Of Stars, Seagulls, and Love: Loren Eiseley on the First and Final Truth of Life

NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](.  If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( — it's free.  Need to modify your subscription? You can [change your email address]( or [unsubscribe](. [The Marginalian]( [Welcome] Hello {NAME}! This is the weekly email digest of [The Marginalian]( by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — Iris Murdoch on how to see more clearly and love more purely, a forgotten Victorian woman's pioneering visualizations of the human voice, Vasily Grossman on what makes life alive — you can catch up [right here](. And if my labor of love enriches your life in any way, please consider supporting it with a [donation]( — for seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know. [Of Stars, Seagulls, and Love: Loren Eiseley on the First and Final Truth of Life]( Somewhere along the way of life, we learn that love means very different things to different people, and yet all personal love is but a fractal of a larger universal love. Some call it God. I call it wonder. Dante called it “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.” Because the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness and consciousness the crowning achievement of the universe, because the mystery of the universe will always exceed the reach of the consciousness forged by that mystery, love in the largest sense is a matter of active surrender (to borrow Jeanette Winterson’s perfect term for [the paradox of art]( to the mystery. It may be that we are only here to learn how to love. The paleontologist, philosopher of science, and poet Loren Eiseley (September 3, 1907–July 9, 1977) channels this idea with uncommon loveliness and lucidity in one of the essays found in his superb 1969 collection [The Unexpected Universe]( ([public library](. Writing at the dawn of the space age, when the human animal with its “restless inner eye” first reached for the stars, Eiseley observes: The venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without… That inward world… can be more volatile and mobile, more terrible and impoverished, yet withal more ennobling in its self-consciousness, than the universe that gave it birth. Plate from [An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe]( by Thomas Wright, 1750. (Available as [a print]( and as [stationery cards]( Picking up Dante’s thread, Eiseley offers a sweeping meditation on what ennobles our small stardusted lives, beginning with the story of a seemingly mundane accident that thrusts him, as sudden shocks to the system can often do, toward transcendence. Walking to his office afternoon, deep in thought while working on a book, Eiseley trips on a street drain, crashes violently onto the curb, and finds himself facedown on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood. In the delirium of disorientation and pain, he looks at the vermillion liquid in the sunshine and suddenly sees life itself, suddenly feels all the tenderness one feels for the miracle of life whenever one is fully feeling. And then, with that wonderful capacity we humans have, he surprises himself: Confusedly, painfully, indifferent to running feet and the anxious cries of witnesses about me, I lifted a wet hand out of this welter and murmured in compassionate concern, “Oh, don’t go. I’m sorry, I’ve done for you.” The words were not addressed to the crowd gathering 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 systems. I was made up of millions of these tiny creatures, their toil, their sacrifices, as they hurried to seal and repair the rent fabric of this vast being whom they had unknowingly, but in love, compounded. And I, for the first time in my mortal existence, did not see these creatures as odd objects under the microscope. Instead, an echo of the force that moved them came up from the deep well of my being and flooded through the shaken circuits of my brain. I was they — their galaxy, their creation. For the first time, I loved them consciously, even as I was plucked up and away by willing hands. It seemed to me then, and does now in retrospect, that I had caused to the universe I inhabited as many deaths as the explosion of a supernova in the cosmos. Art by Luisa Uribe from [The Vast Wonder of the World]( — a picture-book biography of cellular biology pioneer [Ernest Everett Just]( It is often like this, in some small sudden experience, that we awaken to reality in all its immensity and complexity. Eiseley’s blood-lensed realization is elemental and profound: We are not the sum total of the tiny constituent parts that compose us — we are only ever-shifting and regenerating parts operating under the illusion of a sum we call a self. Any such awareness — whether we attain it through science or art or another spiritual practice — is an act of [unselfing]( to borrow Iris Murdoch’s perfect term. And every act of unselfing is an act of love — it is how we contact, how we channel, “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.” It is the self — the prison of it, the illusion of it — that keeps us trapped in lives of less-than-love. But a self is a story, which means we can always change the story to change, to dismantle, to be set free from the self — and it might not even require a bloody face. Observing that while other animals live out their lives by obeying their nature, the human animal has the freedom to define and redefine its own humanity, Eiseley considers both the gift and the danger of our malleable and impressionable self-definition. A decade before James {NAME} admonished in his [superb conversation with