Halfway through reading Loren Eiseley’s The Firmament of Time I was asked what it was about. Words fumbled out of my mouth that made no sense as I peered around in my mind for something to latch onto that didn’t feel as slippery as an avocado seed.
What is it about? Time, nature, evolution, perception, meaning. I’m entranced by these things, but discussing them is awkward. Everyone has their own ideas about the meaning of life, and articulating them is like trying to describe a dream.
An anthropologist, Eiseley spent the better part of this book attempting just that. Originally a series of lectures delivered at the University of Cincinnati in 1959, the text here isn’t academic or scholarly but poetic, romantic, for the hungry of mind. The prose sings and soothes, invoking wonder and fascination:
We know that sunlight fell, as it falls now, upon this planet. We know that rain fell, as it falls now, upon wet beaches that have never known the step of man. We can read the scampering imprints of the raindrops upon the wet mud that has long since turned to stone. We can view the ripple marks in the sands of vanished coves. In all that time the ways of the inanimate world have not altered; storms and wind, sun and frost, have worked slowly upon the landscape. Mountains have risen and worn down, coast lines have altered. All that world has been the product of blind force and counterforce, the grinding of ice over stone, the pounding of pebbles in the mountain torrents - a workshop of a thousand hammers and shooting sparks in which no conscious hand was ever visible, today or yesterday.
Moving back and forth with ease from the scientific need for logic, measurement, and precision, to the flickering corners of life that provide no opportunities for the kind of certainty those things depend upon, Eiseley weaves them together in a way I find relevant.
When #science has been all but weaponized in the political space, expressing ideas that fall out of lockstep runs the risk of public ridicule. This causes a cooling effect on honest discourse, stifling not only free expression but our very thought process itself.
Eiseley had no such concerns, and I find this not only honest but consistent with his ethical responsibilities as a scientist. For what compels one to a path of seeking truth if not wonder and curiosity? And how much room does such a path have for fear?
Admittedly, I had a hard time wrapping my head around the book. Much like poetry does, its beauty captivated me but still left me scratching my head. Fitting perhaps. Near its end, Eiseley travels back through time in full-fledged fever dream:
I moved in silence now, waiting a sign. I saw it finally, a green lizard on a stone. We were far back, far back. He bobbed his head uncertainly at me, and I reined in with the nostalgic intent, for a moment, to call him father, but I saw soon enough that I was a ghost who troubled him and that he would wish me, though he had not the voice to speak, to ride on.
He goes on…
An enormous emptiness by degrees possessed me. I was back almost, in a different way, to the thin air over the mountain, to the end of all things in the cold starlight of space.
I passed some indefinable bones and shells in the salt-crusted wall of a dry arroyo. As I reined up, only sand dunes rose like waves before me and if life was there it was no longer visible. It was like coming down to the end – to the place of fires where we began. I turned about then and let my gaze go up, tier after tier, height after height, from crawling desert bush to towering pine on the great slopes far above me.
Looking at reviews of Eiseley’s books on Goodreads and Amazon, his mastery of prose is respected with near unanimity. I can’t say I’d give this one another read, but I’ll definitely find another of his books.
If you’re looking to give this a go, its first half consists of a journey through the evolution of prevailing thought about the nature of the world and those who challenged the fashionable narratives of their time, and how those conflicts charted a new course in our conceptions of the world, its history and ours.
In its second half, wonder and curiosity take the wheel. Don’t be put off by the quote above; the writing follows from, and ties together, what was conveyed in the first half, with direct and indirect allusions to it. Moreover, it is unlike any other scientific writing you’re likely to encounter.
I’ll leave you with something more grounded that summarizes not just this book but the mind of the man who strung together such slippery subjects with the measure of a master craftsman whose aim is not to propagate or prove but, like a good scientist, to rigorously challenge:
I am a man who has spent a great deal of his life on his knees, though not in prayer. I do not say this last pridefully, but with the feeling that the posture, if not the thought behind it, may have had some final salutary effect. I am a naturalist and a fossil hunter, and I have crawled most of the way through life. I have crawled downward into holes without a bottom, and upward, wedged into crevices where the wind and the birds scream at you until the sound of a falling pebble is enough to make the sick heart lurch. In man, I know now, there is no such thing as wisdom. I have learned this with my face against the ground. It is a very difficult thing for a man to grasp today, because of his power; yet in his brain there is really only a sort of universal marsh, spotted at intervals by quaking green islands representing the elusive stability of modern science - islands frequently gone as soon as glimpsed.