The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley

Author:Loren Eiseley [Eiseley, Loren]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780307801937
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

1 “Note on Absolute Chronology of Human Evolution,” Science 123 (1956), pp. 924–26.

2 Embryos and Ancestors, rev. ed. (New York, Oxford, 1951), p. 93.

MAN OF THE FUTURE

There are days when I may find myself unduly pessimistic about the future of man. Indeed, I will confess that there have been occasions when I swore I would never again make the study of time a profession. My walls are lined with books expounding its mysteries, my hands have been split and raw with grubbing into the quicklime of its waste bins and hidden crevices. I have stared so much at death that I can recognize the lingering personalities in the faces of skulls and feel accompanying affinities and repulsions.

One such skull lies in the lockers of a great metropolitan museum. It is labeled simply: Strandlooper, South Africa. I have never looked longer into any human face than I have upon the features of that skull. I come there often, drawn in spite of myself. It is a face that would lend reality to the fantastic tales of our childhood. There is a hint of Wells’s Time Machine folk in it—those pathetic, childlike people whom Wells pictures as haunting earth’s autumnal cities in the far future of the dying planet.

Yet this skull has not been spirited back to us through future eras by a time machine. It is a thing, instead, of the millennial past. It is a caricature of modern man, not by reason of its primitiveness but, startlingly, because of a modernity outreaching his own. It constitutes, in fact, a mysterious prophecy and warning. For at the very moment in which students of humanity have been sketching their concept of the man of the future, that being has already come, and lived, and passed away.

We men of today are insatiably curious about ourselves and desperately in need of reassurance. Beneath our boisterous self-confidence is fear—a growing fear of the future we are in the process of creating. In such a mood we turn the pages of our favorite magazine and, like as not, come straight upon a description of the man of the future.

The descriptions are never pessimistic; they always, with sublime confidence, involve just one variety of mankind—our own—and they are always subtly flattering. In fact, a distinguished colleague of mine who was adept at this kind of prophecy once allowed a somewhat etherealized version of his own lofty brow to be used as an illustration of what the man of the future was to look like. Even the bald spot didn’t matter—all the men of the future were to be bald, anyway.

Occasionally I show this picture to students. They find it highly comforting. Somebody with a lot of brains will save humanity at the proper moment. “It’s all right,” they say, looking at my friend’s picture labeled “Man of the Future.” “It’s O.K. Somebody’s keeping an eye on things. Our heads are getting bigger and our teeth are getting smaller. Look!”

Their voices ring with youthful confidence, the confidence engendered by my persuasive colleagues and myself.

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