The Immense Journey - Loren Eiseley: Selected Capters

The chapter “Flow of the River” had me on “water is magical.” It resonated with what I have always thought and believed. I read all chapters and the fifth one “How the Flowers Changed the World,” was also quite impressive, in the end, I went back to read the second chapter.

Water is indeed magical. It nurtures life, it provides food the little saplings and helps them grow into huge trees. Without water the paddy wouldn’t grow into rice or we wouldn’t have wheat and most parts of the world would not have a stable supply of food. It quenches our thirst. Keeps us alive -ask anyone who has ever crossed a desert. Mirage is the illusion of water, not food, not fruits, not love or friendship, but water. However, the same water is powerful enough to unleash terrors. Flood. Tsunami, underwater volcano eruption, all show how water reacts to anthropogenic manipulation of natural space.

Like Eiseley, I am also not a good swimmer, in fact, I stay away from it, but I often wonder, how a pond, a pool of water can immediately tell the difference between alive and dead – a living person can drown if they do not move their limbs but a dead body which cannot move the limbs floats above the surface – it is magical. It can tell without any help.

Eiseley talks about Stalagmites and Stalactites. It gets me thinking, a river is humble, it carves its way when we think there isn’t any – it trickles through narrow path, meanders arounds the rocks, gives birth to pillars of limestones (joining the stalagmites and stalactites). It knows when to bend and when to force itself and crush a boulder to form its pathway.

The author talks of seasons – spring, when the river is bouncy and then the winters when all is cold and frigid. The seasons, especially winters bring about another magical property of the river – it exists in all three states (solid, liquid, and vapours) simultaneously. When the temperature drops below freezing pint, the surface of the river is frozen while the lower layer is still flowing and as soon as the sun comes up, the upper most layer of ice sublimates directly into vapours – isn’t that miraculous.

The same river, provides residence to so many creatures – some plants flutter at the surface and distend into non-active states in winters and then breathe again as soon as the weather changes. The river hosts tentacled beasts as well as soft tiny fishes, all surviving in their own niche. There is an entire universe that a river carries with itself.

It picks loads and silt from some places and deposits them at other, always making sure not to carry the burden too far. In truth, I feel, the flow of a river is just like life – always moving forward, every nook waiting to change the course of its flow and hence the direction it could take.

The book was originally published in 1957, when science and technology was not what it is today. We have since then created robots, test tube babies, discovered CRISPR-9 which can edit DNA and thus modify genes that cause diseases. We have used machine learning and artificial intelligence to train our computers to write codes, make decisions, perform surgeries and maybe someday go to the battlefield for us.

Despite all these advancements, I see that Eiseley’s basic question in the “Secret of Life”- remains – is nature that simple, can we replicate it? He describes how scientists thought that Amoeba was made of simple proteins and once they have proved that it was no more than a blob of protoplasm, it would be easy to say that life’s secrets have been discovered. Alas!!! A small microscopic organism could easily defy the scientist’s expectations and lead them back to square one.

“To grasp in detail,” says the German biologist Von Bertalanaffy, “the physio-chemical organisation of the simplest cell is far beyond our capacity.” It may not be the happiest statement, but, somehow, for me, its an assertion that life is magical. And, someday when I am lonely and depressed, I can hope for something extraordinary to happen without understanding the meaning. It sounds strange coming from an Engineer who is currently working on Machine learning algorithms, but I like to believe that we humans do not understand the mysteries of life and that is what makes it all the more exciting. The unpredictability, the knowledge that some ideas are still beyond our grasp makes me study more, work more, and find more joy in unearthing the “Secret of Life.”

I agree with Eiseley’s observation that if one day we are able to decipher the meaning or secret of life, we would need to remain humble. He believes that one act of pride can snatch the entire mechanism from out hand - “It will be difficult for us to believe, in our pride of achievement, that the secret of life has slipped through our fingers and eludes us still.”

He ends the essay with a nonchalance stating that even if he were alive on such a historic day, he would wear his old hat and climb over the wall as usual. His remark reminds me of the protagonist of the “Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End if the World” who decided to live the last day of his consciousness listening to music in a park and observing the love people have for one another. Letting go and trying our best to live in the present is the ultimate :Secret of Life” for me.

I enjoyed reading Eiseley’s essays, they were replete with facts, scientific proofs including fossils and carbon dating, taking us on a journey about our evolution. Eiseley does not speculate or add his own theory but corroborates his ideas with proven data. Eiseley discusses human evolution. How Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest led to the growth of the smartest being, us, the humans. He talked about the animals, the birds, the ancestors of homo sapiens and the process giving rise to the world as it is today. It was an interesting refresher of science and geology classes I took in school. However, once again, I ask the same question that I asked in school – what next? Humans evolved from monkey and apes to Neanderthals and homo sapiens. Darwin explained how the smartest won the fight for survival and human, with their intelligence and ability to create, rules over Planet Earth. Where does this lead us to? Are we still evolving or will this fight for survival end with us? A million years from now, will there be a race, much smarter than us? Will that race call itself the successor of humans?

Whether we find an answer to this or not, I would forever be grateful to the process of evolution for giving me the chance to experience the world as it is today.