Word: manness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Eiseley fights a purely scientific view of man with the fury of an underground resistance fighter. "Each one of us," he writes in a cry from the heart, "is a statistical impossibility around which hover a million other lives that were never destined to be born...
...ordinary detective is a hunk of merchandise, like a gun and bullets. Anybody with enough small change can buy him. Philip Marlowe is the exception. "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean," wrote Chandler, "who is neither tarnished nor afraid." Trading on the name, the Marlowe makers have banished fear, but they forgot to remove the tarnish...
...very seldom that the same man knows much of science, and about the things that were known before ever science came," Lord Dunsany once remarked, with both British and scientific understatement. Loren Eiseley is one such humanist-scientist-Dunsany's man for all cultures. A writer of literary distinction (The Immense Journey, The Mind as Nature) as well as a front-rank anthropologist, he is one of the few living scientists who can contemplate evolution and think of the Odyssey as the immediately appropriate metaphor. Somehow Eiseley has absorbed all the New Information while retaining a pre-scientific sense...
...there is but one way into the future: the technological way." Again and again, he tries to sober us up about the Great White Prophets in smocks. The new faith in computers, he warns, has made us forget the old wisdom of fairy tales: there is a frontier to man's kingdom where "predictability ceases and the unimaginable begins...
...anything, science has made man more of a mystery to himself. For in conquering the universe, says Eiseley, man has got curiously out of touch with it: "His march is away from his origins . . . From the solitude of the wood he has passed to the more dreadful solitude of the heart." Once or twice he seems on the verge of promulgating an Eiseley law: The more science expands the universe, the more it shrinks man...