The Unexpected Universe

by Loren Eiseley

  Man, long before he trained the first dog, had learned to domesticate fire. Its dancing midnight shadows and the comfort it gave undoubtedly enhanced the opportunities for brain growth. The fourth ice would see man better clothed and warmed. In our own guise, as the third and last great human wave, man would pursue the trail of mammoths across the Arctic Circle into America. The animal counselors that once filled his dreams would go down before him. Thus, inexorably, he would be forced into a new and profound relationship with plants. If one judges by the measures of civilization, it was all for the best. There are, however, lingering legends that carry a pathetic symbolism: that it was fire that separated man from the animals. It is perhaps a last wistful echo from a time when the chasm between ourselves and the rest of life did not yawn so impassably.

  V

  They tell an old tale in camping places, where men still live in the open among stones and trees. Always, in one way or another, the tale has to do with messages, messages that the gods have sent to men. The burden of the stories is always the same. Someone, man or animal, is laggard or gets the message wrong, and the error is impossible to correct; thus have illness and death intruded in the world.

  Mostly the animals understand their roles, but man, by comparison, seems troubled by a message that, it is often said, he cannot quite remember, or has gotten wrong. Implied in this is our feeling that life demands an answer from us, that an essential part of man is his struggle to remember the meaning of the message with which he has been entrusted, that we are, in fact, message carriers. We are not what we seem. We have had a further instruction.

  There is another story that is sometimes told of the creator in the morning of the world. After he had created the first two beings, which he pronounced to be “people,” the woman, standing by the river, asked: “Shall we always live?” Now the god had not considered this, but he was not unwilling to grant his new creations immortality. The woman picked up a stone and, gesturing toward the stream, said: “If it floats we shall always live, but if it sinks, people must die so that they shall feel pity and have compassion.” She tossed the stone. It sank. “You have chosen,” said the creator.

  Many years ago, as a solitary youth much given to wandering, I set forth on a sullen November day for a long walk that would end among the fallen stones of a forgotten pioneer cemetery on the High Plains. The weather was threatening, and only an unusual restlessness drove me into the endeavor. Snow was on the ground and deepening by the hour. There was a rising wind of blizzard proportions sweeping across the land.

  Late in a snow-filled twilight, I reached the cemetery. The community that placed it there had long vanished. Frost and snow, season by season, had cracked and shattered the flat, illegible stones till none remained upright. It was as though I, the last living man, stood freezing among the dead. I leaned across a post and wiped the snow from my eyes.

  It was then I saw him—the only other living thing in that bleak countryside. We looked at each other. We had both come across a way so immense that neither my immediate journey nor his seemed of the slightest importance. We had each passed over some immeasurably greater distance, but whatever the word we had carried, it had been forgotten between us.

  He was nothing more than a western jack rabbit, and his ribs were gaunt with hunger beneath his skin. Only the storm contained us equally. That shrinking, long-eared animal, cowering beside a slab in an abandoned graveyard, helplessly expected the flash of momentary death, but it did not run. And I, with the rifle so frequently carried in that day and time, I also stood while the storm—a real blizzard now—raged over and between us, but I did not fire.

  We both had a fatal power to multiply, the thought flashed on me, and the planet was not large. Why was it so, and what was the message that somehow seemed spoken from a long way off beyond an ice field, out of all possible human hearing?

  The snow lifted and swirled between us once more. He was going to need that broken bit of shelter. The temperature was falling. For his frightened, trembling body in all the million years between us, there had been no sorcerer’s aid. He had survived alone in the blue nights and the howling dark. He was thin and crumpled and small.

  Step by step I drew back among the dead and their fallen stones. Somewhere, if I could follow the fence lines, there would be a fire for me. For a moment I could see his ears nervously recording my movements, but I was a wraith now, fading in the storm.

