He was a contemplator of deep time, and about the history contained within artifacts. Hewrote with a human skull upon his desk. He came to science by literature and to literature by science. He held many distinguished honors in his life, but his most important title was that of a writer. An heir to Emerson and Thoreau, Eiseley was an anthropologist, nature writer, philosopher, and poet. It marked a bold turn in his life as a writer, away from academic writing, as he’d been criticized within the scientific community for his more poetic tendencies. The Night Country is a collection of personal essays Eiseley published late in his career, just a few years before his death. Two months later, we set out on this trip. I’d left college for inpatient rehab for anorexia. We were riding borrowed bicycles up and down the rocky hills looking for something to which to attach ourselves. We were staying with his uncle in exchange for painting his house buttercup yellow. My boyfriend and I had made it to Maine on a freight train, in the backs of several strangers’ cars, and two Greyhounds. I had never heard of Eiseley, but I connected with the image. It was a mass-market paperback with an emerald green cover: a silhouette of a man standing on a cliff looking into the night sky. I was twenty-two and rambling around the Maine coast when I found a copy of Loren Eiseley’s The Night Country in a Goodwill.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |