Loren Eiseley and Blaise Pascal visit the Sierra Club

I have a habit, shared by many others, of reading something “light” (or at least short) to help me get to sleep after I go to bed. I even have a light clipped to my headboard to shine on my book or magazine.

To this end, I recently picked up an old (1985) paperback edited by James Moffett entitled Points of Departure: An Anthology of Nonfiction. It contains over fifty short pieces, ranging from personal letters and newspaper columns to travelogues, short bits of history, and personal essays (the last under the chapter heading “Cogitation.”) As an old cogitator from way back, I picked an essay in this section by the great science writer Loren Eiseley entitled “The Hidden Teacher.”

I selected this essay because I recall reading Eiseley’s book on evolution, The Immense Journey, many years ago with great delight. It was one of the most compelling pieces of popular science writing that I had ever encountered. I imagined that his prose would once again glide across the page as he introduced me to creatures in nature whose antics would keep me awake longer than usual.

This was not to be the case; this piece seemed ponderous, a somewhat heavy cautionary tale. And the title seemed oblique at best.  It took me two nights of pre-sleep reading to finish it. However when I did, I had the feeling that this essay, written at least forty years ago and published in The Star Thrower, a collection published 1978, just after Eiseley’s death, had a compelling story to tell, one that makes more sense today than it must have to readers when it was first published. 

Allow me to explain with a brief summary of this tale.

Spider World

The main event in the story occurs “far away on a rainy morning in the West,” as Eiseley, an anthropologist by trade (but also a “naturalist” and English major in college) was looking for fossils in a gulch.  He encountered “at eye level. . .a huge yellow-and-black orb spider, whose web was moored to the tall spears of buffalo grass.”  He knew that the spider “could feel every vibration throughout that delicate structure [of her web]” and so he took a pencil from his pocket and touched the web. “Immediately. . . .the web, plucked by its menacing occupant, began to vibrate until it was a  blur.  Anything that had brushed claw or wing against that amazing snare would be thoroughly trapped.”  Then the vibrations slowed down.  Eiseley continued:

I could see the owner fingering her guidelines for signs of struggle. A pencil point was an intrusion into this universe for which no precedent existed. Spider was circumscribed by spider ideas; its universe was spider universe. All outside was irrational, extraneous, at best raw material for spider. As I proceeded on my way along the gully, like a vast impossible shadow, I realized that in the world of spider, I did not exist.

After making such a dramatic point and getting my attention, it was easy for Eiseley to move me to the heart of his essay, an anthropological / philosophical reflection on human existence.  We may not be as specialized, biologically speaking, as the yellow and black orbed spider, but we humans are also fragile. “A few moment’s loss of vital air and the phenomenon we know as consciousness goes down into the black night of inorganic things. The human body is a magical vessel, but its life is linked with an element it cannot produce. Only the green plant knows the secret of transforming the light that comes to us across the far reaches of space. There is no better illustration of the intricacy of man’s relationship with other living things.”

Note that “intricate” here refers to the complexity of our relationship with nature. We cannot connect with the spider, nor can we photosynthesize. In short, Eisley is telling us that our fragility consists in our inability to control the earth (and its creatures) that we were told by the Hebrew book of Genesis to “subdue?”

Human Fragility

Eisley’s musings reminded me of a similarly elegant statement made by the mathematician-physicist-religious philosopher Blaise Pascal in the 17^th century:

The human being is only a reed, the most feeble in nature; but this is a thinking reed.  It isn’t necessary for the entire universe to arm itself in order to crush him; a whiff of vapor, a taste of water, suffices to kill him. But when the universe crushes him, the human being becomes still more noble than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and the advantage that the universe has over him. The universe, it does not have a clue.

I believe that Eiseley must have either read Pascal’s judgment or at least suffered from the same form of melancholia.  I became more convinced as I read Eisley’s comment that “the spider was a symbol of man in miniature;” humans too lived in a web, he believed, one that extended from “the starry reaches of sidereal space” on the one side to the world of  minute particles explored through the electron microscope on the other. 

So are we “at heart any different from the spider?” Are human thoughts “as limited as spider thoughts, contemplating now the nearest star with the threat of bringing with [us] the fungus rot from earth, wars, violence, the burden of a population [we] refuse to control, cherishing again [our] dreams of the Adamic Eden [we] pursued and lost in the green forests of America.” Or, looking to the other side of our web, what of the “work of the phagocytes [cells that protect the body by ingesting harmful foreign particles, bacteria, and dead or dying cells] swarming in the rivers of [our] bodies, the unresting cells in their mortal universe?”   “What is it,” Eiseley asked, “that we are a part of that we do not see, as the spider was not gifted to discern my face, or my little probe into her world?”

Both Eiseley and Pascal were sensitive to our species ‘exaggerated sense of our importance to the universe. Whether dealing with “spider world” or contemplating our reedlike vulnerability, humans need to be aware of our limitations. Consider these words from Pascal’s Pensées: “Returning to himself, let man consider what he is in comparison with all existence; let him regard himself as lost in this remote corner of nature; and from the little cell in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the universe, let him estimate at their true value the earth, kingdoms, cities, and himself. What is a man in the infinite?”

