The Unexpected Universe

by Loren Eiseley

  In the Hall of Early Man in one of America’s great archaeological museums there stands a reconstruction in the flesh of one of the early man-apes of preglacial times. He is reproduced as the bones tell us he must have basically appeared, small of brain, with just one foot, it could be said, across the human threshold. The whole appearance of the creature seems shrunken by modern standards—made more so by a fragment of bone clutched in a small uncertain hand. There remains with the observer an impression of fumbling weakness, as though the pygmy’s dreams had depleted him—as though his genuine being had somehow been projected forward across millennia into the Herculean Grecian figure standing beyond him.

  The dwarfed man-ape stands on the border of his invisible island; nor can there be any doubt of the nature of that island. It is Prospero’s realm, whose first owner was Caliban. It is Shakespeare’s island of sweet sounds and miraculous voices. It is the beginning rent in the curtain, the kingdom once confined to a single thicket, the isle of which it was once said, “this is no mortal business.”

  Some months ago, engaged in travel, I lay in a troubled sleep in the solitary freezing bed of a Canadian hotel. A blizzard had been raging. Beyond the raw new town stretched a stand of dark spruce forest such as one no longer sees in daylight. Somewhere toward dawn I dreamed.

  The dream was of a great blurred bearlike shape emerging from the snow against the window. It pounded on the glass and beckoned importunately toward the forest. I caught the urgency of a message as uncouth and indecipherable as the shape of its huge bearer in the snow. In the immense terror of my dream I struggled against the import of that message as I struggled also to resist the impatient pounding of the frost-enveloped beast at the window.

  Suddenly I lifted the telephone beside my bed, and through the receiver came a message as cryptic as the message from the snow, but far more miraculous in origin. For I knew intuitively, in the still snowfall of my dream, that the voice I heard, a long way off, was my own voice in childhood. Pure and sweet, incredibly refined and beautiful beyond the things of earth, yet somehow inexorable and not to be stayed, the voice was already terminating its message. “I am sorry to have troubled you,” the clear faint syllables of the child persisted. They seemed to come across a thinning wire that lengthened far away into the years of my past. “I am sorry, I am sorry to have troubled you at all.” The voice faded before I could speak. I was awake now, trembling in the cold. There was nothing to be seen at the window but the rising flurries of the snow.

  Finally they ceased, and all around the little village, wrapped in an enormous eldritch winter, slumbered the dark forest. I looked below my window, but there were no tracks. I looked beside my bed, but there was, in reality, no phone. I lay back, huddled under the blanket, and thought briefly of the shrunken figure of the ape in the museum and of what had once been projected out of his living substance. My own body, in the freezing cold, felt wracked by a similar psychic effort that still persisted. Far off, as over an immense distance in my brain, I heard the echo of my own true voice, or perhaps it was mankind’s accumulated voice, for the last time. It was hauntingly beautiful, but it was going. It would not be supplicated. As though in response to my thought, the incessant march of snow began again in the forest.

  So this is the end, I thought, wrapping my shoulders closer against the increasing cold; we are, in truth, a failure. Beautiful and terrible, perhaps, but a failure, an island failure—an island whose origins are lost in time yet are still about us in such a way that we do not see them. To an invisible island we owe both triumph and disaster. At first, the island was a rent, a very small rent, in the curtain of life—perhaps no more than a few hairy creatures in a forest glade making experimental sounds that could be varied, one sound that defined the past and another that signified tomorrow. They were very small sounds with which to create an island, but the island, like those fostered by volcanoes on the sea floor, grew, and remained at the same time invisible. The sounds—passing from brain to brain, defining, measuring, remembering how stones could be broken—were responsible. If the island was invisible it was, unlike all other islands, shoreless as it grew. Nevertheless, man, like the other creatures on true islands, was isolated. He drifted insensibly from the heart of things. At first, he kept an uncertain memory of his origins in the animal world. He claimed descent from Grandfather Bear or Raven and on ritual occasions he talked to them or to his mother, the Earth.

  The precarious thread that bound man to the living whole finally snapped. He had passed irrevocably into another dimension. His predicament is recognized in the myths of the Tree and of Pandora’s box. He had learned to distinguish good from evil. Moreover, his capacity for evil increased as he discovered that the tiny sounds could be made to lie. This was an island within an island. It separated people into many islands. As man entered upon a wild new corridor of existence, some part of himself passed into a hypnotic slumber, but, in the diverse rooms of the mind, other sleepers awakened.

  Man has indeed become a giant, but within him, growing at the pace of his own island, is locked the original minuscule dwarf who had stumbled out of the strangling grasp of the forest with a stone clutched in its hand. “This thing of Darknesse,” speaks Shakespeare in the shape of the learned Prospero, “I acknowledge mine.”

