The Unexpected Universe

by Loren Eiseley

  Yet the moment the words are said and documented, either the data are seized upon to give ourselves a fearsome picture to delight and excuse the black side of our natures or, strangely, even beautifully, the picture begins to waver and to change. St. Francis of the birds broods by the waters; Gilbert White of Selborne putters harmlessly with the old pet tortoise in his garden. Ishi, the primitive gentle philosopher, steps real as life from the Sierra forest—the idyllic man denounced as an invention of Rousseau’s, yet the product of a world more primitive than black Africa today.

  “Double in ourselves” we are, said Montaigne. Now with that doubleness in mind let us look once more into the fossil past, full into the hollow sockets of the halfmen from whom we sprang. Their bones are known; their remains have been turning up for over a century in almost every area of the Old World land mass. They have been found in the caves and gravels of ice age Europe, in the cemented breccias of deposits near Peking, in Asian coastal isles like Java, shaken at intervals by turbulent volcanoes. They have been found, as well, in the high uplands of eastern Africa and in the grottoes of the Holy Land.

  Nevertheless, the faces of our ancestors remain forever unknown to us even as they stare from the illustrations of the poorest and most obscure textbook. The color of their skins is lost, the texture of their hair unknown, the expression of their once living features is as masked as those of the anonymous cadaver that represents collective humanity in the pages of medical textbooks. It is the same gray anonymity in which man’s formidable enemy, the saber-toothed tiger, is lost, or even the dinosaur.

  In the case of man, the representations are particularly ungratifying. Man is a creature volatile of expression, and across his features in a day may flow happiness and remorse, rage and charity. Individually, as on a modern street, one should be able to sight the sly, the brutal, and the benignant. If, in the world of fossils, however, we seek the soul of man himself, we are forced to draw it from the empty sockets of skulls or the representations of artists quick to project their own conceptions of the past upon the indifferent dead.

  It is man’s folly, as it is perhaps a sign of his spiritual aspirations, that he is forever scrutinizing and redefining himself. A mole, so far as we can determine, is content with its dim world below the grass roots, a snow leopard with being what he is—a drifting ghost in a blizzard. Man, by contrast, is marked by a restless inner eye, which, in periods of social violence, such as characterize our age, grows clouded with anxiety. There are times when our bodies seem to waver from within and bulge lumpishly with the shape of contending forces.

  There is danger as well as wisdom, however, in such self-scrutiny. Man, unlike the lower creatures locked safely within their particular endowed natures, possesses freedom. He can define and redefine his own humanity, his own conception of himself. In so doing, he may give wings to the spirit or reshape himself into something more genuinely bestial than any beast of prey obeying its own nature. In this ability to take on the shape of his own dreams, man extends beyond visible nature into another and stranger realm. It is part of each person’s individual evolutionary status that he possesses this power in unequal degrees.

  Few of us can be saints; few of us are total monsters. To the degree that we let others project upon us erroneous or unbalanced conceptions of our natures, we may unconsciously reshape our own image to less pleasing forms. It is one thing to be “realistic,” as many are fond of saying, about human nature. It is another thing entirely to let that consideration set limits to our spiritual aspirations or to precipitate us into cynicism and despair. We are protean in many things, and stand between extremes. There is still great room for the observation of John Donne, made over three centuries ago, however, that “no man doth refine and exalt Nature to the heighth it would beare.”

  As one surveys the artistic conceptions of the past, whether sculptured or drawn, one frequently encounters an adenoidal, open-mouthed brute with a club representing Neanderthal man. Then, by contrast, we encounter a neatly groomed model of Peking man, looking as clear-eyed and intelligent as a broker on his way to the Stock Exchange. Something is obviously wrong here. The well-groomed Peking specimen belongs on the same anatomical level as Pithecanthropus, sometimes represented in older illustrations as possessing snarling fangs. The fangs are a figment of the artist’s imagination. They have been stolen from our living relative, the gorilla. The mispictured adenoidal moron with the club is known to have buried his dead with offerings, and to have cared for the injured and maimed among his kind.

  Men are subjects of society. It is true that they carry bits and pieces of their past about with them, but they also covertly examine in the social mirror of their minds the way they look. Thus there is a quality of illusion about all of us. Emerson knew this well when he asked, in one of his more profound moments, “Why do men feel that the natural history of man has never been written, but he is always leaving behind what you have said of him, and it becomes old and books of metaphysics worthless?”

  This comment of Emerson’s is perhaps one of the most difficult pieces of wisdom that man has to learn. We are inclined to visualize our psychological makeup as fixed—as something bestowed upon the first man. In pre-evolutionary times, the human mind, with its reason, its conscience, its free will, was regarded as divinely and immediately created in the human organism just as it stands today.

  With the rise of Darwinian evolution in the mid-nineteenth century, the concept of the stably endowed species correctly gave way to the notion of man and other animal forms as transient, imperfect, forever moving from one set of conditions to another. “Cosmic nature,” wrote Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s colleague and defender, “is no school of virtue. . . . For his successful progress as far as the savage state, man has been largely indebted to those qualities which he shares with the ape and the tiger.”

  No intelligent person today, surveying the low skull vault and heavy brow ridges of fossil man, can deny that man has changed through the aeons of prehistory, however difficult may seem the road he has traveled. Natural selection has undoubtedly played a leading role in that process. Here we must proceed with care, if we are not to fall into fallacious reasoning. Otherwise we will emerge from our survey of the past with another set of stereotypes as to the nature of man, which may well prove to be just as rigid and dogmatic as those developed in pre-evolutionary thought—stereotypes that have been thrust forward even today as evidence of man’s bestial nature.

  Man’s altruistic and innately co-operative character has brought him along the road to civilization far more than the qualities of the ape and tiger of Huxley’s analysis. These are bad metaphors at best. The ape is a largely inoffensive social animal, the tiger a solitary, carnivorous hunter. To lump them in a comparison with man is spectacular but confusing. As for the fearful war of nature painted by the early evolutionists and symbolized by the tiger, we know today that even the great carnivores exist, normally, in balance with their prey. When satiated and not involved in the hunt, they may stroll scarcely noticed among the herd creatures they stalk.

  Some members of the Darwinian circle could only conceive of man achieving his high intellect through the heavy selection of incessant war. Today we know that early man was small and scant in numbers and that most of his efforts must have been given over to food-getting rather than conflict. This is not to minimize his destructive qualities, but his long-drawn-out, helpless childhood, during which his growing brain matured, could only have flourished in the safety of a stable family organization—groups marked by altruistic and long-continued care of the young.

  The nineteenth-century evolutionists, and many philosophers still today, are obsessed by struggle. They try to define natural selection in one sense only—something that Darwin himself avoided. They ignore all man’s finer qualities—generosity, self-sacrifice, universe-searching wisdom—in the attempt to enclose him in the small capsule that contained the brain of protoman. Such writers often fail to explore man’s growing sense of b
eauty, the language that has opened and defined his world, the little gifts he came to lay beside his dead.

  None of these acts could have been prophesied before man came. They reveal something other than what the pure materialist would be able to draw out of the dark concourse of matter before the genuine emergence of these novel human phenomena into time. There is no definition or description of man possible by reducing him to ape or tree shrew. Once, it is true, the shrew contained him, but he is gone. He has broken from the opened seed pod of the prehominid brain, a thistledown now drifting toward the empty spaces of the universe. He is full of the lights and visions—yes, and the fearful darknesses—of the next age of man.

  The world we now know is open-ended, unpredictable. Man has partially domesticated himself; in this lies the story of his strange nature, of that love which transcends the small Darwinian matters of tribal cooperation and safety. For man, be it noted, can love the music of Ariel’s isle, or, in his heart, that ideal city of the Greeks which is not and yet is forever.

