The Unexpected Universe

by Loren Eiseley

  V

  Here, in Thoreau’s question, is the crux, the sum total of the human predicament. This is why I spoke of our figuratively winding our way backward into a spiritual winter, why I quoted an Eskimo upon wisdom. On the eve of the publication of the Origin of Species, Thoreau, not by any means inimical to the evolutionary philosophy, had commented: “It is ebb tide with the scientific reports.”

  In some quarters this has aroused amusement. But what did Thoreau mean? Did he sense amidst English utilitarian philosophy, of which some aspects of Darwinism are an offshoot, an oncoming cold, a muffling of snow, an inability to hear echoes? Paradoxically, Thoreau, who delighted in simplicity of living, was averse to the parsimonious nature of Victorian science. It offended his transcendental vision of man. Lest I seem to exaggerate this conflict, read what Darwin himself admitted of his work in later years:

  “I did not formerly consider sufficiently the existence of structures,” he confesses, “which as far as we can . . . judge, are neither beneficial nor injurious, and this I believe to be one of the greatest oversights as yet detected in my work. This led to my tacit assumption that every detail of structure was of some special though unrecognized service.”

  We know that Thoreau already feared that man was becoming the tool of his tools, which can, alas, include ideas. Even now, forgetting Darwin’s belated caution, those with the backward-reaching spectacles tell us eagerly, if not arrogantly, in the name of evolution, how we are born to behave and the limitations placed upon us—we who have come the far way from a wood nest in a Paleocene forest. Figuratively, these pronouncements have about them the enlarging, man-destroying evil of the pulsing worm. They stop man at an imagined border of himself. Man suffers, in truth, from a magical worm genuinely enlarged by a certain color of spectacles. It is a part, but not the whole, of the magic of Oz.

  Is it not significant, in contrast to certain of these modern prophets, that Thoreau spoke of the freedom he felt to go and come in nature; that what is peculiar to the life of man “consists not in his obedience, but his opposition to his instincts”? The very behavior of the other animals toward mankind, Thoreau knew, revealed that man was not yet the civilized creature he pretended to be.

  One must summarize the two philosophies of evolution and then let the Eskimo speak once more. In the Viking Eddas it is written:

  Hard it is on earth . . .

  Ax-time, sword-time . . .

  Wind-time, wolf-time, ere the world falls

  Nor ever shall men each other spare.

  Through these lines comes the howl of the world-devouring Fenris-wolf, waiting his moment under the deep-buried rocket silos of today. In the last pages of Walden one of Thoreau’s wisest remarks is upon the demand scientific intellectuals sometimes make, that one must speak so as to be always understood. “Neither men,” he says, “nor toadstools grow so.” There is a constant emergent novelty in nature that does not lie totally behind us, or we would not be what we are.

  Here is where Thoreau’s sensitivity to echoes emerges powerfully: It is onflowing man, not past evolutionary man, who concerns him. He wants desperately to know to what degree the human mind is capable of inward expansion. “If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet at hand,” he questions anxiously, “what can we substitute?” The echoes he senses are reverberating from the future.

  Finally, he compresses into a single passage the answer to the wolf-time philosophy, whether expressed by the Viking freebooters, or by certain of their modern descendants. “After,” he says, “the germs of virtue have thus been prevented many times from developing themselves, the beneficent breath of evening does not suffice to preserve them. . . . Then the nature of man does not differ much from that of the brute.”

  Does this last constriction contain the true and natural condition of man? No, Thoreau would contend, for nature lives always in anticipation. Thoreau was part of the future. He walked toward it, knowing also that in the case of man it must emerge from within by means of his own creation. That was why Thoreau saw the double nature of the tool and eyed it with doubt.