  “There are so few tracks in all this snow,” someone had once protested. It was true. I stood in the falling flakes and pondered it. Even my own tracks were filling. But out of such desolation had arisen man, the desolate. In essence, he is a belated phantom of the angry winter. He carried, and perhaps will always carry, its cruelty and its springtime in his heart.

  *Late discoveries have extended the Tertiary time range of the protohuman line. Homo sapiens may have existed for a time contemporaneously with the last of the heavy-browed forms of man, well back in the Pleistocene. If so, however, there is suggestive evidence that fertile genetic mixture between the two types existed. The human interminglings of hundreds of thousands of years of prehistory are not to be clarified by a single generation of archaeologists.

  SIX

  The Golden Alphabet

  A creature without memory cannot discover the past; one without expectation cannot conceive a future.

  —GEORGE SANTAYANA

  “WISDOM,” THE ESKIMO SAY, “can be found only far from man, out in the great loneliness.” These people speak from silences we will not know again until we set foot upon the moon. Perhaps our track is somehow rounding evocatively backward into another version of the giant winter out of which we emerged ten thousand years ago. Perhaps it is our destiny to have plunged across it only to re-enter it once more.

  Of all the men of the nineteenth century who might be said to have been intimates of that loneliness and yet, at the same time, to have possessed unusual prophetic powers, Henry David Thoreau and Charles Darwin form both a spectacular comparison and a contrast. Both Thoreau and Darwin were voyagers. One confined himself to the ever widening ripples on a pond until they embraced infinity. The other went around the world and remained for the rest of his life a meditative recluse in an old Victorian house in the English countryside.

  The two men shared a passion for odd facts. In much else they differed. Darwin, after long travel, had immured himself at home. Thoreau could only briefly tolerate a dwelling, and his journals suggest that he suffered from claustrophobic feelings that a house was a disguised tomb, from which he had constantly to escape into the open. “There is no circulation there,” he once protested.

  Both men were insatiable readers and composers of works not completely published in their individual lifetimes. Both achieved a passionate satisfaction out of their association with the wilderness. Each in his individual way has profoundly influenced the lives of the generations that followed him. Darwin achieved fame through a great biological synthesis—what Thoreau would have called the demoniacal quality of the man who can discern a law, or couple two facts. Thoreau, by contrast, is known as much for what he implied as for what he spoke. His life, like Darwin’s, is known but in many ways hidden. As he himself intimated cryptically, he had long ago lost a bay horse, a hound dog, and a turtledove, for which he was searching. It is not known that he ever came upon them or precisely what they represented.

  All his life Thoreau dwelt along the edge of that visible nature of which Darwin assumed the practical mastery. Like the owls Thoreau described in Walden, he himself represented the stark twilight of a nature “behind the ordinary,” which has passed unrecognized. As he phrased it, “We live on the outskirts of that region. . . . We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision.”

  Both men forfeited the orthodox hopes that had sustained, through many centuries, the Christian world. Yet, at the last, the one transcends the other’s vision, or amplifies it. Darwin remains, though sometimes hesitantly, the pragmatic scientist, content
with what his eyes have seen. The other turns toward an unseen spring beyond the wintry industrialism of the nineteenth century, with its illusions of secular progress. The two views, even the two lives, can be best epitomized in youthful expressions that have come down to us. The one, Darwin’s, is sure, practical, and exuberant. The other reveals an exploring, but wary, nature.

  Darwin, the empiricist, wrote from Valparaiso in 1834: “I have just got scent of some fossil bones of a MAMMOTH; what they may be I do not know, but if gold or galloping will get them they shall be mine.” Thoreau, by nature more skeptical of what can be captured in this world, mused, in his turn, “I cannot lean so hard on any arm as on a sunbeam.” It was one of the first of many similar enigmatic expressions that were finally to lead his well-meaning friend, Ellery Channing, to venture sadly, “I have never been able to understand what he meant by his life. . . . Why was he so disappointed with everybody else? Why was he so interested in the river and the woods . . . ? Something peculiar here I judge.”