And Pascal’s concern echoes into our own century. (2014) Naomi Klein wrote in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014): “It is we humans who are fragile and vulnerable and the earth that. . .that holds us in its hands. . . .Our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely.”

Yet the human weaknesses cited by these authors do not necessarily have the last word, in their books, nor should they in ours.

Eiseley’s essay continues for several more pages before his conclusion, in which he suggests that “The Hidden Teacher” in his title might be our own self awareness, as it seems to be for Pascal’s “thinking reed.”  Eiseley even suggests that our ability to save ourselves from the web that is no longer able to hold us together is just as “reed-like” for him as it was for Pascal. Consider these concluding words.  Humanity, he writes:

. . .may have come to the end of that wild being who had mastered the fire and the lightening. He can create the web but not hold it together, not save himself except by transcending his own image. For at last, before the ultimate mystery, it is himself he shapes. Perhaps it is for this that the listening web lies open: that by knowledge we may grow beyond our past, our follies, and ever closer to what the Dreamer in the dark intended before the dust arose and walked. It has been written that we are in the hands of a Teacher, nor does it appear what [humans] shall be.

Sinking into our Humanity…

Human fragility can be counterbalanced to some extent by our ability to become self-aware, and thus to be able to shape ourselves and grow closer to what “the Dreamer” [God?] intended us to be. Our very humanity and self-awareness, including the awareness of our own weakness, allows us to become more spiritual.  Or so I choose to interpret this oblique passage. Sinking into our humanity at its best may be the best way to transcend our weaknesses, many of which are due to our ego-striving.

Loren Eiseley wrote this melancholy essay forty years ago, before the great glaciers and ice sheets in our polar regions began their rapid melt, before the droughts, angry storms, and fires signaled the full onslaught of the climate changes we are now experiencing, and which some of us appear to still be puzzling over. 

Members of the Sierra Club, which I joined some years ago, care deeply about the future of our planet. They want us all to survive the current crisis caused by human-induced global climate change, for our sake and for that of our grandchildren.

Yet it intrigues me that some of our members are made uneasy by too much talk about anything metaphysical or Ultimate in our discussions of human or planetary destiny.  Some would be generally put off by these words from Pascal, for example: “What is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. . . .he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up.” Or, we might add to Pascal’s comment this one from Eiseley, from the book in which his “Hidden Teacher” essay appeared: “I am treading deeper and deeper into leaves and silence. I see more faces watch, non-human faces. Ironically, I who profess no religion find the whole of my life a religious pilgrimage.”

…to acknowledge Spirituality

It perhaps should intrigue all of us, secular and spiritual alike, to realize that neither Eiseley nor Pascal were religious people in any conventional sense. Eiseley belonged to no church, and Pascal was what we would call today a secular scientist until he became, in part due to the influence of his younger sister, intrigued by a Catholic group (called a cult by some) known as the Jansenists, a very strict religious group later condemned by the Pope. He did have a religious vision that he said changed him from a non-believer to a believer in God, but this came to him later in life and after he felt he was rescued from a near fatal accident and was not associated with his earlier Jansenist leanings.

Is it possible that those who love Nature and wish to protect our planet, whether conventionally religious or not, might learn something from these two men, each of whom had a sense of both awe and humility when faced with creation and the place of humans therein? It is common today to speak of those who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious.”  I own three books on this subject, all written within the past fifteen years, two published by Oxford University Press. Perhaps it is time to recognize this distinction as meaningful, rather than a clever way for lazy or indifferent folks to make an excuse for not attending a church. 

Can one really appreciate the human condition on our troubled planet without being in some sense or another spiritual? While it is certainly true that morality and ethics are not found only in religious communities or religious belief systems, may it not also be true that an awareness of both our human weaknesses and our ability to see beyond them using our immaterial or spiritual qualities might make it easier to see things as they really are. And might not a common awareness of human strengths as well as weaknesses highlighted by these authors make it easier to understand our current common plight as fragile but thinking reeds on an increasing blighted planet.  Our problems, after all, are more about human pride and greed than about melting glaciers and rising sea levels.

To be spiritual, in any serious way, we must be comfortable with not knowing, in the same way that Eisley’s spider was unable to know or understand that intrusion into his web those many years ago in the desert. Religions, on the other hand, claim to know—and control—those things necessary for our “salvation,” however that term is defined.  Religions claim to inform while spirituality forms us, in part by encouraging us to tolerate ambiguity—something most religions are uncomfortable doing.

Loren Eiseley and Blaise Pascal, both scientists, appreciated human fragility, our position as creatures rather than creators, a weakness that could help alert us to a view of humanity that goes beyond science. That very fragility is what religions try to fix, with rituals, dogmas, and forgiving us for our sins. Spirituality, on the other hands, proclaims no fix beyond unpredictable grace. Those of us who want to save our planet need to appreciate and join those “spiritual but not religious” folks in going beyond scientific truth, for we cannot understand nature without understanding ourselves—and only an opening to that spirituality that allows us to transcend egotism can give us some measure of the self-understanding that we need for this task.