The skull lay tilted in such a manner that it stared, sightless, up at me as though I, too, were already caught a few feet above him in the strata and, in my turn, were staring upward at that strip of sky which the ages were carrying farther away from me beneath the tumbling debris of falling mountains. There were marks of generalized primitiveness in that low, pinched brain case and grinning jaw that marked it as lying far back along those converging roads where… cat and man and weasel must leap into a single shape.Įiseley meets the bygone creature with a jolt of perspective: I squatted on my heels in the narrow ravine, and we stared a little blankly at each other, the skull and I.
I was deep, deep below the time of man * in a remote age near the beginning of the reign of mammals. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)ĭescending into an enormous slit in Earth’s crust - “a perfect cross section through perhaps ten million years of time” - in search of fossils, Eiseley describes the skull he discovers entombed in stone several million years down this chute of time: On those days when the costs of consciousness mount to heavy the heart, when I long to fall in love again with being human, I return to some calibrating passages by the poetic anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley (September 3, 1907–July 9, 1977) from his altogether transcendent 1957 book The Immense Journey ( public library) - his record of “the prowlings of one mind which has sought to explore, to understand, and to enjoy the miracles of this world, both in and out of science.” Geological strata from Geographical Portfolio by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887. We must bear it all, as we watch our humanity and its crowning cognitive achievement dishonored by superstition and senseless violence and cruelties of which no other animal is capable, finding it more and more difficult to take pride in our evolutionary inheritance. It can pivot a hard day to remember that we are “atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity.” But for all of its innumerable glories, consciousness comes with a price that can be difficult to bear - consciousness, with its immense capacity for love, and for loneliness.
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