Loren Eiseley - The Unexpected Universe

are mad, they know not whence they come, nor whither they would go: and those men are maddest of all that go to sea.

ROBERT BURTON

E VERY MAN CONTAINS within himself a ghost continenta place circled as warily as Antarctica was circled two hundred years ago by Captain James Cook. If, in addition, the man is a scientist, he will see strange shapes amidst his interior ice floes and be fearful of exposing to the ridicule of his fellows what he has seen. To begin such a personal record it may be well to start with the odyssean voyages of legend and science. These may defend with something of their own magic the small story of an observer lost upon the fringes of large events. Let it be understood that I claim no discoveries. I claim only the events of a life in science as they were transformed inwardly into something that was whispered to Odysseus long ago.

Like Odysseus, man seeks his spiritual home and is denied it; along his path the shape-shifting immortal monsters of his earlier wanderings assume more sophisticated guises, but they survive because man himself remains and man has called them forth. The almost three-thousand - year-old epic of the Odyssey takes on a particular pertinence today. It possesses a perennial literary freshness that causes it to be translated anew in every generation. It involves an extended journey amid magical obstacles and Cyclopean assailants. Moreover, it can be read as containing the ingredients of both an inward journey of reflection and an outwardly active adventure. Both these journeys threaten to culminate in our time. Mans urge toward space has impelled him to circle the planet, and in the week of December 25, 1968, precisely two hundred years after the navigator James Cooks first great voyage into the Pacific, three American astronauts had returned from the moon. The event lies more than two million years after the first man-ape picked up and used a stone.

Nevertheless, throughout this entire pilgrimage, as reflected in his religious and philosophical thinking, mans technological triumphs have frequently been at odds with his hunger for psychological composure and peace. Thus the epic journey of modern science is a story at once of tremendous achievement, loneliness, and terror. Odysseus passage through the haunted waters of the eastern Mediterranean symbolizes, at the start of the Western intellectual tradition, the sufferings that the universe and his own nature impose upon homeward-yearning man.

In the restless atmosphere of today all the psychological elements of the Odyssey are present to excess: the driving will toward achievement, the technological cleverness crudely manifest in the blinding of Cyclops, the fierce rejection of the sleepy Lotus Isles, the violence between man and man. Yet, significantly, the ancient hero cries out in desperation, There is nothing worse for men than wandering.

The words could just as well express the revulsion of a modern thinker over the sight of a nation harried by irrational activists whose rejection of history constitutes an equal, if unrecognized, rejection of any humane or recognizable future. We are a society bemused in its purposes and yet secretly homesick for a lost world of inward tranquillity. The thirst for illimitable knowledge now conflicts directly with the search for a serenity obtainable nowhere upon earth. Knowledge, or at least what the twentieth century acclaims as knowledge, has not led to happiness.

Ours is certainly the most time-conscious generation that has ever lived. Our cameras, our television, our archaeological probings, our C14 datings, pollen counts, under-water researches, magnetometer readings have resurrected lost cities, placing them accurately in stratigraphic succession. Each Christmas season the art of ice age Lascaux is placed beside that of Rembrandt on our coffee tables. Views of Pompeii share honors with Chichn Itz upon the television screen in the living room. We unearth obscure ancestral primates and, in the motion picture 2001, watch a struck fragment of bone fly into the air and become a spaceship drifting among the stars, thus telescoping in an instant the whole technological history of man. We expect the average onlooker to comprehend the symbolism; such a civilization, one must assume, should show a deep veneration for the past.

Strangely, the results are quite otherwise. We appear to be living, instead, amidst a meaningless mosaic of fragments. From ape skull to Mayan temple we contemplate the miscellaneous debris of time like sightseers to whom these mighty fragments, fallen gateways, and sunken galleys convey no present instruction.

In our streets and on our campuses there riots an extremist minority dedicated to the now, to the moment, however absurd, degrading, or irrelevant the moment may be. Such an activism deliberately rejects the past and is determined to start life anewindeed, to reject the very institutions that feed, clothe, and sustain our swarming millions.