The Unexpected Universe
LOREN EISELEY
The Unexpected Universe
William Cronon, editor
LIBRARY OF AMERICA E-BOOK CLASSICS
Notes and chronology copyright © 2016 by
Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.
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The Unexpected Universe copyright © 1964, 1966, 1968, 1969 by Loren Eiseley, renewed 1994 by John A. Eichman, 3rd. Reprinted by arrangement with the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania.
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eISBN 978–1–59853–545–7
Contents
THE UNEXPECTED UNIVERSE
The Ghost Continent
The Unexpected Universe
The Hidden Teacher
The Star Thrower
The Angry Winter
The Golden Alphabet
The Invisible Island
The Inner Galaxy
The Innocent Fox
The Last Neanderthal
Bibliography
Chronology
Note on the Text
Notes
Index
THE UNEXPECTED UNIVERSE
TO WOLF,
who sleeps forever
with an ice age bone
across his heart,
the last gift
of one
who loved him
I wish to thank the sponsors of the William Haas Lectures of Stanford University, where three of these explorations of the unexpected universe were given, my colleagues in the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, where I was a 1967 guest, and my associates at the Menninger Foundation, where I was a similar visitor. To the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and its former director Henry Allen Moe for his patience and his faith I am most grateful. I would like also to express appreciation to the editors of Time-Life Books for permitting the reprinting, with modifications, of a passage from an older article of mine, once confined to a specialized purpose, and to The American Scholar and Life, in which some of this material also previously appeared.
LOREN EISELEY
Wynnewood, Pa.
March 3, 1969
The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
—J. B. S. HALDANE
If you do not expect it, you will not find the unexpected, for it is hard to find and difficult.
—HERACLITUS
ONE
The Ghost Continent
The winds are mad, they know not whence they come, nor whither they would go: and those men are maddest of all that go to sea.
—ROBERT BURTON
EVERY MAN CONTAINS within himself a ghost continent—a place circled as warily as Antarctica was circled two hundred years ago by Captain James Cook. If, in addition, the man is a scientist, he will see strange shapes amidst his interior ice floes and be fearful of exposing to the ridicule of his fellows what he has seen. To begin such a personal record it may be well to start with the odyssean voyages of legend and science. These may defend with something of their own magic the small story of an observer lost upon the fringes of large events. Let it be understood that I claim no discoveries. I claim only the events of a life in science as they were transformed inwardly into something that was whispered to Odysseus long ago.
Like Odysseus, man seeks his spiritual home and is denied it; along his path the shape-shifting immortal monsters of his earlier wanderings assume more sophisticated guises, but they survive because man himself remains and man has called them forth. The almost three-thousand-year-old epic of the Odyssey takes on a particular pertinence today. It possesses a perennial literary freshness that causes it to be translated anew in every generation. It involves an extended journey amid magical obstacles and Cyclopean assailants. Moreover, it can be read as containing the ingredients of both an inward journey of reflection and an outwardly active adventure. Both these journeys threaten to culminate in our time. Man’s urge toward space has impelled him to circle the planet, and in the week of December 25, 1968, precisely two hundred years after the navigator James Cook’s first great voyage into the Pacific, three American astronauts had returned from the moon. The event lies more than two million years after the first man-ape picked up and used a stone.
Nevertheless, throughout this entire pilgrimage, as reflected in his religious and philosophical thinking, man’s technological triumphs have frequently been at odds with his hunger for psychological composure and peace. Thus the epic journey of modern science is a story at once of tremendous achievement, loneliness, and terror. Odysseus’ passage through the haunted waters of the eastern Mediterranean symbolizes, at the start of the Western intellectual tradition, the sufferings that the universe and his own nature impose upon homeward-yearning man.
In the restless atmosphere of today all the psychological elements of the Odyssey are present to excess: the driving will toward achievement, the technological cleverness crudely manifest in the blinding of Cyclops, the fierce rejection of the sleepy Lotus Isles, the violence between man and man. Yet, significantly, the ancient hero cries out in desperation, “There is nothing worse for men than wandering.”
The words could just as well express the revulsion of a modern thinker over the sight of a nation harried by irrational activists whose rejection of history constitutes an equal, if unrecognized, rejection of any humane or recognizable future. We are a society bemused in its purposes and yet secretly homesick for a lost world of inward tranquillity. The thirst for illimitable knowledge now conflicts directly with the search for a serenity obtainable nowhere upon earth. Knowledge, or at least what the twentieth century acclaims as knowledge, has not led to happiness.
