The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature

This is a wonderful book. Loren Eisley is an anthropologist who writes like John Donne. I went to the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s when Loren Eisley was Professor of Anthropology. He was then recognized as the finest writer at Penn. Though his field was anthropology, every semester he was a guest lecturer for the English department in their Creative Writing classes. Each chapter starts with a theme from nature, archeology, or biology. Gradually his writing turns from scientific observation to philosophical musing, poetry, and introspection. A perfect example is his chapter called "The Dream Animal." In "The Dream Animal" Eisley starts by pondering a genuine problem in evolutionary biology - the remarkably short periodof time (approx. 500,000 years ago to 150,000 years ago) during which the brain evolved from the size of an apes to modern man. He ends with this - "The story of Eden is a greater allegory than man has ever guessed. For it was truly man who, walking memoryless through bars of sunlight and shade in the morning of the world, sat down and passed a wondering hand over a heavy forehead. Time and darkness, knowledge of good and evil, have walked with him ever since...a new world of terror and loneliness appears to have been created in the soul of man.For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds. Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the chill waters, that he had before him an immense journey. Perhaps that same foreboding still troubles the hearts of those who walk out of a crowded room and stare with relief in to the abyss of space so long as there is a star to be seen twinkling across those miles of emptiness."Take your time with this book - read it in a quiet space where Eisley's musings can lead you into musings of your own.

This book was first published over fifty years ago when Americans used to read plenty of naturalists (like Emerson, Thoreau and Muir.) That said, I think this book is just as relevant today as it was fifty years ago when it was first written. I would even put this book up as a healthy alternative to much of our New Age writing (in particular, his passages on the notion of the homonculous man seem to challenge our generation's obsession with Newness, i.e. contempt for certain parts of the past.)Eiseley's message is simple: a person can find personal meaning and comfort in nature. I enjoyed this book a lot, mostly because Eiseley indirectly reminded me to go outside and poke around. As a result, all of his little explanations about evolution became more clear when I just looked around (like his chapter entitled, "How flowers changed the world.")I recommend this book to anyone with a natural curiosity or a curiosity in nature.

I first encountered Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey by accident in a university's library stacks. I took it down from the shelf and, after glancing at the table of contents, started to read one of the essays. Three hours later I realized that I was still standing in the same place and had read through almost half the book. I had never encountered writing like this before. Eiseley writes about nature with the eyes of a haunted poet who sees the natural world slipping away even as we view it. It is hard to convey to one who hasn't read any of this just what makes his writing so special. He is a master of language. His 'take' on what he observes in nature is original and fresh. The structure of his essays, like arguments in the form of stories, progressing from some general observation to an unexpected conclusion - please and surprise the reader. Each of his essays is, at one and the same time, a lesson, a sermon, a lyrical poem, a travelogue through time and space, a prayer and a great imaginative leap beyond human skin, culture, time and place.These essays deserve to have a much broader audience than they have enjoyed. This is simply some of the best and most original writing that has been done in our century.

The other reviews say it so well, so I will simply quote something from the book: "...whenever I see a frog's eye low in the water warily ogling the shoreward landscape, I always think inconsequentially of those twiddling mechanical eyes that mankind manipulates nightly from a thousand observatories. Someday, with a telescopic lens an acre in extent, we are going to see something not to our liking, some looming shape outside there across the great pond of space."Whenever I catch a frog's eye I am aware of this, but I do not find it depressing. I stand quite still and try hard not to move or lift a hand since it would only frighten him. And standing thus it finally comes to me that this is the most enormous extension of vision of which life is capable: the projection of itself into other lives. This is the lonely, magnificent power of humanity. It is, far more than any spatial adventure, the supreme epitome of the reaching out."The comparison of a frog's eye low in the water to humanity peering out into the universe from observatories blows me away and epitomizes this great writer's style and deep imagination, which is evident in all of his books. He was able to take the simplist things and weave them into a vision of immense beauty or perhaps disturbing self examination. A fascinating and lovely book. Go back and take a look at the cover, which I think fits perfectly!

Wonderful essays on evolution, nature, and the human mind. Makes most books about these subject seem as deep as articles in _People_. I quote one of these essays, "Flying Saucers and Little Green Men," on my home page: "Darwin saw clearly that the succession of life on this planet was not a formal pattern imposed from without, or moving exclusively in one direction. Whatever else life might be, it was adjustable and not fixed. It worked its way through difficult environments. It modified and then, if necessary, it modified again, along roads which would never be retraced. Every creature alive is the product of a unique history. The statistical probability of its precise reduplication on another planet is so small as to be meaningless. Life, even cellular life, may exist out yonder in the dark. But high or low in nature, it will not wear the shape of man. That shape is the evolutionary product of a strange, long wandering through the attics of the forest roof, and so great are the chances of failure, that nothing precisely and indentically human is ever to come that way again." "In a universe whose size is beyond human imagining, where our world floats like a dust mote in the void of night, men have grown inconceivably lonely. We scan the time scale and the mechanism of life itself for portents and signs of the invisible. As the only thinking mammals on the planet -- perhaps the only thinking animals in the entire sidereal universe -- the burden of consciousness has grown heavy upon us. We watch the stars, but the signs are uncertain. We uncover the bones of the past and seek for our origins. There is a path there, but it appears to wander. The vagaries of the road may have a meaning, however; it is thus we torture ourselves." "Lights come and go in the night sky. Men, troubled at last by the things they build, may toss in their sleep and dream bad dreams, or lie awake while the meteors whisper greely overhead. But nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. There may be wisdom; there may be power; somewhere across space great instruments, handled by strange manipulative organs, may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever." -- Loren Eiseley, "Little Men and Flying Saucers," The Immense Journey There is more bleak majesty and wisdom in these three paragraphs than in any hundred science fiction novels. It also neatly summarizes Stephen Jay Gould's arguments from _Wonderful Life_. I rarely give out "10s". This book is seriously wonderful. --Stefan Jones