![]() He was distracted by wonder, overwhelmed with a feeling “as though the universe were too frighteningly queer to be understood by minds like ours.”Īs a scientist he knew that “one is supposed to flourish Occam’s razor and reduce hypotheses about a complex world to human proportions. He might have been a poet, or a philosopher. Few men of science have ever been so well read.Įiseley seems to have harbored doubts about his calling. He found his peace working alone in the empty places of the High Plains or at the foot of the Rockies, scraping at the exposed strata of ancient streambeds to unbury the lingering remains of the great Ice Ages: the bones of forgotten nomads and species long extinct. ![]() ![]() ![]() Somehow he managed to get an education and become an anthropologist. He nearly died of tuberculosis in his early twenties. Eiseley fled as soon as he was able, riding the rails as a young man through the Great Depression, living hand-to-mouth and at the mercy of strangers. They were a family of outsiders with few friends and connections, always moving from the edge of one town to the edge of another. His mother was deaf and mentally ill, his father a failed stage actor who earned a scant living as a salesman. Sometimes I think Loren Eiseley must have been the saddest American that ever lived, but he found consolation in places most others would fail to uncover it. ![]()
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