Word: eiseley
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...UNEXPECTED UNIVERSE by Loren Eiseley. 239 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World...
...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...
...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...
ANIMAL SECRETS (NBC, 5-5:30 p.m.). In "The Hostile Environment," Dr. Loren Eiseley shows how the study of animals reacting to various situations can help man adjust to the conditions of outer space...