The Unexpected Universe by Loren Eiseley

Author:Loren Eiseley [Eiseley, Loren]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781598535457
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2016-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

IV

Thoreau had loved nature as intensely as Darwin and perhaps more personally. He had seen with another set of glasses. He was, in an opposite sense to Darwin, a dweller along the edge of the known, a place where the new begins. Thoreau carries a hint of that newness. He dwelt, without being quite consciously aware of it, in the age after tomorrow. His friends felt universally baffled by Thoreau and labeled him “almost another species.” One contemporary wrote: “His eyes slipped into every tuft of meadow or beach grass and went winding in and out of the thickest undergrowth, like some slim, silent, cunning animal.” It has been said that he was not a true naturalist. What was he, then? The account just quoted implies a man similar to Darwin, and, in his own way, as powerfully motivated.

Of all strange and unaccountable things, Thoreau admits his efforts at his Journal to be the strangest. Even in youth he is beset by a prescient sadness. The companions who beguile his way will leave him, he already knows, at the first turn of the road. He was basically doomed all his life to be the Scarecrow of Oz, and if he seems harsher than that genial figure, it is because the city he sought was more elusive and he did not have even the Cowardly Lion for company. He knew only that by approaching nature he would be consulting, in every autumn-leaf fall, not alone those who had gone before him, but also those who would come after. He was writing before the Origin of Species, but someone had sewn amazing eyes upon the Concord Scarecrow.

There is a delicacy in him that is all his own. His search for support in nature is as diligent as that of a climbing vine he had once watched with fascinated attention groping eerily toward an invisible branch. Yet, like Darwin, he had witnessed the worst that nature could do. On his deathbed he had asked, still insatiable, to be lifted up in order that he could catch through the window a glimpse of one more spring.

In one passage in the Journal he had observed that the fishers’ nets strung across the transparent river were no more intrusive than a cobweb in the sun. “It is,” he notes, “a very slight and refined outrage at most.” In their symmetry, he realizes, they are a beautiful memento of man’s presence in nature, as wary a discovery as the footprint upon Crusoe’s isle. Moreover, this little symbol of the fishers’ seine defines precisely that delicately woven fabric of human relationships in which man, as a social animal, is so thoroughly enmeshed. There are times when, intellectually, Darwin threshed about in that same net as though trapped by a bird spider in his own forested Brazil.

For the most part, the untraveled man in Concord managed to slip in and out of similar meshes with comparative ease. Like some lean-bodied fish he is there, he is curiously observant, but he floats, oddly detached and unfrightened, in the great stream.

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