the way you think about the world. I've since bought another couple of his works - so thanks, Daily Galaxy!