The Firmament of Time by Loren Eiseley

The Firmament of Time by Loren Eiseley

Author:Loren Eiseley [Eiseley, Loren]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781598535440
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2016-08-30T04:00:00+00:00


FIVE

How Human Is Man?

Be not under any Brutal Metempsychosis while thou livest and walkest about erectly under the scheme of Man.

—SIR THOMAS BROWNE

OVER A HUNDRED years ago a Scandinavian philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard, made a profound observation about the future. Kierkegaard’s remark is of such great, though hidden, importance to our subject that I shall begin by quoting his words. “He who fights the future,” remarked the philosopher, “has a dangerous enemy. The future is not, it borrows its strength from the man himself, and when it has tricked him out of this, then it appears outside of him as the enemy he must meet.”

We in the western world have rushed eagerly to embrace the future—and in so doing we have provided that future with a strength it has derived from us and our endeavors. Now, stunned, puzzled and dismayed, we try to withdraw from the embrace, not of a necessary tomorrow, but of that future which we have invited and of which, at last, we have grown perceptibly afraid. In a sudden horror we discover that the years now rushing upon us have drained our moral resources and have taken shape out of our own impotence. At this moment, if we possess even a modicum of reflective insight, we will give heed to Kierkegaard’s concluding wisdom: “Through the eternal,” he enjoins us, “we can conquer the future.”

The advice is cryptic; the hour late. Moreover, what have we to do with the eternal? Our age, we know, is littered with the wrecks of war, of outworn philosophies, of broken faiths. We profess little but the new and study only change.

Three hundred years have passed since Galileo, with the telescope, opened the enormous vista of the night. In those three centuries the phenomenal world, previously explored with the unaided senses, has undergone tremendous alteration in our minds. A misty light so remote as to be scarcely sensed by the unaided eye has become a galaxy. Under the microscope the previously unseen has become a cosmos of both beautiful and repugnant life, while the tissues of the body have been resolved into a cellular hierarchy whose constituents mysteriously produce the human personality.

Similarly, the time dimension, by the use of other sensory extensions and the close calculations made possible by our improved knowledge of the elements, has been plumbed as never before, and even its dead, forgotten life has been made to yield remarkable secrets. The great stage, in other words, the world stage where the Elizabethans saw us strutting and mouthing our parts, has the skeletons of dead actors under the floor boards, and the dusty scenery of forgotten dramas lies abandoned in the wings. The idea necessarily comes home to us then with a sudden chill: What if we are not playing on the center stage? What if the Great Spectacle has no terminus and no meaning? What if there is no audience beyond the footlights, and the play, in spite of bold villains and posturing heroes, is a shabby repeat performance in an echoing vacuity? Man is a perceptive animal.



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