  The soul of the universe, the Upholder, reported Rasmussen of the Alaskan Eskimo, is never seen. Its voice, however, may be heard on occasion, through innocent children. Or in storms. Or in sunshine. Both Darwin and Thoreau had disavowed the traditional paradise, and it has been said of Thoreau that he awaited a Visitor who never came. Nevertheless, he had felt the weight of an unseen power. What it whispers, said the men of the high cold, is, “Be not afraid of the universe.”

  Man, since the beginning of his symbol-making mind, has sought to read the map of that same universe. Do not believe those serious-minded men who tell us that writing began with economics and the ordering of jars of oil. Man is, in reality, an oracular animal. Bereft of instinct, he must search constantly for meanings. We forget that, like a child, man was a reader before he became a writer, a reader of what Coleridge once called the mighty alphabet of the universe. Long ago, our forerunners knew, as the Eskimo still know, that there is an instruction hidden in the storm or dancing in auroral fires. The future can be invoked by the pictures impressed on a cave wall or in the cracks interpreted by a shaman on the incinerated shoulder blade of a hare. The very flight of birds is a writing to be read. Thoreau strove for its interpretation on his pond, as Darwin, in his way, sought equally to read the message written in the beaks of Galápagos finches.

  But the messages, like all the messages in the universe, are elusive.

  Some months ago, walking along the shore of a desolate island off the Gulf Coast, I caught a glimpse of a beautiful shell, imprinted with what appeared to be strange writing, rolling in the breakers. Impelled by curiosity, I leaped into the surf and salvaged it. Golden characters like Chinese hieroglyphs ran in symmetrical lines around the cone of the shell. I lifted it up with the utmost excitement, as though a message had come to me from the green depths of the sea.

  Later I unwrapped the shell before a dealer in antiquities in the back streets of a seaport town.

  “Conus spurius atlanticus,” he diagnosed for me with brisk efficiency, “otherwise known as the alphabet shell.”

  But why spurious? I questioned inwardly as I left the grubby little shop, warily refusing an offer for my treasure. The shell, I was sure, contained a message. We live by messages—all true scientists, all lovers of the arts, indeed, all true men of any stamp. Some of the messages cannot be read, but man will always try. He hungers for messages, and when he ceases to seek and interpret them he will be no longer man.

  The little cone lies now upon my desk, and I handle it as reverently as I would the tablets of a lost civilization. It transmits tidings as real as the increasingly far echoes heard by Thoreau in his last years.

  Perhaps I would never have stumbled into so complete a revelation save that the shell was Conus spurius, carrying the appellation given it by one who had misread, most painfully misread, a true message from the universe. Each man deciphers from the ancient alphabets of nature only those secrets that his own deeps possess the power to endow with meaning. It had been so with Darwin and Thoreau. The golden alphabet, in whatever shape it chooses to reveal itself, is never spurious. From its inscrutable lettering is created man and all the towering cloudland of his dreams.

  SEVEN

  The Invisible Island

  I say by Sorcery he got this Isle;

  From me he got it.

  —CALIBAN

  IN LATITUDE SIXTY degrees south, under the looming shadow of the antarctic ice, from somewhere deep in the freezing planetary swirl of the Humboldt Current, the great whale surfaced and was struck for the last time. “We found embedded in her hide,” the record of the old logbook runs, “divers harpoons of antique shapes, ours being her death.”

  What shafts have equally been hurled in epochs gone against the quarry earth? What gaping prehistoric jaws, subsiding in oblivion, have struck and splintered in their turn upon her stone? What giant plinths and cromlec
hs buried in her soil still mark the deeds of conquerors long since undone? What mile-deep drills and missiles wrought by hands more violent now probe at earth’s defenses? Yet she flies on regardless. Her hour has not yet come. The blade that will split her heart has not been forged.

  Earth is the mightiest of the creatures. She contains beneath her furry hide the dark heart of nothingness, from which springs all that lives. She is the wariest and most complete of animals, for she lends herself to no particular form and in the end she soundlessly forsakes them all. She is the one complete island of being. The rest, including man, are in some degree fragmented and illusory. Yet it is these phantoms, even of whales come up from the deep gulfs, that mark our thought.