  Channing was not wrong. There was something peculiar about Thoreau, just as there was something equally peculiar about Darwin. The difference between them lies essentially in the nature of man himself, the creature who persists in drawing sharp, definitive lines across the indeterminate face of nature. Essentially, the problem may be easily put. It is its varied permutations and combinations that each generation finds so defeating, and that our own time is busy, one might say horribly busy, in re-creating.

  One may begin with what we all remember from childhood—the emerald light in the wonderful city of Oz. Those who lived in the city wore spectacles that were locked on by night and day. Oz had so ordered it when the city was built. Now Oz, it was explained to the simple ones who came there, was a great wizard who could take on any form he wished. “But,” as one denizen of the city explained, “who the real Oz is when he is in his own form, no living person can tell.”

  Among the visitors to that city came several creatures, only one of whom was human, but all of whom dealt with great questions couched in very simple form. One was the Tin Woodman, in search of a heart. One was the Cowardly Lion, who had not the courage to keep tramping forever without getting anywhere at all. Then there was also the little girl, Dorothy, from Kansas, who was sure that if they walked far enough they would sometime come to some place. Particularly pertinent here is that appealing character, the Scarecrow, who, with his straw-filled head and patient good nature has always represented the better, more humble side of man. Scarecrow had been made out of straw instead of the clay so frequently utilized in the creation of man, and perhaps he proved the better for it. At any rate, his only recorded comment upon his existence in the fields was, “It was a lonely life to lead, for I had nothing to think of, having been made such a little while before.”

  The whole story of humanity is basically that of a journey toward the Emerald City, and of an effort to learn the nature of Oz, who, perhaps wisely, keeps himself concealed. In each human heart exists the Cowardly Lion and the little girl who was sure that the solution to life lay in just walking far enough. Finally, among our great discoverers are those with precious straw-filled heads who have to make up their own thoughts because each knows he has been made such a little while before, and has stood alone in the fields. Darwin and Thoreau are two such oddly opposed, yet similar, scarecrows. As it turned out, they came to two different cities, or at least vistas. They discovered something of the nature of Oz, and, rightly understood, their views are complementary to each other.

  I shall treat first of Darwin and then of Thoreau, because, though contemporaries, they were distinct in temperament. Thoreau, who died young, perhaps trudged farther toward the place which the little girl Dorothy was so sure existed, and thus, in a sense, he may be a messenger from the future. Since futures do not really exist until they are present, it might be more cautious to say that Thoreau was the messenger of a possible future in some way dependent upon ourselves.

  Neither of the two men ever discovered the nature of Oz himself. The one, Darwin, learned much about his ways—so much, indeed, that I suspect he came to doubt the existence of Oz. The other, Thoreau, leaned perhaps too heavily upon his sunbeam, and in time it faded, but not surely, because to the last he clung to the fields and heard increasingly distant echoes. Both men wore spectacles of sorts, for this is a rule that Oz has decreed for all men. Moreover, there are diverse kinds of spectacles.

  There are, for example, the two different pairs through which philosophers may look at the world. Through one we see ourselves in the light of the past; through the other, in the light of the future. If we fail to use both pairs of spectacles equally, our view of ourselves and of the world is apt to be distorted, since we can never see completely without the use of both. The historical sciences have made us very conscious of our past, and of the world as a machine generating successive events out of foregoing ones. For this reason some scholars tend to look totally backward in their interpretation of the human future. It is, unconsciously, an exercise much favored in our time.

  Like much else, this attitude has a history.

  When science, early in the nineteenth century, began to ask what we have previously termed “the terrible questions” because they involved the nature of evil, the age of the world, the origins of man, of sex, or even of language itself, a kind of Pandora’s box had been opened. People could classify giraffes and porcupines but not explain them—much less a man. Everything stood in isolation, and therefore the universe of life was bound to appear a little ridiculous to the honestly enquiring mind. What was needed was the kind of man of whom Thoreau had spoken, who could couple two seemingly unrelated facts and reduce the intractable chaos of the world. Such a man was about to appear. In fact, he had already had his forerunners.

