"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. Why? 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 that the cells took the lime habit, and they kept it after we came ashore."
Loren Eiseley -American paleontologist and author of Darwin's Century, The Unexpected Universe, and the haunting Immense Journey.
Loren Eiseley was born on the bleak plains of Nebraska in 1907, a haunted man who
grew up in a haunted house, dominated by the stoney silence of a deaf,
mentally unstable mother- a cosmic outcast whose etched sense ''aloneness in the universe''
infused his brilliant essays on science and man's place in the universe with a stark, terrifying beauty.
The literature of the American plains is largely a
literature of suffering, madness, purification by fire and "bones under
the sun, failed and buried lives" that Eiseley captured in his writing.
His empathy with life in all
its forms, and particularly with its lost outcasts -a ''the love that
transcends the boundaries of species''- flowed from his recognition of
the
odds against any life in an indifferent and constantly shifting cosmos
be it unearthing the skull of a long-dead Plains Indian to his
description a dog washed up on a beach in
Curacao, ''mingling the little lime of his bones with all else that had
once stood upright on these shores.''
In his journals he wrote of our immense journey as a species that "eventually man would
learn, to his humiliation, that his road was the road of other
creatures, that it was marked with all the cryptic ambiguities which
constantly beset the evolutionary pathway - that through these same
rents and fissures, biological failures, or seeming failures, might
tumble through the life-withholding mesh into paradoxical success."
Posted by Casey Kazan.
Related Galaxy posts:
Darwin's God -The Legacy of HMS 'Beagle'
Richard Dawkins, Darwin & the Big Questions
Story Link:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE6DF1030F933A1575AC0A961948260