  Of true places Herman Melville once remarked that “they are never down on any map.” He also observed of those great amphibians, those islands of living flesh of which I have just spoken, that it is not known whether the small eyes placed yards apart on opposite sides of their huge heads can co-ordinate the meaning of two sights at once. If not, that great solitary beast, with all its hoary antiquity written in the weapons ranged along its back, saw, as it floundered in its death throes, two separate worlds. It saw with one dimming affectionate eye the ancient mother, the heaving expanse of the universal sea. With the other it glimpsed with indescribable foreboding the approaching shape of man, the messenger of death and change. So it was that the dying whale in its dissociated vision had arrived, if momently, at the one true place where the nature of the past mingles with the onrush of the future and is borne down forever into darkness. It is an instant to remember, for it will come, in turn, to man.

  Indeed, this fusing of the past and future has already come and made of man the thing he is, an invisible island, as surely as the great whale was an island, as surely as volcanic clinkered isles produce monstrosities, dwarfs, and giants in secret shifting latitudes where no navigator is able to take readings. It is a somber reflection upon human nature that so much has been written about the triumph of the fittest and so little about the survival of the failures who have changed, if not deranged, the world.

  Man is one such creature, but the story begins long before him, a story of only incidental triumphs. The universe, as we have seen, is a place of unexpected events. A major portion of the world’s story appears to be that of fumbling little creatures of seemingly no great potential, falling, like the helpless little girl Alice, down a rabbit hole or an unexpected crevice into some new and topsy-turvy realm. Such beings sometimes find themselves cast unhappily in the role of unanticipated giants. It is not struggle and survival alone that have so marked life’s exuberant pathway; rather, the mastery has often come after the event and almost as a prelude to extinction. It is as though everything alive had in it a tug of antigravity, a revulsion from the central fire or the mother sea. If stars and galaxies hurtle outward in headlong flight, the urge for dispersal seems equally and unexplainably written into the living substance itself. The myth of Eden, the myth of Babel, and now our evolving science itself all testify to this rent in nature, as though, if we could but see it, everything might be scurrying and hopping toward a myriad exits. Solitude may strike self-conscious man as an affliction, but his march is away from his origins, and even his art is increasingly abstract and self-centered. From the solitude of the wood he has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart.

  In a university lecture hall some months ago, it was brought home to me just how far this alienation had progressed. I had been speaking, by way of illustrating a point, about a tiny deer mouse, a wonderfully new and radiant little creature of white feet and investigative fervor whom I had seen come into a basement seminar upon the Byzantine Empire. After a time the mouse in its innocent pleasure had actually ascended into an empty chair and perched upright with trembling inquisitive gravity while an internationally renowned historian continued to address the group. By no least sign did he reveal that an eager anticipatory face had appeared among his students.

  After my own lecture I was approached and chided by a young lady who informed me with severity that I was betraying evidence of a foolish anthropomorphism, which would certainly place me under disfavor and suspicion in the psychological circles she frequented.

  I sighed and reluctantly confessed that perhaps the mouse, since he was obviously a very young mouse recently come from the country, could not have understood every word of the entire lecture. Nevertheless, it was gratifyingly evident to my weary colleague, the great historian, that the mouse had at least tried.

  “You see,” I explained carefully, “we may have witnessed something like Alice in reverse. The mouse came through a crevice in the wall, a chink in nature. Man in his time has come more than once through similar chinks. I admit that the creatures do not always work out and that the chances seemed rather against this one, but who is to say what may happen when a mouse gets a taste for Byzantium rather beyond that of the average graduate student? It takes time, generations even, for this kind of event to mature.

