Loren Eiseley Ideas

Ideas and Art of Loren Eiseley

Pool of One’s Own Blood

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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 … [Read more]

Last Nectar

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From "Wind Child"   They are individualists. They fly alone. Who wouldn't in autumn like to rock and waver southward like an everblowing leaf over and through forests and hedges, float in the glades sip the last nectar? What a way to … [Read more]

Love in Atoms that Make Sapphires

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. . . say that it takes all forms out of some human center heartbreak knows -- love given to serpents, to great clouded leopards moving in snowstorms, and there is love in snowflakes, crystals, too. So much love that catalogues must be kept … [Read more]

Tree of Igdrasil

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  I too am aware of the trunk that stretches loathsomely back of me along the floor. I too am a many-visaged thing that has climbed upward out of the dark of endless leaf falls, and has slunk, furred, through the glitter of blue glacial nights. … [Read more]

Sacred Center

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If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must still seek refuge there. - The Invisible Pyramid Image: Forest Wander | Flickr … [Read more]

Thistledown to New Worlds

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"If I dream by contrast of the eventual drift of the star voyagers through the dilated time of the universe, it is because I have seen thistledown off to new worlds and am at heart a voyager who, in this modern time, still yearns for the lost country … [Read more]

Outer Freedom

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". . . The great French medical scientist Claude Bernard [inventor of the expression milieu intérieur, or homeostasis] observed that the stability of the inside environment of complex organisms must be maintained before an outer freedom can be … [Read more]

Some Landscapes

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"Some landscapes, one learns, refuse history; some efface it so completely it is never found; in others the thronging memories of the past subdue the living." The Invisible Pyramid (p. 120). Image Credit: John Holm | Flickr … [Read more]

Featured Prose

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I am all that I have striven to describe of the strangest organism on the planet. I am one of the world eaters in the time when that species has despoiled the earth and is about to loose its spores into space. As an archaeologist I also know that our … [Read more]

Sustainability

renewable-energy

RSS Inside the Ordinary (reviews)

  • One Earthling
    A Review of Earthling: A New Ethics for the Anthropocene by Dean Wallraff I’ve written a handful of reviews for authors I’ve known, but none whose narrative includes the author’s remarkable — and relevant — life story. Privy as I am to some of this author’s personal history, some of which is readily shared in […]
  • Elevating the Ordinary: Gravity vs. Karl Ove Knausgaard
    Karl Ove Knausgaard's Summer, like the season it marks, is as much about the heat of dissipation and as it is of lawn sprinklers and cherry trees that push back with a stubborn, if not irresistible delight. Summer is less about writing than about attention. The post Elevating the Ordinary: Gravity vs. Karl Ove Knausgaard […]
  • The Little Clan of Literate Discourse
    While at times this reviewer of The Little Clan is himself desperate for "the casual entitlement of vertical parity" with worthwhile, enviable acquaintances and adversaries, for someone who might call out my "distinctive aesthetic" or conversations in which the participants bemoan their "desultory attempts" at topics less "pedestrian," the world drawn in The Little Clan […]
  • What passes for perverted is normal, and vice versa: a review of Jen Silverman’s The Island Dwellers collection
    There is such a thing as a credible joke — one based in astute observation, irony, paradox. Such humor lies at the opposite end of puns: it’s richly semantic. If credibility matters, do read this collection. You’ll be laughing, but the laughter is razor sharp. Even the titles in this short story collection by Jen […]
  • Sync with the Inefficiencies of Time
    Sync with the Inefficiencies of Time: DarkViolin reviews The After Party, a poetry collection by Jana Prikryl. The post Sync with the Inefficiencies of Time appeared first on Inside the Ordinary.