themarginalian.org · 15 hours ago

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

After falling violently on a sidewalk and finding himself facedown in his own blood, paleontologist and philosopher Loren Eiseley addresses not the gathering crowd but the cells dying on the hot pavement: "Oh, don't go. I'm sorry, I've done for you." In that moment of dizzying compassion, he recognizes himself not as a unified self but as a galaxy of tiny creatures laboring in love to repair their unknowing host-and feels "an echo of the force that moved them" rise from the deep well of his being. Years later, befriending an old seagull at the ocean's edge, Eiseley discovers "the final phase of love in the mind of man-the phase beyond the evolutionists' meager concentration upon survival," a love freed from the body's demands, "tenuous, almost disembodied," directed at gulls and hermit crabs and the vast mystery that gave consciousness birth. What he finds, bloodied and later watching waves, is that we may be here only to learn this: how to love without reason, without issue, beyond the prison of self.