  “There is no loneliness,” once maintained the Egyptologist John Wilson, “like the loneliness of a mighty place fallen out of its proper service to man.” Perhaps the same loneliness inevitably haunts modern man himself, that restless and vacant-eyed wanderer through the streets of cities, that man of ruinous countenance from whom the gods have hidden themselves. Above him, somewhere in the blue, like a hawk hovering over a deserted temple as if in expectation of some divine renewal, the spirit Ariel, dismissed and masterless, still lingers, soaring. Ariel had been long entrapped in the knotted pine that one suspects was human flesh. Does he now hesitate to leave his prison, grown used at last to the drunken mortal cry, “The sound is going. Hark, let’s follow it”?

  Perhaps it was just such music that I had heard traversing a phantom wire at midnight. Perhaps its purpose was to lead me to another doorway, another opening portal in the dark forest that is man. It is certain that the wooded shores that now confine us lie solely within ourselves. But they are the shores still frequented at midnight by a vengeful Caliban.

  EIGHT

  The Inner Galaxy

  There is strong archaeological evidence to show that with the birth of human consciousness there was born, like a twin, the impulse to transcend it.

  —ALAN McGLASHAN

  MANY YEARS AGO, I, with another youth of my own age whom I had persuaded to make the journey with me, walked throughout the day up a great mountain. There was a famous astronomical observatory upon the mountain. On certain nights, according to the guidebooks, the lay public might come to the observatory and look upon some remote planetary object. They could also hear a lecture.

  The youth and I, who had much eager interest but no money, were unable to join one of the numerous tours organized from the tourist hotels in the valley. Instead, we had trudged for many hours in order to arrive before the crowds of visitors might frustrate our hopes for a glimpse of those far worlds about which we had read so avidly.

  This was long ago, and we were naïve young men. We thought, though we were poor, that we would be welcome upon the mountain because of our desire to learn. There were reputed to dwell in the observatory men of wisdom who we hoped would receive us kindly since we, too, wished to gaze upon the wonders of outer space. We were, indeed, very unskilled in the ways of the adult world. As it turned out, we were never permitted to see the men of wisdom, or to gaze through the magic glass into outer space. I rather suspect that the eminent astronomers had not taken youths like us into their calculations. There was, it seemed, a relationship we had never suspected between the hotels in the valley and the men who inhabited the observatory upon the mountain.

  Although by laborious effort we had succeeded in arr
iving before the busloads of tourists from the hotels, we were thrust forth and told to take our chances after the tourists had been accommodated. As busload after busload of people roared up before the observatory, we saw that this was an indirect dismissal. It would be dawn before our turn came, if, indeed, they chose to accept us at all.

  The guard eyed us and our clothes with sullen distaste. Though it was freezing cold upon the mountain, it was plain we were not welcome in the inn that catered to the tourists. Reluctantly, with a few coins from our little store of change we purchased a bit of chocolate. We looked at each other. Wearily and without a word, we turned and began our long descent through the dark. It would take many hours; nor were we sustained by having seen the shining planet upon which our hopes were fixed.

  This was my first experience of the commercial side of outer space, and though I now serve upon a committee that encourages the young in a direction once denied me, I feel that this youthful experience contributed to a certain growing introspection and curiosity about the relationship of science to the world about it.

  Something was seriously wrong upon that mountain and among the wise men who flourished there. Knowledge, I had learned in the bleak wind by the shut door, was not free, and many to whom that observatory was only a passing curiosity had easier access to it than we who had climbed painfully for many hours. My memory is from the far days of the twenties, and I realize that we now beckon enticingly to the youth interested in space where before we ignored him. I still have an uncomfortable feeling, however, that it is the circumstances, and not the actors, which have changed. I remain oppressed by the thought that the venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without.

  Upon that desolate peak my mind had turned finally inward. It is from that domain, that inner sky, that I choose to speak—a world of dreams, of light and darkness, that we will never escape, even on the far edge of Arcturus. The inward skies of man will accompany him across any void upon which he ventures and will be with him to the end of time. There is just one way in which that inward world differs from outer space. It can be more volatile and mobile, more terrible and impoverished, yet withal more ennobling in its self-consciousness, than the universe that gave it birth. To the educators of this revolutionary generation, the transformations we may induce in that inner sky loom in at least equal importance with the work of those whose goals are set beyond the orbit of the moon.

  No one needs to be told that different and private worlds exist in the heads of men. But in a day when some men are listening by radio telescope to the rustling of events at the ends of the universe, the universe of others consists of hopeless poverty amidst the filthy garbage of a city lot. A taxi man I know thinks the stars are just “up there,” and that as soon as our vehicles are perfected we can all take off like crowds of summer tourists to Cape Cod. This man expects, and I fear has been encouraged to expect, that such flights will solve the population problem. Again, while I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors.

  “He doesn’t know,” my friend whispered excitedly. “He’s passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us. Where are we? Whose is the real play?”

