Faith in the Distance: The Wisdom of Loren Eiseley

Loren Eiseley

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The creature had never lived to see a man, and I, what was it I was never going to see?

I restrained a panicky impulse to hurry upward after that receding sky that was outlined above the Slit. Probably, I thought, as I patiently began the task of chiseling into the stone around the skull, I would never again excavate a fossil under conditions which led to so vivid an impression that I was already one myself. The truth is that we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age.

As I tapped and chiseled there in the foundations of the world, I had ample time to consider the cunning manipulability of the human fingers. Experimentally I crooked one of the long slender bones. It might have been silica, I thought, or aluminum, or iron—the cells would have made it possible. But no, it is calcium, carbonate of lime. Only because of its history. Elements more numerous than calcium in the earth's crust could have been used to build the skeleton.

Our history is the reason—we came from the water. It was there the cells took the lime habit, and they kept it after we came ashore. It is not a bad symbol of that long wandering, I thought again—the human hand that has been fin and scaly reptile foot and furry paw.

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If a stone should fall I cocked an eye at the leaning shelf above my head and waited, fatalistically let the bones lie here with their message, for those who might decipher it, if they come down late among us from the stars. Perhaps there is no meaning in it at all, the thought went on inside me, save that of journey itself, so far as men can see. It has altered with the chances of life, and the chances brought us here; but it was a good journey -- long, perhaps — but a good journey under a pleasant sun.

Do not look for the purpose. Think of the way we came and be a little proud. Think of this hand—the utter pain of its first venture on the pebbly shore.

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I ceased my tappings around the sand-filled sockets of the skull and wedged myself into a crevice for a smoke. As I tamped a load of tobacco into my pipe, I thought of a town across the valley that I used sometimes to visit, a town whose little inhabitants never welcomed me. No sign points to it and I rarely go there any more. Few people know about it and fewer still know that in a sense we, or rather some of the creatures to whom we are related, were driven out of it once, long ago. I used to park my car on a hill and sit silently observant, listening to the talk ringing out from neighbor to neighbor, seeing the inhabitants drowsing in their doorways, taking it all in with nostalgia—the sage smell on the wind, the sunlight without time, the village without destiny.

We can look, but we can never go back. It is prairie-dog town.

It would come as a shock to those who believe firmly that the scroll of the future is fixed and the roads determined in advance, to observe the teetering balance of earth's history through the age of the Paleocene. The passing of the reptiles had left a hundred uninhabited life zones and a scrambling variety of newly radiating forms. Unheard-of species of giant ground birds threatened for a moment to dominate the earthly scene. Two separate orders of life contended at slightly different intervals for the pleasant grasslands—for the seeds and the sleepy burrows in the sun.

Sometimes, sitting there in the mountain sunshine above prairie-dog town, I could imagine the attraction of that open world after the fern forest damp or the croaking gloom of carboniferous swamps. There by a tree root I could almost make him out, that shabby little Paleocene rat, eternal tramp and world wanderer, father of all mankind. He ruffed his coat in the sun and hopped forward for a seed.

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It was to be a long time before he would be seen on the grass again, but he was trying to make up his mind. For good or ill there was to be one more chance, but that chance was fifty million years away. Here in the Paleocene occurred the first great radiation of the placental mammals, and among them were the earliest primates—the zoological order to which man himself belongs. Today, with a few unimportant exceptions, the primates are all arboreal in habit except man. For this reason we have tended to visualize all of our remote relatives as tree dwellers. Recent discoveries, however, have begun to alter this one-sided picture.

Before the rise of the true rodents, the highly successful order to which present-day prairie dogs and chipmunks belong, the environment which they occupy had remained peculiarly open to exploitation. Into this zone crowded a varied assemblage of our early relatives. With the later appearance of true rodents, the primate habitat was markedly restricted.

