The Night Country

Rating:
Summary: The size of time and space
Review: I first was introduced to Loren Eisley by a roommate in graduate school who read aloud to me the final essay in this book. It is entitled, "The Brown Wasps," and if you've never read anything by Eisley, you might want to start there. Among many things, this particular essay is about memory, home, and the place of death in life - themes that run throughout the book whose essays are intimate narratives that intermingle meditations on science and personal history. Having now written these words I feel they miss the mark in recommending this book becuase the themes of Eisley's work seem more experiential than concrete to me, which is the case for many truths about life - truths that can be captured more by the feelings evoked by a time and a place than by mere words alone. And yet, his words do a remarkable job of evoking past times and places, locating them in your present life and providing a context for understanding their meaning. If you read this book, perhaps you'll want to share it with a friend, as my friend did with me, and I have with many good friends since. Eisley communicates the happy/sad, excited/melancholic, naive/wise tensions of nostalgia like no one else I've read.

Rating:
Summary: You cannot miss with Loren Eiseley
Review: Theodosius Dobzhansky described Eiseley as "...a Proust miraculously turned into an evolutionary anthropologist," and his works are greatly admired by Ray Bradbury. This was the second book I read of his after "The Immense Journey" and it was no let down at all! It too is haunting, beautiful, disturbing, hopeful, fearful, and immensely imaginative.

Here's a taste, from the chapter The Places Below: "If you cannot bear the silence and the darkness, do not go there; if you dislike black night and yawning chasms, never make them your profession. If you fear the sound of water hurrying through crevices toward unknown and mysterious destinations, do not consider it. Seek out the sunshine. It is a simpler prescription. Avoid the darkness."