  Between the universe of the moth and the poet, I sat confounded. My mind went back to the heads of alabaster that the kings of the old Egyptian Empire sought to endow with eternal life, replacing thus against accident their own frail and perishable brains for the passage through eternity. The Pharaohs, like the moth among the arc lights, had been entranced by the flaming journey of the sun. Some had even constructed, hopefully, their own solar boats. Perhaps, I thought, those boats symbolized the frail vessel of which Plato was later to speak—that vessel on which to risk the voyage of life, or, rather, eternity, which was inevitably man’s compulsive interest. As for me, I had come to seek wisdom no longer upon the improvised rafts of proud philosophies. I had seen the moth burn in its passage through the light. I had seen all the vessels fail but one—that word which Plato sought, and which none could long identify or hold.

  There was a real play, but it was a play in which man was destined always to be a searcher, and it would be his true nature he would seek. The fragile vessel was himself, and not among the stars upon the mountain. Was not that what Plotinus had implied? Then if a man were to write further, I considered, he would write of that—of the last things.

  II

  Several years ago, a man in a small California town suffered an odd accident. The accident itself was commonplace. But the psychological episode accompanying it seems so strange that I recount it here. I had been long engaged upon a book I was eager to finish. As I walked, abstracted and alone, toward my office one late afternoon, I caught the toe of my shoe in an ill-placed drain. Some trick of mechanics brought me down over the curb with extraordinary violence. A tremendous crack echoed in my ears. When I next opened my eyes I was lying face down on the sidewalk. My nose was smashed over on one side. Blood from a gash on my forehead was cascading over my face.

  Reluctantly I explored further, running my tongue cautiously about my mouth and over my teeth. Under my face a steady rivulet of blood was enlarging to a bright red pool on the sidewalk. It was then, as I peered nearsightedly at my ebbing substance there in the brilliant sunshine, that a surprising thing happened. Confusedly, painfully, indifferent to running feet and the anxious cries of witnesses about me, I lifted a wet hand out of this welter and murmured in compassionate concern, “Oh, don’t go. I’m sorry, I’ve done for you.”

  The words were not addressed to the crowd gathering about me. They were inside and spoken to no one but a part of myself. I was quite sane, only it was an oddly detached sanity, for I was addressing blood cells, phagocytes, platelets, all the crawling, living, independent wonder that had been part of me and now, through my folly and lack of care, were dying like beached fish on the hot pavement. A great wave of passionate contrition, even of adoration, swept through my mind, a sensation of love on a cosmic scale, for mark that this experience was, in its way, as vast a catastrophe as would be that of a galaxy consciously suffering through the loss of its solar systems.

  I was made up of millions of these tiny creatures, their toil, their sacrifices, as they hurried to seal and repair the rent fabric of this vast being whom they had unknowingly, but in love, compounded. And I, for the first time in my mortal existence, did not see these creatures as odd objects under the microscope. Instead, an echo of the force that moved them came up from the deep well of my being and flooded through the shaken circuits of my brain. I was they—their galaxy, their creation. For the first time, I loved them consciously, even as I was plucked up and away by willing hands. It seemed to me then, and does now in retrospect, that I had caused to the universe I inhabited as many deaths as the explosion of a supernova in the cosmos.

  Weeks later, recovering, I paid a visit to the place of the accident. A faint discoloration still marked the sidewalk. I hovered over the spot, obscurely troubled. They were gone, utterly destroyed—those tiny beings—but the entity of which they had made a portion still persisted. I shook my head, conscious of the brooding mystery that the poet Dante impelled into his great line: “the love that moves the sun and other stars.”

  The phrase does not come handily to our lips today. For a century we have chosen to talk continuously about the struggle for existence, about man, the brawling half-ape and bestial fighter. We have explored with wavering candles the dark cellars of our subconscious and been appalled by the faces we have encountered there. It will do no harm, therefore, if we choose to examine the history of that great impul
se—love, compassion, call it what one will—which, however discounted in our time, moved the dying Christ on Golgotha with a power that has reached across two thousand weary years.

  “The conviction of wisdom,” wrote Montaigne in the sixteenth century, “is the plague of man.” Century after century, humanity studies itself in the mirror of fashion, and ever the mirror gives back distortions, which for the moment impose themselves upon man’s real image. In one period we believe ourselves governed by immutable laws; in the next, by chance. In one period angels hover over our birth; in the following time we are planetary waifs, the product of a meaningless and ever altering chemistry. We exchange halos in one era for fangs in another. Our religious and philosophical conceptions change so rapidly that the theological and moral exhortations of one decade become the wastepaper of the next epoch. The ideas for which millions yielded up their lives produce only bored yawns in a later generation.

  “We are, I know not how,” Montaigne continued, “double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.”

  This complex, many-faceted, self-conscious creature now examines himself in the mirror held up to him by the modern students of prehistory. Increasingly he asks of the bony fragments recovered from pre-ice-age strata, not whether they are related to himself, but what manner of creature they proclaim us to be. Of the answer that may come up from underground we are all too evidently afraid. There are even those who have dared prematurely to announce the verdict. “Look,” they say, “at the dark instincts that drive you. Look deep into your bloody, fossil, encrusted hearts. Then you will know man. You will know him from the caves to the Berlin wall. Thus he is and thus he will remain. It is written in his bones.”