There’s little newsmaking in a “102nd” birthday for a dead person, but Garrison Keillor’s team at the APR Writer’s Almanac remembered Eiseley on today’s broadcast. The brief bio of Eiseley highlighted the troubled and solitary prairie childhood, and quoted several thoughts abridged from Eiseley’s ruminations about “the birds taking over New York [City] after the last man has run away to the hills.”
The show’s writers Betsy Allister and Margaret Boehme singled out The Immense Journey as his “most famous” and reprise the graveside inscription, “We loved the earth but could not stay”, the oft-quoted line from the rarely read poem “The Little Treasures.”
I was also moved on this day of remembrance by a Wright letter quoted in biographer Gale Christianson’s Fox at the Wood’s Edge:
O Mabel dear for those who were there it was a good rich life, savory as peanut brittle, deserving of our affection and celebration, the pleasures and torments of our emotions. We think of you, we love you, and we continue to cherish our much shared lives.