Ours is certainly the most time-conscious generation that has ever lived. Our cameras, our television, our archaeological probings, our C14 datings, pollen counts, under-water researches, magnetometer readings have resurrected lost cities, placing them accurately in stratigraphic succession. Each Christmas season the art of ice age Lascaux is placed beside that of Rembrandt on our coffee tables. Views of Pompeii share honors with Chichén Itzá upon the television screen in the living room. We unearth obscure ancestral primates and, in the motion picture “2001,” watch a struck fragment of bone fly into the air and become a spaceship drifting among the stars, thus telescoping in an instant the whole technological history of man. We expect the average onlooker to comprehend the symbolism; such a civilization, one must assume, should show a deep veneration for the past.
Strangely, the results are quite otherwise. We appear to be living, instead, amidst a meaningless mosaic of fragments. From ape skull to Mayan temple we contemplate the miscellaneous debris of time like sightseers to whom these mighty fragments, fallen gateways, and sunken galleys convey no present instruction.
In our streets and on our campuses there riots an extremist minority dedicated to the now, to the moment, however absurd, degra
ding, or irrelevant the moment may be. Such an activism deliberately rejects the past and is determined to start life anew—indeed, to reject the very institutions that feed, clothe, and sustain our swarming millions.
A yearning for a life of noble savagery without the accumulated burdens of history seems in danger of engulfing a whole generation, as it did the French philosophes and their eighteenth-century followers. Those individuals who persist in pursuing the mind-destroying drug of constant action have not alone confined themselves to an increasingly chaotic present—they are also, by the deliberate abandonment of their past, destroying the conceptual tools and values that are the means of introducing the rational into the oncoming future.
Their world, therefore, becomes increasingly the violent, unpredictable world of the first men simply because, in losing faith in the past, one is inevitably forsaking all that enables man to be a planning animal. For man’s story, in brief, is essentially that of a creature who has abandoned instinct and replaced it with cultural tradition and the hard-won increments of contemplative thought. The lessons of the past have been found to be a reasonably secure instruction for proceeding against the unknown future. To hurl oneself recklessly without method upon a future that we ourselves have complicated is a sheer nihilistic rejection of all that history, including the classical world, can teach us.
Odysseus’ erratic journey homeward after the sack of Troy to his own kingdom in Ithaca consumed ten years. There is a sense in which this sea-battered wanderer, who, at one point in concealment, calls himself “Nobody,” represents the human journey toward eternity. The sea god Poseidon opposes his passage. He is shipwrecked, escapes monsters, evades the bewitchment of goddesses. In the words of Kazantzakis, he appears to have “a wind chart in his breast for heart.”
Yet Odysseus, like Cook and Darwin, the scientific voyagers, is shrewd, self-reliant, and persistent. He is farsighted even when on the magical isles, but he could not always save his companions. They frequently caused him trouble because they were concerned solely with the immediate. Scenting treasure, they opened at the wrong moment the bag that loosed all the winds of the sea upon their vessel. Like man in the mass, they were feckless, unstable, and pursuing the will-o’-the-wisp of the moment. In Homer’s words, “they wanted to stay with the Lotus-Eaters and forget the way home.”
By contrast, Circe, the great enchantress, says coolly to Odys seus, “There is a mind in you no magic will work on.” The remark, however, is two-edged. It is circumspect, as one great lord of thought might speak to another. It hints at the dawn in the Greek mind of that intelligence which we of this age choose to call scientific. Nevertheless, beneath the complimentary words can be sensed a veiled warning. For the man whom no magic will charm may, in the end, find himself, by means of a darker sorcery, upon a shore as desolate as that which Odysseus narrowly escaped in passing the Isle of the Sirens. The Sirens had sung sweetly to him of all knowledge, while about them lay dead men’s bones. If living for the day and the senses is the folly of the thoughtless, so also is there danger in that insatiable hunger for power which besets the human intellect. Far more than modern men, Homer is wary of that vaulting pride the Greeks called hubris, which is an affront to the immortal gods.
It was once said, half in irony, by an ancient geographer that “you will find where Odysseus wandered when you find the cobbler who stitched the bag of the winds.” Doubtless this is true, but is not man similarly the product of such an untraceable cobbler? And, even more, is not each individual life a bag full of surging dreams and compulsions imprisoned in human skin by that same cobbler, and equally capable of inadvertent release? Yet for all the vagaries of human voyaging amidst inward and outward tempests, the mariners of three thousand years ago had begun scientifically to watch the stars. Homer himself was acquainted with the guide stars of the seafarers. We know from the Odyssey that the constellation of the Great Bear was never wetted by the waves on its night circling above the Mediterranean.
If one now turns to the Odyssean voyages of science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one will come surprisingly close both to that shadowy Cimmerian land where the sun is hidden and to that rift in time where life leaped backward to confront itself upon its evolutionary road. The voyages that produced these observations were as irretraceable and marvel-filled as any upon the lost sea charts of Odysseus.
II
It has been said of Captain James Cook that no discoverer ever measured his claims with more moderation. Yet among the great mariners none ran greater risks for the purposes of close inshore mapping. None sailed farther, or sailed under weightier secret instructions. Masterful and solitary, but with a superb gift of leadership, he endured the vanities of his scientific associates as he endured plotting natives and the hard diet of the sea.
