He envisioned himself as one who was meant to be born into the Age of Ice, at the dawn of human consciousness. I had entered a dark room and found a shadow writing words in the long-ago.Įiseley would understand that. What? What does it mean? But I was too late. "Just once out of all time," he continued in The Night Country, his moodiest collection of essays, "there was a pattern that we call Bison regius, a fish called Diplomystus humlis, and, at this present moment, a primate who knows, or thinks he knows, the entire score." "There is no life in the iron, there is no life in the phosphorus, the nitrogen does not contain me, the water that soaks my tissues is not I. And the chemicals that once gave it life. The outline of what was, the shadow of the fish, was still there. And here was a mystery, written in a "heavy and peculiar stone." He was drawn to the study of time and space and our place within it. It was then that he would tell the stories. This, as with so many things, would give him pause. Both are extinct and gone, he mused, as "our massive-faced and shambling forebears of the Ice have vanished." It could, he noted, just as well have been the long-horned Alaskan bison on his wall. He was sitting at his desk contemplating a fish fossil. Where is Loren Eiseley, now that we need him? I met him, in a manner of speaking, years ago, and then only by chance (how he would worry that word).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |