The Wild Reality

THE UNEXPECTED UNIVERSE by Loren Eiseley. 239 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $5.75.

"It is very seldom that the same man knows much of science, and about the things that were known before ever science came," Lord Dunsany once remarked, with both British and scientific understatement. Loren Eiseley is one such humanist-scientist--Dunsany's man for all cultures. A writer of literary distinction (The Immense Journey, The Mind as Nature) as well as a front-rank anthropologist, he is one of the few living scientists who can contemplate evolution and think of the Odyssey as the immediately appropriate metaphor. Somehow Eiseley has absorbed all the New Information while retaining a pre-scientific sense of wonder.

In fact, that is precisely Eiseley's argument in this curious book: If science ignores the ancient intuitions of poets and primitives, it is likely to become an arrogant distortion of its own truth. Practicing the sensibility he preaches, Eiseley begins each chapter under the guise of an old-fashioned personal essayist. Almost casually, he recalls a walk on the beach, the odd behavior of his shepherd dog one stormy winter night, a dig among American rhinoceros bones.

Despite his modern choice of literary form, Eiseley is perceptively ambitious. Taken together, these introspective pieces comprise nothing less than a corrective statement on the modern view of the universe and the human priorities set within it. Like a latterday, lab-trained Hamlet, Eiseley confronts his fellow scientists with the charge that there are more things in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in their philosophy. His book is one long repeated warning that "the wild reality always eludes our grasp."

The Heart's Solitude. Increasingly, he notes, "there is but one way into the future: the technological way." Again and again, he tries to sober us up about the Great White Prophets in smocks. The new faith in computers, he warns, has made us forget the old wisdom of fairy tales: there is a frontier to man's kingdom where "predictability ceases and the unimaginable begins."

Eiseley fights a purely scientific view of man with the fury of an underground resistance fighter. "Each one of us," he writes in a cry from the heart, "is a statistical impossibility around which hover a million other lives that were never destined to be born."

If anything, science has made man more of a mystery to himself. For in conquering the universe, says Eiseley, man has got curiously out of touch with it: "His march is away from his origins . . . From the solitude of the wood he has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart." Once or twice he seems on the verge of promulgating an Eiseley law: The more science expands the universe, the more it shrinks man.

As far as the technological future goes, Eiseley has little doubt that the standard rule of civilization will continue to apply: "Solutions to problems create problems." As if it were perverse salvation, he clings to a classically tragic vision of life. It is a dark journey from birth to death, and nothing can change that.

Yet more than most of his contemporaries, he believes in the possibilities of man. He agrees with Thoreau: "We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision." Stirred by the memory of a memory--a truth just beyond our fingertips--we are, Eiseley asserts, "message carriers" who "have had a further instruction." That is our torment and our unidentifiable hope.

In the meantime, there is a choice. Strolling on a beach, Eiseley met a stranger who sought out the tide-stranded starfish and obstinately tossed the live ones back out to sea. A futile gesture, perhaps, because man cannot reverse the laws of life and death. But, says Eiseley, he can at least choose to vote for life rather than death.

If he does this, Eiseley suggests (without promising) a man may now and then glimpse a destiny beyond his brief time in the sun. He may even reach one of those rare but redeeming moments when he can look at the universe about him and say, as Eiseley does at one point: "I no longer cared about survival--I merely loved."

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