The Unexpected Universe

by Loren Eiseley

  Instead, its genesis in Darwin’s mind lies mysteriously back amidst unrecorded nights in student Edinburgh and lost in the tracery of spider tracks over thousands of dusty volumes after his return. For this is the secret of Charles Darwin the naturalist-voyager, the modern Odysseus who came to Circe’s island of change in the Galápagos: he was the product of two odysseys, not one. He lives in the public mind partly by the undoubted drama of a great voyage whose purpose, as defined by the chief hydrographer, was the placing of a chain of meridians around the world. While those meridians were being established through Fitzroy’s efforts, another set was being posted by Darwin in the haunted corridors of the past.

  But the second odyssey, the one most solitary, secretive, and hidden, is the Merlin-like journey which had no ending save at death. It is the groping through webby corridors of books in smoky London—the kind of journey in which men are accountable only to themselves and by which the public is not at all enlivened. No waves burst, no seaman falls from the masthead, no icy continent confronts the voyager. Within the mind, however, all is different. There are ghost fires burning over swampy morasses of books, confusing trails, interceptions of the lost, the endless weaving and unweaving of floating threads of thought drawn from a thousand sources.

  “Lord,” briefly writes the man with the increasingly worn face and heavy brow, “in what a medley the origin of cultivated plants is. I have been reading on strawberries, and I can find hardly two botanists agree what are the wild forms; but I pick out horticultural books here and there, with queer cases of variation.” Or, being the man he was, again surfacing for a moment from the least expected place: “I sat one evening in a gin palace among pigeon fanciers.”

  A doubt, a shrinking terrible doubt such as can cause a man’s hands to shake and rustle amidst the leaves of folios, came on him in 1854. “How awfully flat I shall feel, if when I get my notes together . . . the whole thing explodes like an empty puff-ball.”

  References to old transactions, old travels, old gardener’s magazines bestrew his letters. Ideas are pressed away like botanical specimens between boards. “The Bishop,” he says, “makes a very telling case against me.” “Hurrah! A seed has just germinated after twenty-one and a half hours in an owl’s stomach.” “I am like a gambler and love a wild experiment.”

  “I am horribly afraid.” “I trust to a sort of instinct and God knows can seldom give any reason for my remarks.” And then, pathetically, “All nature is perverse and will not do as I wish it. I wish I had my old barnacles to work at, and nothing new.”

  The confidences go on like the running stream of the years. Volumes of them exist. There are other volumes that are lost—the one, for example, that might explain what strange compulsion drove Darwin, in at least one recorded instance, from bed at midnight to come downstairs to chatting guests and correct a trivial shift in opinion that could affect no one.

  The floating threads of all the ideas, all the thinking, all the nightmares of hours spent in the endless galleries of books, meet and are gathered up at last in the great book of 1859—that book termed the Origin of Species, which Darwin to the last maintained was only a hasty abstract.

  Do not judge harshly, he importuned no one in particular. Wait for the Big Book, the real book, where everything will be explained and more, so much more, will be adequately interpreted. And if not that book, then the endless regression through ever larger volumes seems to occupy his mind. His odyssey is endless. There is the earthworm, the orchid, the pigeons from the sporting gentry in the gin palace, the shapes of leaves, the carnivorous sundew feeding like an animal. There is the weird groping of vines. There is man himself, the subject of subjects. Year after year he brings his treasures forward like a child and proffers them.

  In one or another guise he is hiding from the public. He has become, save for his family, almost a recluse. To his astonishment, he is a legend in his lifetime. The “abstract” he scorned has become a classic of the world’s literature. His name is coupled with that of Newton.

  Variation—that subtle, unnoted shifting of the shapes of men and leaves, bird beaks and turtles, that he had pondered over far off in the Circean Galápagos—was now seen to link the seemingly ridiculous and chaotic world of life into a single whole. Selection was the living screen through which all life must pass. No fact could be left a fact; somewhere in the world it was tied to something else. What made a tuft of feathers suddenly appear on a cock’s head or induce the meaningless gyrations of a tumbler pigeon? What, in this final world of the fortuitous, the sad eyes questioned, had convinced a tailless ape that he was the object of divine attention?

  The year 1859 was gone. The British Association had met at Oxford in 1860 and Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s devastatingly caustic defender, had clashed with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. A lady had fainted. Captain Robert Fitzroy, himself a Fellow of the Royal Society, now a meteorologist and advocate of storm warnings, had arisen angrily to protest the violation of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis.

  In a few more years, worn out with his attempts to convince the indifferent Admiralty and public that weather might be foretold and disasters minimized, Fitzroy would go alone upstairs in the dawn with a razor cold against his throat while his family slumbered. Was he, too, feeling the sickness of that grinding human displacement? Did he, too, feel his solid Victorian world slipping beneath his feet, and, irony of ironies, all because he, Robert Fitzroy, had invited an earnest young man from Cambridge to go on a sea voyage years and years ago? In the dim light the razor glinted. The most important storm warning of all had failed Fitzroy. He was a scientific pioneer who had the misfortune to die unrecognized. He had pleaded for the use of the telegraph in following the weather. Radio and aircraft would prove his wisdom in the following century. Fitzroy had the misfortune to be both behind and ahead of his time. Such men are always subject to injustice.

