Loren Eiseley

 

               

Loren Eiseley…does anyone read him any longer? He wrote about paleontology, and time, and humanity, with a wild and dark perspective. He rode the rails as a young man during the Great Depression and has always felt like a voice calling to me from the distant past. I am working my way thought his autobiography, All the Strange Hours, again after many years away.  It is still haunting and haunted; he knows that he is at the end of his life and an era as he writes. As someone who roams the stacks of our library, looking for the oldest covers on the shelves and bringing them home to read (and save, for another round, from a purge) it’s made me wonder how we will find these voices from the past in the future, as our public libraries move more towards cotemporary and popular literature and away from the older writers.

                When I was young, my father took me to our local library one night a week. It was a tiny place—no bigger, in my mind, than my house now, which is 625 square feet. There was a children’s’ room to the right when you walked in, the magazine room to the left, and adult books towards the back. It was kind of dark and dusty. The librarian, who was also my neighbor, baby sitter, and an old student of Robert Frosts’, sat at a large wooden desk facing the door, surrounded by cards from the catalog, piles of toppling books, and paper bags. Because I was a voracious reader, I started with the A’s and worked my way up and down and around the room, checking out every book.  There was no system of purging and replacing; books spanned 50 or more years of publication.  I roamed through time on those evenings, bringing home a stack every week. When I had read every book twice, my father negotiated with a friend to use his address and gave me a library card to the Haverhill library, which was a large, modern concrete bunker of a building. I roamed those shelves as well, searching for the older books, away from the young adult angst and death of friends that dominated the contemporary selections.  . Books were a way to look backwards, to learn about the culture of our country—and others—from primary sources, not from history texts. I am sure this experience led to my history degree.

                And so, Loren Eiseley resonated with this exploration. He traveled much further back in time, in his mind, back to the Ice Ages when bison roamed the Great Plains, to the grave of a child wrapped in rabbit fur in Texas, deep into caverns in the southwest. Time was fluid in his mind, as it has been in mine. I don’t know when I first read his essays—it must have been in high school.  I may have just stumbled onto him as I roamed the shelves of our tiny library. Or was he part of a high school anthology that I read on a winter afternoon when it was cold and rainy outside?  Did my senior teacher hand us a copy of one of his essays as a model?  I loved him then—and he is still a pretty fine time traveler, so many years later.