  The law of selection that acts upon living creatures in the wild is frequently repressive. A coat color a little off tone and visible, a variation in instinct, may make for death. The powerful creative surge from the under-darkness of nature is held in check, awaiting, perhaps, a season that never comes; the white stag is struck down by the hunter. It is this unending struggle that those who would picture man from the beginning as a monster of terror would delineate—the man with the stone striking down in barbaric rage, not only his game, but his brother and his son.

  Natural selection is real but at the same time it is a shifting chimera, less a “law” than making its own law from age to age. Let us see, before we approach what I shall call domesticated man, what mutual aid can mean in the life of a European sea bird, the common tern. This bird lacks the careful concealing coloration of some of nature’s species. It is variable in matters of egg form and nest shape. Capricious deviation in all these features prevails among the terns. The conformist pressures of natural selection have here given way to the creative forces of random mutation. The potential hidden in nature has flowered into a greater variety of behavior. Thus, what we call natural selection, “the war of nature,” can either enclose living creatures in specialized prisons or, on occasion, open amazing doorways into unsuspected worlds. Even such a lowly relative of man as the existing lemur Propithecus, which lives in groups, may exhibit marked individual variation, because these animals recognize and behave differently toward each other. Conformity has here given way to selective pressure for at least limited physical diversity and corresponding individuality of behavior.

  Though the case of man is complicated, it seems evident that just such a remarkable doorway opened when man, as a social animal, fell under selective forces that no longer severely channeled the nature of his mind or the minds of his aberrant offspring. Through language, this creature could communicate his dreams around the cave fires. Inevitably, a great wealth of intellectual diversity, and consequent selective mating, based upon mutual attraction, would emerge from the dark storehouse of nature. The cruel and the gentle would sit at the same fireside, dreaming already in the Stone Age the different dreams they dream today.

  The visionary was already awaiting the eternal city; the gifted musician sat hearing in his brain sounds that did not yet exist. All waited upon and yet possessed, in some dim way, the future in their heads. Abysmal darkness and great light lay invisibly about their camps. The phantom cities of the far future awaited latent talents for which, in that unspecialized time, there was no name.

  Above all, some of them, a mere handful in any generation perhaps, loved—they loved the animals about them, the song of the wind, the soft voices of women. On the flat surfaces of cave walls the three dimensions of the outside world took animal shape and form. Here—not with the ax, not with the bow—man fumbled at the door of his true kingdom. Here, hidden in times of trouble behind silent brows, against the man with the flint, waited St. Francis of the birds—the lovers, the men who are still forced to walk warily among their kind.

  III

  I am middle-aged now, and like the Egyptian heads of buried stone, or like the gentle ones who came before me, I am resigned to wait out man’s lingering barbarity. I have walked much to the sea, not knowing what I seek. The west headland I visit is always boiling, even on calm days. Spume leaps up from the sea caverns of buried reefs and the blue and purple of the turbulent waters are roiled and twisted with clashing and opposed currents. I go there frequently and sit for hours on an old whiskey crate half-buried in the sand.

  Staring into those uncertain and treacherous waters with their unexpected and lifting apparitions is like looking into the future. You can see its forces constantly gathering, expending themselves, streaming away and streaming back, contorting or violently lifting into huge and grotesque shapes. The meaning escapes one, but day after day the harpy gulls scream and mew over it and the crabs scuttle like spiders along its edge, waving threatening pincers.

  But I wander.