  III

  We today know the result of Darwin’s endeavors—the knitting together of the vast web of life until it is seen like the legendary tree of Igdrasil, reaching endlessly up through the dead geological strata with living and related branches still glowing in the sun. Bird is no longer bird but can be made to leap magically backward into reptile; man is hidden in the lemur, lemur in tree shrew, tree shrew in reptile; reptile is finally precipitated into fish.

  But then there intrudes another problem: Mouse is trying to convert all organic substance into mouse. Black snake is trying to convert mouse into snake. Man maintains factories to convert cattle into human substance. It is an ingenious but hardly edifying spectacle in which nothing really wins, and through which whole orders of life have perished. If our tempo of seeing could be speeded, life would appear and disappear as a chaos of evanescent and writhing forms, possessing the impermanence of the fairy mushroom circles that spring up on our lawns at midnight.

  But this is not all; there is something more terrible at the heart of this seething web, something that caused even Darwin’s nerves to shudder. Let me illustrate from an experience of my own. I had been far outward on an open prairie swept by wind and sun. The day was fair. It was good to be alive. On all that wild upland I finally saw one human figure far away. He, like myself, seemed wandering and peering. Eventually he approached. We exchanged amenities, and I learned he was a brother scientist, though from a different discipline. He carried dissecting instruments and a bottle.

  There was something living in the bottle amidst the juices drained from a rabbit’s belly. The man was happy; his day had been successful. He showed me his treasure there in the bright sun on the turf of that sterile upland where there had seemed to lurk no evil. The sight lies a quarter of a century away and still I remember it—the dreadful pulsing object in the bottle and the grinning delight of its possessor.

  It was a parasite—a new and unnamed parasite—explained the happy government entomologist, or so the man had represented himself. But there in the bottle, alternately expanding and contracting, searching blindly for
the living flesh from which it had been torn, groped an enormous, glistening worm. I was younger then, and my mind clearer. Within it arose the memory of perhaps the most formidable words Darwin was ever to write—words never intended for publication. His personal discovery, in what must have been all its dire immediacy, lay in that moment before me, just as his words re-echoed in my brain. “What a book,” he had written with unaccustomed savagery, “a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering and horribly cruel works of Nature.”

  Evil has always been one of the difficult questions associated theologically with the fall of man, but now it had been found in the heart of nature itself. It was as though the pulse of the universe had been transferred to that obscene, monstrous body that was swelling as though to engulf the world. The more I looked, the more it appeared to grow. The high clean air of that lonely upland only made the event more unnatural, the collector’s professional joy more maniacal.

  Finally he went away, bearing his precious bottle with its pulsing, unspeakable life. I watched him until he dwindled to a trudging speck on the distant horizon. It is plain, however, in the light of decades, that that remote, gesticulating figure within my mind is still obscurely laughing in his long descent. If it were not so, I would not see him, for the plain itself was gigantic. This, too, I remember. It would be hard, it seems in retrospect, for anything at all to be found there—just anything, including man. I do not comprehend to this day what it was that ordained our meeting.

  Except one thing, perhaps: the fall of man. In that fall, gazing upon the creature in the bottle, I, too, had participated. For man did fall; even to an unbeliever and an evolutionist like Darwin. Man fell from the grace of instinct into a confused and troubled cultural realm beyond nature, much as in the old theology man fell from a state of innocence into carnal knowledge. The idea is implicit in Darwin’s work and has been commented upon by the critic Stanley Hyman, who has noted its recognition by a late Victorian scholar. This reviewer had commented that “Mr. Darwin [in The Descent of Man] finds himself compelled to reintroduce a new doctrine of the fall of man. He shows that the instincts of the higher animals are far nobler than the habits of the savage races of men, and he finds himself, therefore, compelled to reintroduce—in a form whose substantial orthodoxy appears to be quite unconscious—the doctrine that man’s gain of knowledge was the cause of the temporary but long enduring moral deterioration . . . of savage tribes.” The slow climb back to respectability seems, as one studies Darwin’s work, to have culminated in Victorian civilization. The savages of Cape Horn were hardly accorded the graces of domesticated animals.

  Darwin had been gazing backward upon the ways of pigeons, apes, and earthworms in extravagant profusion. Upon these creatures and their origins he had expended a sizable proportion of his life. Nature he loved, but by his own words he had become a hermit. Man he achingly endured, as he endured the visitors at Down. He was looking back upon an increasingly remote and violent past, through spectacles few men had raised to their eyes before, and none before him so effectively. Though he occasionally rendered lip service to the idea of human progress toward perfection, cultural man was really a disturbing element in his system, an obstruction difficult to account for, and introducing strange vagaries into Darwin’s own version of the Newtonian world machine. In spite of a vast world journey, enormous reading, and a wonderful glimpse, as through the mosaic of a stained-glass window, at the imperfect changing quality of life, Darwin remained an observer held in the bonds of the European social system of his day, and overimpressed by Malthusian struggle. The oncoming world of the indeterminate and the possible that he had helped to initiate he never fully grasped. He looked, and his spectacles brought him light, but it was sometimes the half-light with which Oz has so frequently chosen to shade the eyes of men.