  “If I may be pardoned for being so bold,” I remonstrated with the young lady, “what do you think your chances might have been of charging me with anthropomorphism when we were both floundering about in a mud puddle, or, for that matter, testing whether an incipient backbone might enable us to wriggle upstream? You must remember,” I continued, “that these are all figurative entrances and exits with sometimes kingdoms at the bottom of them. Or disaster, or even both together.”

  “But not,” the young lady protested venomously, “the Byzantine Empire.”

  “My friend was quite hopeful,” I persisted. “The creature was so evidently concerned and alert beyond the average. After all, how must the first two invented words have stirred your ancestors,” I appealed, “and there was nobody, absolutely nobody, to give them a lecture on Byzantium, because, well, because Byzantium was”—I was getting out of my depth now —“up there in the future.” I gestured uncertainly with one finger.

  “It was not down a hole then,” said the literal young lady. Triumphantly she drove home her point. “It wasn’t anywhere.” With this she walked out.

  “This woman is evidently part of a conspiracy to keep things just as they are,” I later wrote to my friend. “This is what biologically we may call the living screen, the net that keeps things firmly in place, a place called now.

  “It doesn’t always work,” I added in encouragement. “Things get through. We ourselves are an example. Perhaps a bad one. About the mouse . . .”

  The answer came back in a few days, lugubriously.

  “The Exterminators have come. Your chink is closed. Definitely.”

  The Exterminators. I turned the harsh word over in my mind. Great God, what were we doing? The net was drawing tighter. Man had his hands upon it. The effects were terrifying. I thought of a sparkling stream where I had played as a boy. There had been sunfish in it, turtles. Now it ran sludge and oil. It was true. The net was tightening. All over the earth it was tightening. Even the ice chinks at the poles were under man’s surveillance.

  One might say that the surveillance began in 1835, when young Charles Darwin, on the round-the-world cruise of H.M.S. Beagle, dropped anchor in the Galápagos Archipelago, six hundred miles off the west coast of South America. Ashore, young Darwin observed with a speculative eye a bird strange to his experience of the continents. He jotted into his notebook an observation that was not to bear full fruit until after the passage of over a quarter of a century. Such island differences among the creatures of the Archipelago, the young man meditated, “will be well worth examining; for such facts would undermine the stability of species.”

  II

  I have often looked with speculative interest upon those delicate insects that row with feathery feet upon the waters of a brook. They make but a slight dimple upon the film of sliding water. They breathe the air; they rove in an immense freedom over ponds and watercourses. The insubstantial film upon which they float resembles the surface tension of the living scr
een of life, in which every organism, like the forces in the atom, exerts an enormous hold, directly or indirectly, upon every other living thing. The water striders have evolved a way of outwitting the water film that entraps the heavy-footed. In their small way they have risen superior to a dangerous medium and have diverted its tensions to their own advantage.

  Man has similarly defeated and diverted the entire web of life and dances, dimpling, over it. Like the water strider he possesses the freedom of a dangerous element. Even the water strider’s freedom is relative, however, and contained within nature. One cannot help but dwell upon the hidden powers that produce so delicate a balance between freedom and catastrophe. For freedom of this nature is rare, and in man it is more than rare—it is unique—for he dances upon shadows, the shadows in his brain.

  Before turning to that realm of shadows, it is well to define what we mean by the web of life. Some time ago I had occasion one summer morning to visit a friend’s grave in a country cemetery. The event made a profound impression upon me. By some trick of midnight circumstance a multitude of graves in the untended grass were covered and interwoven together in a shimmering sheet of gossamer, whose threads ran indiscriminately over sunken grave mounds and headstones.

  It was as if the dead were still linked as in life, as if that frail network, touched by the morning sun, had momentarily succeeded in bringing the inhabitants of the grave into some kind of persisting relationship with the living. The night-working spiders had produced a visual facsimile of that intricate web in which past life is intertwined with all that lives and in which the living constitute a subtle, though not totally inescapable, barrier to any newly emergent creature that might attempt to break out of the enveloping strands of the existing world.