  On one occasion, there was just this broken crate in the sand, myself, and the sea—and then this other. I only became aware of him after several days had passed. I first encountered him when I had ventured at low tide up to the verge of the reef beyond which burst that leaping, spouting thunder, which, in my isolated wanderings, I had come to conceive of as containing the future. As I reached the flat, slippery stones over which passed a constant surf, I saw a gray wing tilt upward and move a few feet farther on. It was a big gray-backed gull, who slid quietly down again amidst the encrusted sea growth. He moved just enough, out of old and wise judgment, to keep me at arm’s length, no more. He was no longer with his kind, hovering and mewing over the outer rock masses of a dubious future. He had a space of his own on the last edge of the present. He fed there upon such things as the sea brought. He was old and he rested, if one could be said to rest amidst such waters.

  I disturbed him once by coming closer, whereupon he rose and tilted slightly in the blast from over the reef. If I did not move, neither did he. Since I am not one to go rushing over dangerous crevices, we achieved, after some days, a dignified relationship. We were both gray, and disinclined toward a future that had come to have little meaning to either of us. We stood or sat a little apart and ignored each other, being, after all, creatures diverse.

  Every morning when I came he was there. He was growing thinner, but he still rose at my coming and hovered low upon his great seagoing wings. Then I would seek my box and he would swoop back to the little space that contained his last of life. I came to look for this bird as though we shared some sane, enormously simple secret amidst a little shingle of hard stones and broken beach.

  After several days he was gone. A sector of my own life had been sheared away with his going. I shied a stone uncertainly toward the still-spouting future. Nothing came of it; no hand reached out, no shape emerged. The only rational shape had been that aged gull, too wise to venture more than a tilting wing’s length upward in such air. Finally, the extremest edge of his space had hesitantly touched mine. Neither of us had much farther to go, and the harsh simplicity of it was somehow appropriate and gratifying. A little salt-washed rock had contained us both.

  Here, I thought, is where I shall abide my ending, in the mind at least. Here where the sea grinds coral and bone alike to pebbles, and the crabs come in the night for the recent dead. Here where everything is transmuted and transmutes, but all is living or about to live.

  It was here that I came to know the final phase of love in the mind of man—the phase beyond the evolutionists’ meager concentration upon survival. Here I no longer cared about survival—I merely loved. And the love was meaningless, as the harsh Victorian Darwinists would have understood it or even, equally, those harsh modern materialists of whom Lord Dunsany once said: “It is very seldom that the same man knows much of science, and about the things that were known before ever science came.”

  I felt, sitting
in that desolate spot upon my whiskey crate, a love without issue, tenuous, almost disembodied. It was a love for an old gull, for wild dogs playing in the surf, for a hermit crab in an abandoned shell.

  It was a love that had been growing through the unthinking demands of childhood, through the pains and rapture of adult desire. Now it was breaking free, at last, of my worn body, still containing but passing beyond those other loves. Now, at last, it was truly “the bright stranger, the foreign self,” of which Emerson had once written.

  Through shattered and receding skulls, growing ever smaller behind us in the crannies of a broken earth, a stranger had crept and made his way. But precisely how he came, and what might be his destiny, except that it is not wholly of our time or this our star, we do not know.

  Perhaps it is always the destined role of the compassionate to be strangers among men. To fail and pass, to fail and come again. For the seed of man is thistledown, and a puff of breath may govern it, or a word from a poet torment it into greatness. There are few among us who can notice the passage of a moth’s wing across an opera tent at midnight and ask ourselves, “Whose is the real play?”

  I had turned to the young man who spoke those words as to one whose eye reached farther than the giant lens upon the mountain in my youth. Before us had seemed to stretch the infinite pathways of space down which, like the questing moth, it was henceforth man’s doom to wander. But the void had become to me equally an interior void—the void of our own minds—a sea as infinite as the one before which I had been meditating.

  Amidst the fall of waters on that desolate shore I watched briefly an exquisitely shaped jellyfish pumping its little umbrella sturdily along only to subside with the next wave on the strand. “Love makyth the lover and the living matters not,” an old phrase came hesitantly to my lips. We would win, I thought steadily, if not in human guise then in another, for love was something that life in its infinite prodigality could afford. It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes. This is the final paradox, which men call evolution.