The end?

Before Sunday passes, a brief overview of the rest of the essays in the The Immense Journey.

The Slit

"Through how many dimensions and how many media will life have to pass? Down how many roads among the stars must man propel himself in search of the final secret? The journey is difficult, immense, at times impossible, yet that will not deter some of us from attempting it. We cannot know all that has happened in the past, or the reason for all of these events, any more than we can with surety discern what lies ahead. We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know."

The Flow of the River

"If there is magic on this planet it is contained in water. (...) As for men, those myriad little detached ponds with their own swarming corpuscular life, what were they but a way that water has of going about beyond the reach of rivers? I, too, was a microcosm of pouring rivulets and floating driftwood gnawed by the mysterious animalcules of my own creation." 

The Great Deeps

"All of the tremendous differences between living forms have been achieved only by the elaboration of devices for the maintenance of that inner nourishing liquidity in which cells can live and grow within a certain narrow range of tolerance. Nor for nothing has the composition of mammalian blood led to our description as 'walking sacks of sea water.' Nor for nothing did the great French physiologist Bernard comment that 'the stability of the interior environment is the condition of free life.'"

The Snout

"The day of the Snout was over three hundred million years ago. Not long since I read a book in which a prominent scientist spoke cheerfully of some ten billion years of future time remaining to us. He pointed out happily the things that man might do throughout that period. Fish in the sea, I thought, birds in the air. The climb all far behind us, the species fixed and sure. There is something wrong with our worldview. It is still Ptolemaic, though the sun is no longer believed to revolve around the earth. We teach the past, we see farther backward into time than any race before us, but we stop at the present, or, at best, we project far into the future idealized versions of ourselves. We see through human eyes alone. We see ourselves as the culmination and the end, and if we do indeed consider our passing, we think that sunlight will go with us and the earth be dark. We are the end. For us continents rose and feel, for us the waters and the air were mastered, for us the great living web has pulsated and gown more intricate. (...) Perhaps the old road through the marsh should tell us. We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time." 

How Flowers Changed the World

"Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all, would be today unrecognizable. (...) The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world and made it ours."

Man of the Future

"We men of today are insatiably curious about ourselves and desperately in need of reassurance. Beneath our boisterous self-confidence is fear– a growing fear of the future we are in the process of creating." 

Little Men and Flying Saucers

"Darwin saw clearly that the succession of life on this planet was not a formal pattern imposed from without, or moving moving exclusively in one direction. Whatever else life might be, it was adjustable and not fixed. It worked its way through difficult environments. It modified and then, if necessary, it modified again, along roads which would never be retraced. Every creature alive is the product of a unique history. The statistical probability of its precise reduplication on another planet is so small to be meaningless. Life, even cellular life, may exist out yonder in the dark. But high or low in nature, it will not wear the shape of man. That shape is the evolutionary product of a strange, long wandering through the attics of the forrest roof, and so great are the chances of failure, that nothing precisely and identically human is likely ever to come that way again. (...) In the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever."

The Bird and the Machine

"This is the great age, make no mistake about it; the robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with the atom bomb, and the brain they say now is just another type of more complicated feedback system. The engineers have its basic principles worked out; it's mechanical, you know; nothing to get superstitious about; and man can always improve on nature once he gets the idea. (...) On the other hand the machine does not bleed, ache, hang for hours in the empty sky in a torment of hope to learn the fate of another machine, nor does it cry out with joy nor dance in the air with the fierce passion of a bird."

All quotes taken from The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley, a Vintage Book edition, 1959.