  II

  Robert Fitzroy was a captain with a conscience. Another of that great breed of English navigators of whom Cook stands as the epitome, Fitzroy had been appointed at twenty-three to the command of H.M.S. Beagle on a mapping and exploring voyage around Cape Horn. This event preceded the famous expedition in which Charles Darwin was to participate. Mapping the Strait of Magellan, the ambitious young officer discovered, was rather like mapping the stars in the heavens. Perhaps Fitzroy’s wry comment to this effect was an unconscious omen of what was to prove the task of Charles Darwin, venturing upon the greater waters of time and change.

  The second voyage might never have taken place had it not been that in his adventures about the Strait Fitzroy had acquired four savage Indians, whom he brought home to London in 1830 with the quixotic idea of familiarizing them with Christian civilization and then returning them to their native land. One man died of smallpox—the other three, one woman and two men, survived. The troubled captain, maintaining and attempting to educate these people at his own expense, decided upon their return, even if he personally had to charter a vessel to see them safely home.

  Ironically, it was because of this touch of zealous missionary spirit on the part of Fitzroy that mankind was to find itself eventually displaced, biologically, from the center of the universe. The aristocratic Fitzroy exerted influence upon the Admiralty, and that body, in turn, assented to a second voyage, under renewed instructions for further mapping and exploration.

  Fitzroy, at heart a lonely young captain, sought a companion. In the Cook tradition he decided upon a naturalist. Charles Darwin secured the post through the good offices of his botanical instructor at Cambridge, John Henslow. Fitzroy, a passionately religious early Victorian, had taken aboard his vessel a man who by training and inclination carried with him the liberal enquiring attitudes of the Enlightenment—the spirit that had perished in the excesses of the French Revolution.

  The shadow of those excesses had fallen darkly across Britain and had accentuated the conservatism of the upper classes. There was a strong tendency to excoriate or ridicule French thinkers, particularly if their ideas appeared religiously unorthodox. Even their rare defenders preferred to remain an
onymous. The result, for the historian of science, is unfortunate. Published innovations in some instances remain unidentifiable with their advocates. In other cases, anticipations of what were later to emerge as significant ideas have been hidden, deliberately or by accident, under innocuous titles, or interjected into seemingly guileless and innocent works upon stultifying subjects.

  We know perfectly well, for example, that the name of the French evolutionist Jean Baptiste Lamarck was known in Edinburgh University circles when young Charles Darwin was a medical student there. We know, even, that one of Darwin’s instructors, Robert Grant, was an avowed follower of the French naturalist. Yet so fixed was this isolated British set of mind that as late as 1863, after the publication of the Origin of Species, we find Darwin writing to Sir Charles Lyell on the subject of the Philosophie Zoologique, “to me it was an absolutely useless book,” owing, he says, to his search for “facts.”

  In the same letter he dismisses his grandfather’s ideas with equal abruptness. Not only are these remarks scarcely borne out by a careful examination of Darwin’s work, but the harsh emphasis upon “facts” comes a little oddly from a scholar who could also protest, “Forfend me from a man who weighs every expression with Scotch prudence.” Elsewhere he intimates he can scarcely abide facts without attempting to tie them together.

  The youth who went aboard the Beagle in December 1831 was a great deal more clever than his academic record at both Edinburgh and Cambridge might suggest. The ingenuity with which he went about securing his father’s permission for the voyage in itself indicates the dedicated persistence with which he could overcome obstacles. There remained in the motherless young man a certain wary reserve, which would finally draw him into total seclusion. In the first edition of the Origin of Species he was to write: “When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts. . . . These facts seemed to . . . throw light on the origin of species. . . .” The remark is true, but it is also ingenuous. Young Charles’s first knowledge of evolution did not emerge spontaneously aboard the Beagle, however much that conception was to be strengthened in the wild lands below the equator.