Home > Author > Loren Eiseley
81 " Perhaps far outward on the rim of space a genuine star was similarly seized and flung... For a moment, we cast on an infinite beach together, beside an unknown hurler of suns... I have caught a glimpse of what man may be, along an endless wave beaten coast at dawn "
― Loren Eiseley , The Star Thrower
82 " It has ever been my lot, though formally myself a teacher, to be taught surely by none. There are times when I have thought to read lessons in the sky, or in books, or from the behavior of my fellows, but in the end my perceptions have frequently been inadequate or betrayed. Nevertheless, I venture to say that of what man may be I have caught a fugitive glimpse, not among multitudes of men, but along an endless wave-beaten coast at dawn. As always, there is this apparent break, this rift in nature, before the insight comes. The terrible question has to translate itself into an even more terrifying freedom. "
― Loren Eiseley
83 " 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 is 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. "
84 " just as instinct may fail an animal under some shift of environmental conditions, so man’s cultural beliefs may prove inadequate to meet a new situation, or, on an individual level, the confused mind may substitute, by some terrible alchemy, cruelty for love. The "
― Loren Eiseley , The Immense Journey
85 " This fear of the upheld mirror in the hand of genius extendsto the teaching profession and perhaps to the primary andsecondary school teacher most of all. The teacher occupies a particularly anomalous andexposed position in a society subject to rapid change or threatenedby exterior enemies. Society is never totally sure of whatit wants of its educators. It wants, first of all, the inculcationof custom, tradition, and all that socializes the child into thegood citizen. In the lower grades the demand for conformityis likely to be intense. The child himself, as well as the teacher,is frequently under the surveillance of critical, if not opinionated,parents. Secondly, however, society wants the child toabsorb new learning which will simultaneously benefit thatsociety and enhance the individual's prospects of success.Thus the teacher, in some degree, stands as interpreter anddisseminator of the cultural mutations introduced by the individualgenius into society. Some of the fear, the projected guiltfeelings, of those who do not wish to look into the mirrors heldup to them by men of the Hawthorne stamp of genius, fallsupon us. Moving among innovators of ideas as we do, siftingand judging them daily, something of the suspicion with whichthe mass of mankind still tends to regard its own cultural creatorsfalls upon the teacher who plays a role of great significancein this process of cultural diffusion. He is, to a degree, placedin a paradoxical position. He is expected both to be the guardianof stability and the exponent of societal change. Since allpersons do not accept new ideas at the same rate, it is impossiblefor the educator to please the entire society even if heremains abjectly servile. This is particularly true in a dynamicand rapidly changing era like the present.Moreover, the true teacher has another allegiance than thatto parents alone. More than any other class· in society, teachersmold the future in the minds of the young. They transmit tothem the aspirations of great thinkers of which their parentsmay have only the faintest notions. The teacher is often thefirst to discover the talented and unusual scholar. How he handlesand encourages, or discourages, such a child may make allthe difference in the world to that child's future- and to theworld. Perhaps he can induce in stubborn parents the convictionthat their child is unusual and should be encouraged in hisstudies. If the teacher is sufficiently judicious, he may even beable to help a child over the teetering planks of a broken homeand a bad neighborhood.It is just here, however--in our search for what we might callthe able, all-purpose, success-modeled student--that I feel it sonecessary not to lose sight of those darker, more uncertain, late-maturing,sometimes painfully abstracted youths who may represent the Darwins, Thoreaus, and Hawthornes of the nextgeneration. "
86 " Science can be--and is--used by good men, but in its present sense it can scarcely be said to create them. Science, of course, in discovery represents the individual, but in the moment of triumph, science creates uniformity through which the mind of the individual once more flees away.... Man inhabits a realm half in and half out of nature, his mind reaching forever beyond the tool, the uniformity, the law, into some realm which is that of mind alone. "
― Loren Eiseley , The Night Country
87 " The violence in Hutton’s raindrop is equaled, if not surpassed, by the violence contained in a microscopic genetic particle. The one, multiplied, carries away a mountain range. The other crosses an ice age and produces, on its far side, a man-ape whose intellectual powers now endanger his own civilization. "
― Loren Eiseley , The Firmament of Time
88 " I was shivering a little by the time the guard came to me. Around us in the museum cases was an old pattern, out of the remote sea depths. It was alien to man. I would never underestimate it again. It is not the individual that matters; it is the Plan and the incredible potentialities within it. The forms within the Form are endless and their emergence into time is endless. I leaned there, gazing at that monster from whom the forms seemed flowing, like the last vertebrate on a world whose sun was dying. It was plain that they wanted the planet and meant to have it. One could feel the massed threat of them in this hall. "
89 " It is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster, consuming flesh, stones, soil, minerals, sucking down the lightning, wrenching power from the atom, until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned in the cacophony of something which is no longer nature, something instead which is loose and knocking at the world’s heart, something demonic and no longer planned—escaped, it may be—spewed out of nature, contending in a final giant’s game against its master. "
90 " We are all potential fossils, still carrying within our bodies the crudites of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker. "
91 " As for men, those myriad little detached ponds with their own swarming corpuscular life, what were they but a way that water has of going beyond the reach of rivers. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker) "
92 " I one saw, on a flowerpot in my own living room, the efforts of a field mouse to rebuild a remembered field. I have lived to see this episode repeated in a thousand guises, and since i have spent a large portion of my life in the shade of a non-existent tree, i think i am entitled to speak for the field mouse. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker) "