Margaret Mead]( that “you’ve got to tell the world how to treat you [because] if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble,” and half a century before Maya Angelou wrote in [her staggering poem to the cosmos]( that “we are neither devils nor divines,” Eiseley reminds us of something fundamental that we so easily forget, so easily abdicate, in these times of social imaging and performative selfing: To the degree that we let others project upon us erroneous or unbalanced conceptions of our natures, we may unconsciously reshape our own image to less pleasing forms. It is one thing to be “realistic,” as many are fond of saying, about human nature. It is another thing entirely to let that consideration set limits to our spiritual aspirations or to precipitate us into cynicism and despair. We are protean in many things, and stand between extremes. There is still great room for the observation of John Donne, made over three centuries ago, however, that “no man doth refine and exalt Nature to the heighth it would beare.” Art from [An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days](. (Available as [a print]( and as [stationery cards]( benefitting the Audubon Society.) With that great countercultural courage of defying cynicism, Eiseley insists that it was the humans who nourished the highest in their nature by means of love, who lived with such exquisite tenderness for life in all of its expressions, that propelled our species from the caves to the cathedrals, from savagery to sonnets. (A particularly countercultural point, given he is writing in the middle of the Cold War — an ideology of hate, like all war, under which humans on both sides are taught that those on the other are devils, that power and not peace is the pinnacle of our humanity.) Drawing on his singular access to deep time as a scientist who studies fossils long predating Homo sapiens, he considers what made us human — what keeps us human: A great wealth of intellectual diversity, and consequent selective mating, based upon mutual attraction, would emerge from the dark storehouse of nature. The cruel and the gentle would sit at the same fireside, dreaming already in the Stone Age the different dreams they dream today. […] Some of them, a mere handful in any generation perhaps, loved — they loved the animals about them, the song of the wind, the soft voices of women. On the flat surfaces of cave walls the three dimensions of the outside world took animal shape and form. Here — not with the ax, not with the bow — man[*]( fumbled at the door of his true kingdom. Here, hidden in times of trouble behind silent brows, against the man with the flint, waited St. Francis of the birds — the lovers, the men who are still forced to walk warily among their kind. One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrett’s century-old [illustrations for old French fairy tales](. (Available as [a print]( and [stationery cards]( Millions of years later, Eiseley finds himself one of the lovers as he befriends a large old seagull, grey as himself. Day after day, he sits on an old whiskey crate half-buried in the sand at the edge of the ocean — that crucible of life, that [ultimate lens on its meaning]( — and watches the gull. “I came to look for this bird,” he recounts, “as though we shared some sane, enormously simple secret amidst a little shingle of hard stones and broken beach.” And then, one day, the gull is gone. With an eye to what remains — which is what always remains when something or someone we love leaves — Eiseley writes: Here, I thought, is where I shall abide my ending, in the mind at least. Here where the sea grinds coral and bone alike to pebbles, and the crabs come in the night for the recent dead. Here where everything is transmuted and transmutes, but all is living or about to live. It was here that I came to know the final phase of love in the mind of man — the phase beyond the evolutionists’ meager concentration upon survival. Here I no longer cared about survival — I merely loved. And the love was meaningless, as the harsh Victorian Darwinists would have understood it or even, equally, those harsh modern materialists… I felt, sitting in that desolate spot upon my whiskey crate, a love without issue, tenuous, almost disembodied. It was a love for an old gull, for wild dogs playing in the surf, for a hermit crab in an abandoned shell. It was a love that had been growing through the unthinking demands of childhood, through the pains and rapture of adult desire. Now it was breaking free, at last, of my worn body, still containing but passing beyond those other loves. Here, in this scientist’s farewell to life, we find an echo of Dante and of Larkin’s timeless insistence that “what will survive of us is love,” we find the first truth of life, which is also its final truth. (This too is why we, fallible and vulnerable to the bone, ought to [love anyway]( Complement with Eiseley’s contemporary and kindred spirit Lewis Thomas on [how to live with our human nature]( and Iris Murdoch on [how to love more purely]( then revisit Eiseley’s [muskrat-lensed meditation on the meaning of life]( and his [warbler-lensed meditation on the miraculous](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so [on this page](. [Batter My Heart: Love, the Divine Within, and How Not to Break Our Your Own Heart]( There are many things we mistake for love — infatuation, admiration, need — but there is no error of the heart graver than making another our higher power. This may seem inevitable — because to love is always to see the divine in each other, because [all love is a yearning for the sacred]( within us and between us. And yet