He was a man supremely indifferent to every circumstance, who brought to the tenth year of his Pacific voyaging the same ingenuity and doggedness that had brought Odysseus home from Troy. Like Odysseus he could practice wise restraint; like Odysseus he could improvise against the future. Unlike the more primitive warriors of the Greek bronze age, however, he was not vengeful. He saw in the looming future the possibilities offered by Australia for civilized settlement, and directed attention to the furtherance of such potentials. So vast was the range of his wanderings and so attractive the Pacific isles he visited and explored that they have veiled from our memory the storms and darkness that hovered over his greatest achievement, the circumnavigation of Antarctica.
Men of today frequently turn to science for such knowledge of the hazardous future as can be gained by mortals. In Homer’s time it was believed that this information might be sought among the dead. At Circe’s instigation Odysseus reached toward the world’s edge the mist-shrouded land of Hades, the dwelling place of the shades:
hidden in fog and closed, nor does Helios, the radiant
sun, ever break through the dark . . .
always a drear night is spread.
It was there that the dead Theban, Tiresias, foretold the end of Odysseus’ voyage, further remarking that in old age “death will come to you from the sea, in some altogether unwarlike way.”
Cook, who opened the Pacific frontier to science, is largely associated in the public mind with those Lotus Isles of forgetfulness that lie in Polynesia. In reality, however, he had received, like Odysseus, assignment to a more desperate errand. The adventure was as stark in his day as the adventure into space is in ours. In terms of supporting equipment, it was equally, if not more, dangerous, for Cook’s mission was to penetrate the unknown region at the bottom of the globe. In 1768 his public orders were ostensibly to proceed to the Pacific and observe from Tahiti the transit of Venus. On the island he was to open his sealed instructions, which read in part:
Whereas there is reason to imagine that a Continent or Land of great extent, may be found to . . . the Southward of the Track of any former Navigators . . . you are to proceed to the southward in order to make discovery of the Continent above mentioned. . . .
Whence had emerged this conception of a continent unknown but supposed to be clothed with verdure and inhabited by living people whose wares and activities might be of interest to the Crown? Since the days of Ptolemy a great southern land mass, a continent labeled Terra Incognita, had floated down through the centuries on a succession of maps. Although belief in such a continent wavered and died down, certain sightings of islands in the sixteenth century restimulated the hopes of geographers. Visions were entertained of a rich and habitable continent south and westward of South America. It moved upon the eighteenth-century sea charts as elusively as Melville’s great white whale, in all meridians.
By Cook’s time, in the late eighteenth century, an ambitious scholar-merchant, Alexander Dalrymple, whose hobby was the memoirs of the early voyagers, had become a believer in the ghost continent. Dalrymple thought this huge mainland must be necessary to balance the earth on its axis and that its human population must be numbered in t
he millions. Dalrymple wished to lead an expedition there to establish trade relations. Cook, a proven naval commander with long mapping and coastal sailing experience, was chosen instead. Dalrymple was bitterly disappointed and harassed Cook after his first voyage of 1768, saying, “I would not have come back in ignorance.” Cook had stated, after long voyaging, “I do not believe any such thing exists, unless [and here he proved prophetic] in a high latitude.” Dalrymple succeeded in creating such doubt and confusion that the Admiralty decided on a second expedition, but again Cook was the chosen officer; the ghost continent was once more pursued through the shifting degrees of latitude.
Antarctica is another world. Instead of discovering a living continent, Cook, like Odysseus, came to a land of Cimmerian darkness. Huge icicles hung on the ship’s sails and rigging. The pack ice “exhibited such a variety of figures that there was not an animal on earth that was not represented by it.” A breeding sow on board farrowed nine pigs, every one of which was killed by cold in spite of attempts to save them. Scurvy appeared. In the after cabin a gentleman died. A sailor dropped from the rigging and vanished beneath the ice floes. Cavernous icebergs, against which the waves resounded, inspired exclamations of admiration and horror. Vast-winged gray albatrosses drifted by in utter silence.
In 1773 Cook first crossed the Antarctic Circle, where, in the words of one of his scientist passengers, “We were . . . wrapped in thick fogs, beaten with showers of rain, sleet, hail and snow . . . and daily ran the risk of being shipwrecked.” Cook himself, after four separate and widely removed plunges across the Circle, speaks, as does Homer, of lands “never to yield to the warmth of the sun.” His description of an “inexpressibly horrid Antarctica” resounds like an Odyssean line. Terra Incognita Australis had been circumnavigated at last, its population reduced to penguins. If there was land at all beyond the ice barrier, it was the frozen world of another planet. Only the oaths of sailors splintered and re-echoed amidst the pinnacles of ice.