While at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, Eiseley caught the toe of his shoe on a drain, fell and broke his nose. Blood issued forth profusely. Studying the pooled blood, he later wrote:
‘Oh, don’t go. I’m sorry.’ Words not addressed to the crowd gathered about me. They were inside and spoken to no one but a part of myself. I was quite sane, only it was an oddly detached sanity, for I was addressing blood cells, phagocytes, platelets, all the crawling living, independent wonder that had been part of me and now, through my folly and lack of care, were dying like beached fish on the hot pavement. A great wave of passionate contrition, even of adoration, swept through my mind, a sensation of love on a cosmic scale, for mark that this experience was, in its way, as vast a catastrophe as would be that of a galaxy consciously suffering through the loss of its solar solar systems.
Fox at the Wood’s Edge, p. 334.
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