It is in these multiple immensities - of time, distance, and memory - that Eiseley consistently roams. Or you will find yourself catapulted into the star-field of galaxies that are themselves remnants of earlier beginnings.

By staring into the vacant eyes of a long-buried skull, he will bring you face to face with the once-living creature and describe it and its environment in loving, wondrous detail. With him, you will venture deep into the storied past of our lovely and truly ancient planet.

He is proof that we are capable of thinking and speaking like this! Unlike the club-bearing, guttural utterances of our pathetic “leaders” today, Eiseley wields words with both a poet’s and a surgeon’s precision. His eloquent phrases, so redolent of nature and the mysteries of life, offer the equivalent of a refreshing breeze or a cleansing shower. Even though such can occasionally jar a modern reader, Eiseley was but using the language of his time, one which now seems so very long ago.Įiseley is a wonderful companion for our own troubled, often sordid, times.

the towering cloudland of his dreams.”Īs this quote reveals, Eiseley, who died in 1977, lived before more gender-neutral terminology came into standard use. Repeatedly, one comes upon a burst of prose that just explodes with a breath-taking expression, a vision of what we usually describe in the most ordinary terms, as in mankind pursuing “. In his remarkable autobiography - “All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life” - he relates his ascent from a childhood of poverty and loneliness - his mother was a victim of a profound mental illness that separated wife from husband and mother from son - through a young adulthood of struggles, including being judged unteachable in school and various wanderings around the United States by riding the rails during the Depression, to finding his love of nature and language.Įiseley peers into - and thinks about - the deep the depths of time and space, and the immense distances between the stars and within human hearts the challenge of bridging eons with that of understanding and mastering ourselves. Like the late Carl Sagan, Loren Eiseley had the great gift of being able to express his thoughts in language that not only made his field of study more accessible to the rest of us, but to also do so in words that soared into the realm of poetic beauty.

Loren eiseley collected essays