The movement is progressive and distributed in several different groups. One form, although that of a true primate, shows similarities to the modern kangaroo rat, which is, of course, a rodent. There is little doubt that it was a burrower. It is this evidence of a lost chapter in the history of our kind that I used to remember on the sunny slope above prairie-dog town, and why I am able to say in a somewhat figuratively fashion that we were driven out of it once ages ago.

We are not, except very remotely as mammals, related to prairie dogs. Nevertheless, through several million years of Paleocene time, the primate order, instead of being confined to trees, was experimenting to some extent with the same grassland burrowing life that the rodents later perfected. The success of these borrowers crowded the primates out of this environment and forced them back into the domain of the branches. As a result, many primates, by that time highly specialized for a ground life, became extinct. In the restricted world of the trees, a "refuge area," as the zoologist would say, the others lingered on in diminished numbers.

Our ancient relatives, it appeared, were beaten in their attempt to expand upon the ground; they were dying out in the temperate zone, and their significance as a widespread and diversified group was fading. The shabby pseudo-rat I had seen ruffling his coat to dry after the night damps of the reptile age, had ascended again into the green twilight of the rain forest. The chatterers with the ever-growing teeth were his masters. The sunlight and the grass belonged to them. It is conceivable that except for the invasion of the rodents, the primate line might even have abandoned the trees.

We might be there on the grass, you and I, barking in the high-plains sunlight. It is true we came back in fifty million years with the cunning hands and the eyes that the tree world gave us, but was it victory? Once more in memory I saw the high blue evening fall sleepily upon that village, and once more swung the car to leave, lifting, as I always did, a figurative lantern to some ambiguous crossroads sign within my brain. The pointing arms were nameless and nameless were the distances to which they pointed.

One took one's choice. I ceased my daydreaming then, squeezed myself out of the crevice, shook out my pipe, and started chipping once more, the taps sounding along the inward-leaning walls of the Slit like the echo of many footsteps ascending and descending. I had come a long way down since morning; I had projected myself across a dimension I was not fitted to traverse in the flesh. In the end I collected my tools and climbed painfully up through the colossal debris of ages. When I put my hands on the surface of the crack I looked all about carefully in a sudden anxiety that it might not be a grazing horse that I would see.

He had not visibly changed, however, and I mounted in some slight trepidation and rode off, having a memory for a camp—if I had gotten a foot in the right era —which should lie somewhere over to the west. The first chapter concerns man's burning desire for a philosophic understanding of the world; Lavery quotes many philosophers to show how central to our existence this is.

Which it may be -- if you're a philosopher, or a young adult finding your way in the world. My own experience suggests that most "men" are less concerned with this than with fulfilling their responsibilities and just getting through the day. In any case, if you are interested in Eisley, this book has little to add. Spend you time reading Eisley's own, and far superior, work.

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One person found this helpful. Reasonably pedantic, but not persuasive. There were too many quotes from others that smudged the presentation of David Lavery himself who has a brilliance of his own. Although I enjoyed this reading, and spent many moments digesting what was said and reflecting upon it, I kept trying to figure out where the "distance" was in which Eiseley's faith lay. Isn't that what the title purposes to tell you this?

I finally decided that David Lavery needs to read more neuroscience. The theory of evolution needs a brain as well as data. The understanding that captures on imagination, is not explainable as both Eiseley and Lavery had hoped. They write around the subject and do not take it head on. I think they argue this way: The brain is constructed in a particular way by nature, and the data found in nature somehow leads to an eventual acquired cerebral structure that comes to know God This knowledge is emergent, not inherent, nor necessary in all humans.

There is no direct path that leads to God, just as there is no direct path from the fossil remains to the idea of natural selection. But if you adore Eiseley's works as I do, then buy this book. Lavery has created som thoughtful analysis of Eiseley's work. He draws interesting comparisons between ideas.

I would have preferred a more personal commentary and more excerpts from Eiseley's writing. See all 3 reviews. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway. Faith in the Distance: The Wisdom of Loren Eiseley. Set up a giveaway. What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

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