The Night Country | Loren Eiseley | You cannot miss with Loren Eiseley

The Night Country | Loren Eiseley | The size of time and space

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The Night Country

	The Night Country Loren Eiseley Bison Books, 1997 - 241 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Toward the end of his life, Loren Eiseley reflected on the mystery of life, throwing light on those dark places traversed by himself and centuries of humankind. The Night Country is a gift of wisdom and beauty from the famed anthropologist. It describes his needy childhood in Nebraska, reveals his increasing sensitivity to the odd and ordinary in nature, and focuses on a career that turns him inward as he reaches outward for answers in old bones.

You cannot miss with Loren Eiseley

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."

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The size of time and space

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.

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A little night music

This is only one among many collections of Loren Eisley's thoughtful works, and I would willingly recommend all those I have read. THE NIGHT COUNTRY, however, remains my favorite. Eisley's vision overlays the human and non-human worlds and examines both over the span of ages rather than years. He will show you tiny snippets of life in a parking lot, shadows on cave walls, deserts, pigeons and childhood memories that will linger in your thinking like dinosaur footprints impressed in mud and baked to permanence by hot volcanic ash. You may choose not to follow that trail again, but I assure you it will remain vivid. Consider the return of an old man to a boyhood home after more than a half century, eager to see the cottonwood tree he and his father planted together. It was the tree his father had promised would provide Eisley with shade in his old age, where he might sit and remember his Dad; a tree that had grown and blossomed and flourished year after year in Eisley's thoughts and dreams; a tree under whose branches Eisley figuratively lived his entire life. Gone. For, who knows, fifty years? And yet, what tree could have been more real, more alive? Like a field mouse displaced by developers, pigeons abandoned with an archaic train station, a bum dying in a depot, or a wasp fading into the chill of autumn, Eisley knows that the shadow he casts on a hotel wall will be that of another man tomorrow, and all shadows fade together into the night.

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