After producing nine books on scientific subjects, in his late sixties Loren Eiseley turned to an account of his own
life and
career. Though
All the Strange Hours may strike the young adult reader as a highly unusual autobiography, its subtitle,
The Excavation of a Life, illuminates its complex structure. Just as Eiseley, an
anthropologist, had reconstructed the life-styles of vanished tribes by examining scattered and fragmentary remains, he narrates his own life by centering on scattered, isolated experiences and images that remained vivid in his mind. The work reads more like a series of impressionistic personal
essays than a carefully structured biographical narrative. A few black-and-white illustrations serve to complement the book’s tone—that of an
individual’s grim struggle for meaning, for success, and for a measure of security.
The twenty-five chapters are divided among three major headings. "Days of a Drifter" gives an account of Eiseley’s difficult and sometimes traumatic early life in Nebraska. In "Days of a Thinker," the book explores his graduate education at the
University of Pennsylvania and his early career as an anthropologist and university teacher. The final
section, "Days of a Doubter," focuses on his later career, including his uncertainties about its significance and his penchant for advancing scientific knowledge through questioning previously accepted views. The autobiography’s concluding section stresses Eiseley’s view that, in life as in science, skepticism represents a healthy approach.
The first section contains essays outlining Eiseley’s difficult boyhood on the American prairie. The son of an elderly traveling hardware salesman who encouraged him to read and considered him a genius, he was reared as an only child, largely by his deaf and mentally disturbed mother. An older half brother, the son of his father by an earlier marriage, was seldom at home and brought little companionship. A solitary and alienated child in an unhappy household, Eiseley found his most important solace through reading. Because his mother’s family was believed to carry a trait of mental instability, he resolved not to have children of his own. Poverty combined with the divided family to make childhood more difficult, and Eiseley narrates how, as a teenager, he had to ride a freight train across the country to attend his father’s funeral. Riding freight trains became a common experience, one that exposed him to harrowing dangers.
Yet at times of crisis, when prospects seemed bleak, others intervened on his behalf. When he developed tuberculosis, a generous, eccentric woman permitted him to recover on her ranch in the Mojave Desert. His greatest luck, however, lay in the support he received from a successful uncle, who partially financed his college education.
The essays included in "Days of a Thinker" concern Eiseley’s years as a graduate student and his career as a field anthropologist, university teacher, lecturer, and writer. They reveal his tendency toward thinking in images, symbols, and metaphors, rather than quantitatively. Instead of quantifying discoveries, he seeks to extrapolate knowledge from them, to make analogies to other experiences. Originally seeking to become a writer, he lost interest in English after an unthinking teacher accused him of plagiarizing a theme on the grounds that it was too good for him to have written.
The five essays in "Days of a Doubter" are highly reflective returns to childhood and speculations about the future. The author examines the meaning of time for the scientist, the individual, and nature. Life is a mystery about which the individual, carried along in a stream, can learn little.
Amillennia, and he acknowledges that the individual life can represent only a minute particle of existence. The pessimism that permeates the book is summed up in the repeated passage, "Behind nothing/ before nothing/ worship it the zero." The narrator accepts the rules ofthe gam
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