  IV

  Thoreau had loved nature as intensely as Darwin and perhaps more personally. He had seen with another set of glasses. He was, in an opposite sense to Darwin, a dweller along the edge of the known, a place where the new begins. Thoreau carries a hint of that newness. He dwelt, without being quite consciously aware of it, in the age after tomorrow. His friends felt universally baffled by Thoreau and labeled him “almost another species.” One contemporary wrote: “His eyes slipped into every tuft of meadow or beach grass and went winding in and out of the thickest undergrowth, like some slim, silent, cunning animal.” It has been said that he was not a true naturalist. What was he, then? The account just quoted implies a man similar to Darwin, and, in his own way, as powerfully motivated.

  Of all strange and unaccountable things, Thoreau admits his efforts at his Journal to be the strangest. Even in youth he is beset by a prescient sadness. The companions who beguile his way will leave him, he already knows, at the first turn of the road. He was basically doomed all his life to be the Scarecrow of Oz, and if he seems harsher than that genial figure, it is because the city he sought was more elusive and he did not have even the Cowardly Lion for company. He knew only that by approaching nature he would be consulting, in every autumn-leaf fall, not alone those who had gone before him, but also those who would come after. He was writing before the Origin of Species, but someone had sewn amazing eyes upon the Concord Scarecrow.

  There is a delicacy in him that is all his own. His search for support in nature is as diligent as that of a climbing vine he had once watched with fascinated attention groping eerily toward an invisible branch. Yet, like Darwin, he had witnessed the worst that nature could do. On his deathbed he had asked, still insatiable, to be lifted up in order that he could catch through the window a glimpse of one more spring.

  In one passage in the Journal he had observed that the fishers’ nets strung across the transparent river were no more intrusive than a cobweb in the sun. “It is,” he notes, “a very slight and refined outrage at most.” In their symmetry, he realizes, they are a beautiful memento of man’s presence in nature, as wary a discovery as the footprint upon Crusoe’s isle. Moreover, this little symbol of the fishers’ seine defines precisely that delicately woven fabric of human relationships in which man, as a social animal, is so thoroughly enmeshed. There are times when, intellectually, Darwin threshed about in that same net as though trapped by a bird spider in his own forested Brazil.

  For the most part, the untraveled man in Concord managed to slip in and out of similar meshes with comparative ease. Like some lean-bodied fish he is there, he is curiously observant, but he floats, oddly detached and unfrightened, in the great stream. “If we see nature as pausing,” Thoreau remarks more than once, “immediately all mortifies and decays.” In that nature is man, merely another creature in perspective, if one does not come too close, his civilizations like toadstools springing up by the road. Everything is in the flowing, not the past.

  Museums, by contrast, are catacombs, the dead nature of dead men. Thoreau does not struggle so hard as Darwin in his phylogenies to knit the living world together. Unlike the moderns, Thoreau was not constantly seeking nostalgically for men on other planets. He respected the proud solitude of diversity, as when he watched a sparrow hawk amusing itself with aerial acrobatics. “It appeared to have no companion in the universe and to need none but the morning,” he remarked, unconsciously characterizing himself. “It was not lonely but it made all the earth lonely beneath it.”

  Or again, he says plainly, “fox belongs to a different order of things from that which reigns in the village.” Fox is alone. That is part of the ultimate secret shared between fox and scarecrow. They are creatures of the woods’ edge. One of Thoreau’s peculiar insights lies in his recognition of the creative loneliness of the individual, the struggle of man the evolved animal to live “a supernatural life.” In a sense, it is a symbolic expression of the equally creative but microcosmic loneliness of the mutative gene. “Some,” he remarks, “record only what has happened to them; but others how they have happened to the universe.”

  To this latter record Thoreau devoted the
Journal that mystified his friends. Though, like Darwin, he was a seeker who never totally found what he sought, he had found a road, though no one appeared to be walking in it. Nevertheless, he seems to have been interiorly informed that it was a way traversed at long intervals by great minds. Thoreau, the physical stay-at-home, was an avid searcher of travel literature, but he was not a traveler in the body. Indeed, there are times when he seems to have regarded that labyrinth—for so he called it—with some of the same feeling he held toward a house—as a place to escape from. The nature we profess to know never completely contained him.

  “I am sensible of a certain doubleness,” he wrote, “by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. . . . When the play—it may be the tragedy of life—is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction.” This man does suggest another species, perhaps those cool, removed men of a far, oncoming century who can both live their lives and order them like great art. The gift is rare now, and not wholly enticing to earthbound creatures like ourselves.

  Once, while surveying, Thoreau had encountered an unusual echo. After days with humdrum companions, he recorded with surprise and pleasure this generosity in nature. He wanted to linger and call all day to the air, to some voice akin to his own. There needs must be some actual doubleness like this in nature, he reiterates, “for if the voices which we commonly hear were all that we ever heard, what then? Echoes . . . are the only kindred voices that I hear.”