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The Invisible Pyramid

The Invisible Pyramid
By Loren Eiseley

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Product Description

In 1910 young Loren Eiseley watched the passage of Halley’s Comet with his father. The boy who became a famous naturalist was never again to see the spectacle except in his imagination. That childhood event contributed to the profound sense of time and space that marks The Invisible Pyramid. This collection of essays, first published shortly after Americans landed on the moon, explores inner and outer space, the vastness of the cosmos, and the limits of what can be known. Bringing poetic insight to scientific discipline, Eiseley makes connections between civilizations past and present, multiple universes, humankind, and nature.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #800568 in Books
  • Published on: 1998-12-01
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 173 pages

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
In July 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin landed on the surface of the moon, a feat millions of earthbound observers cheered. Loren Eiseley, an ecologist and conservationist, saw little cause for celebration in the astronauts' arrival, however. In a series of lectures delivered at the University of Washington later in 1969 and collected in this slender volume, Eiseley took the occasion of the lunar landing to consider how far humans had to go in understanding their own small corner of the universe, their home planet, much less what he called the "cosmic prison" of space. Likening humans to the microscopic phagocytes that dwell within our bodies, he grumpily remarks, "We know only a little more extended reality than the hypothetical creature below us. Above us may lie realms it is beyond our power to grasp." Science, he suggests, would be better put to examining that which lies immediately before us, although he allows that the quest to explore space is so firmly rooted in Western technological culture that it was unlikely to be abandoned simply because of his urging. Eiseley's opinion continues to be influential among certain environmentalists, and these graceful essays show why that should be so. --Gregory McNamee

Review

"There can be no question that Loren Eiseley maintains a place of eminence among nature writers. His extended explorations of human life and mind, set against the backdrop of our own and other universes are like those to be found in every book of nature writing currently available. . . .We now routinely expect our nature writers to leap across the chasm between science, natural history, and poetry with grace and ease. Eiseley made the leap at a time when science was science, and literature was, well, literature. . . . His writing delivered science to nonscientists in the lyrical language of earthly metaphor, irony, simile, and narrative, all paced like a good mystery."—The Bloomsbury Review
(The Bloomsbury Review )

"A relentless haunting and haunted figure devils the man [Eiseley] and twists from him some of the best prose we have. . . . The beauty of The Invisible Pyramid is that it communicates the awesome spectacle of our environmental crisis without a single shrill note. . . . Eiseley is a master of significant anecdote. There is an unstated but real gothic terror prowling behind his vision."—New York Times Book Review
(New York Times Book Review )

About the Author

Loren Eiseley’s many works include The Night Country (Bison Books 1997). Introducing The Invisible Pyramid is Paul Gruchow, a professor of English at Concordia College and the author of Boundary Waters: The Grace of the Wild.

Customer Reviews

The Invisible Pyramid5
Although a little dated - but necessarily so, I found The Invisible Pyramid to be a powerful reminder of our (man's) egocentrism and of the unpopular probability that our brief parenthesis in time will soon end - in terms of geological time, which Eisley so forcefully describes. Perhaps the critics who find this work "too pessimistic" or "too bleak", simply do not admit the presuppositions upon which they are based. This may reflect the critic's inability to accept the inevitable. In "The Invisible Pyramid", Eisley provides a powerful defense of the position that humanity will probably pass from the scene and that it is doubtful that other similar species have occurred elsewhere in the universe. Such a conclusion is often mistakenly seen as nihilistic, reflecting a naivete' on the part of the reader. Some find solace in this view and others find dispair. Existentialists find solace by first passing through - and beyond - the gates of Eisley's dispair.

Les Blough

A Third World5
Others mentioned Eiseley's pessimism. That didn't faze me. His pessimism is counterbalanced by his wonder and curiosity, lyricism and empathy with nature and with humanity. Eiseley writes that we are a species caught between two worlds and a stranger to both; caught between Nature and Culture; between where we've come from and where we'd like to go. Do we have a true "home"? seems to be the question. The use of symbols (and words) has empowered us, but also separates us from the Natural world. The second half of the book picked up speed (keep reading if you find him too dry at first) Eiseley proposes a Third world between the world of Nature that we came from and the world in which our reaching for advancement in technology, knowledge, and achievement propels us ever farther (usually to the detriment of Nature) Is there a balance humans will be able to achieve that is either Between the two worlds (respecting and honoring nature AND our compulsion to transcend) OR is the Third World something entirely different, a momentous change in consciousness; something as radical as the beginning of language was to the humans of prehistory (you could say when we "became" human by use of symbol and language) Wonderful concepts and questions. I could not discern from Eiseley though What this third world would actually be. Maybe it was too early for Eiseley (or me) to conceive of this third world. It would have to be a change that changes everything - which we won't recognize until we are in it.

Humanity as slime mold / very bleak Eiseley4
This book differs from most of Eiseley's other writing in that it seems to be more pessimistic and resigned. The dominant image presented in the book's essays - and not one most people would sympathize with - is that human society is like a slime mold colony. That is, from an original spore the colony grows and grows in complexity until it spews out new spores to be carried by the wind and start other colonies far away - as the parent colony dies, having put all its life into sending out the fresh spore.

Eiseley took this veiw of man as the U.S. was moving into the early days of the exploration of space. It is an interesting analogy, suggesting that as life expands outward from our world the life that sustained the outward thrust will perish. Maybe so, but these essays simply don't convince or please in the way that his previous books of natural writing did. The gloom is too overriding and there is no sense of nature triumphant.

While Eiseley was always a man of bleak vision, that vision was always before filtered through a kind of verbal and mental artistry that is not shown here. Even someone as pessimistic as myself prefers to be offered some hope of redemption for the human race. At this point in his life, Eiseley didn't seem to see any.