the moment we cast the other as our savior, our redeemer, the arbiter of our significance, we have ceased loving — for we have ceased seeing the living human being. The Heart of the Rose by Elihu Vedder, 1891. (Available as [a print]( The tragic part, the touching part, the strangely assuring part is that we have been doing this since consciousness — that synaptic hammock of yearning — first crowned the human animal. We have suffered in the same way across cultures and civilizations, and have transmuted that singular, commonplace suffering into some of our most enduring works of art. (“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James {NAME} observed in [his finest interview]( “but then you read.”) Centuries ago, John Donne (1572–1631) channeled the complex interplay between eros and the divine, the confusion of it and the transcendence of it, in the most eternal of his Holy Sonnets. Composed in his late thirties and published shortly after his death, it is read here by nineteen-year-old artist and poetry-lover [Rose Hanzlik]( to the sound of Bach’s Goldberg Variations: Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp’d town to another due, Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end; Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain, But am betroth’d unto your enemy; Divorce me, untie or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. Complement with Derek Walcott’s lifeline of a poem [“Love After Love,”]( then revisit Aldous Huxley on [reclaiming the divine within](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so [on this page](. [We Go to the Park: A Soulful Illustrated Meditation on Our Search for Meaning]( My first great culture shock upon arriving in America was that concrete playgrounds, basketball courts, and tiny triangles of grass between busy streets all bore plaques that called them “parks.” Where I came from, a park was a place of birdsong and rustling leaves, a place to ramble, to get lost in, to dream in; a patch of wonder in the middle of the city; a pocket wilderness. It was in a park that I took my first steps, had my first kiss, wondered for the first time why we are alive. The park — the proper park — as a place of contemplation, illumination, and discovery comes alive with great soulfulness in [We Go to the Park]( ([public library]( — the product of an unusual collaboration between Swedish author and playwright Sara Stridsberg and Italian artist [Beatrice Alemagna](. At the dawn of the pandemic, amid the maddening captivity of lockdown and the tempest of uncertainty, Alemagna entered a kind of trance of painting — an outpouring of color and feeling channeling her hopes and fears, dreams and remembrances. (Every artist’s art is their coping mechanism — we make what we make to save ourselves, to stay sane, to find the slender cord of grace between us and the world.) When Stridsberg received a selection of these impressionistic unstoried images, she was moved to respond with her own art. Her spare, lyrical words gave the pictures coherence, making of them something uncommonly lovely: part story, part poem, part prayer. Some say we come from the stars, that we’re made of stardust, that we once swirled into the world from nowhere. We don’t know. So we go to the park. Though spoken by children playing in the park, the collective pronoun seems to expand in widening circles as the vignettes unfurl until it becomes the voice of humanity, making the park — this “land beyond” — a miniature of our restless search for meaning, an antidote to the ordinary world where “everything is so big there’s no room for it inside of us.” There amid the thousand-year-old trees that “stretch their branches toward the sky like old hands,” we encounter minute creatures and enormous flowers as big as heads, “birdlike old ladies on benches” and a girl “in a yellow raincoat with wild hair, who smells like lightning and isn’t scared of anything”; we encounter ourselves in all our yearning, all our incompleteness. Sometimes it feels as if all of life is made up of longing. A dizzying lack of someone to swing and swoosh beside. When Stridsberg writes that “there are no rules in the universe” — a universe we know to be governed by immutable laws precise as clockwork — she seems to be intimating that there are no rules for how to be human, for how to make meaning. ([There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.]( There are only invitations — to be present with the wind that feels like “the breath of a dragon,” with the tiny ants, with the exquisite fragility of life and the size of time. In just a second, everything we love might be gone. [We Go to the Park]( is part of independent children’s book powerhouse Enchanted Lion’s inspired [Unruly]( imprint of picture-books for grownups — or, rather, wonderfully category-defying books emanating Maurice Sendak’s insistence that an authentic life is a matter of [“having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of.”]( For other Enchanted Lion treasures that feed the child self without shying away from the deepest dimensions of maturity, savor [Before I Grew Up]( [Big Wolf & Little Wolf]( and this [illustrated reimagining of Neruda’s Book of Questions](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so [on this page](. ALSO [THE UNIVERSE IN VERSE BOOK]( [---]( You're receiving this email because you subscribed on TheMarginalian.org (formerly BrainPickings.org). This weekly newsletter comes out on Sunday mornings and synthesizes what I publish on the site throughout the week. The Marginalian NOT RECEIVING MAIL 47 Bergen Street, 3rd FloorBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](