A few thoughts… On Loren Eiseley and thinking for yourself

By Sandy Compton
Reader Contributor

I’ve lately confessed to enjoying the writings of Loren Eiseley. If you haven’t gotten one of his books and started reading (with a dictionary handy), I may not be doing my job. My job — sometimes — is to encourage my audience, small as it might be, to think for themselves, as opposed to letting someone else think for them. It might be more work, but it’s a critical component of personal freedom. 

Eiseley thought for himself.

Something I like about Eiseley is that he doesn’t tell his readers how it is; he tells how he sees it. He knew that not everyone sees things the same way, or even can see things the same way.

Another thing I like — love, really — is that Eiseley was a beautiful writer. His prose is some of the loveliest I’ve read; a step away from epic poetry, that step being insertion of appropriate line breaks. He was also unafraid to let his readers see him at his best and worst, his sanest and most insane. He often seems to stand on the divide between. 

He was a voracious reader, and he sprinkled his writing liberally with the thoughts of others. Sometimes, it is to make the point that he doesn’t agree with them. His heroes were also thinkers: Bacon, Thoreau, Darwin. And others less well known. Some I’ve read, some I’ve never heard of. 

As a paleontologist, Eiseley spent decades digging up reasons to believe in evolution, as well as evidence that it’s highly unlikely that the biota of Earth can be or is reproduced elsewhere. His Darwinist view went deeper than Darwin’s. He felt life as we know it on Terra is a miraculous, one-shot phenomenon. 

He died in 1977, leaving a huge collection of written thoughts on the why and how of that. Many of his essays are very personal, alluding to a difficult childhood. His was a mental and emotional balancing act on the seam between Holocene reality and a scientifically informed otherworld in which humans are no more important that slime mold, song sparrows or raccoons — all descended from the same mysterious moment of alchemic transformation when the inanimate jumped to Life (capitalization his) 1 billion-plus years ago.

Sometimes, I don’t agree with him. He staunchly defended the Vietnam War. And he felt that the 1969 moon landing — a paragon of American endeavor — was a waste of time and money. But even in his expressions of personal opinion, he allows that he may be in error; that there may be factors he doesn’t have knowledge of that might mitigate his view. 

His view of the space program has merit. He points out that even if we continue past the moon to Mars — which we have, mechanically — it’s still 25 trillion miles to Proxima Centauri, the star nearest ours. P. Centauri may or may not have planets, one of which may or may not be habitable by carbon-based life — you know: us. Odds are infinitely long against that coincidence. Even if a new Earth awaits there, at the top speed Apollo 11 achieved on its expedition to Luna, it will take 43,000 years — 1,700 human generations — to get there. 

His point is that we are stuck in this neighborhood, so we should take better care of it. Agreed. But he also noted that perhaps there was something he didn’t know that would open an avenue by which to travel quickly to points across the galaxy. He was not completely without hope. 

Until then, we need to make considered choices of what we do with our resources. 

There’s something to think about.