8
noonday or black night. Ideas like swarms of insects rose to the beam, but the light consumed them.
Upon that shore meaning had ceased. There were only the dead skull and the revolving eye. With such
an eye, some have said, science looks upon the world. I do not know. I know only that I was the skull
of emptiness and the endlessly revolving light without pity.
16
Eiseley’s essays attest to his relentless commitment to experience the world as it presented itself to him
in those times and places of its own choosing and, moreover, to preserve those visitations. Introducing
“The Judgment of Birds,” Eiseley writes that “the man seeking visions and insight must go apart from
his fellows and live for a time in the wilderness. If he is of the proper sort, he will return with a
message.”
17
Yet, in the same introduction he continues:
Even in NYC there are patches of wilderness, and a man by himself is bound to undergo certain
experiences falling into the class of which I speak. I set mine down . . . in hope that they will come to
the eye of those who have retained a true taste for the marvelous, and who are capable of discerning in
the flow of ordinary events the point at which the mundane world gives way to quite another
dimension.
18
Oftentimes, the world would present itself to him while he was wandering alone through barren
country looking for bones and artifacts in desolate places, but it could also present itself in the crowded
urban environments of the late twentieth century. In “The Star Thrower” essay, he seems to imply that
his experiences as a man in nature created an ambivalent relationship with his professional
commitment to science. There he asserted that his expression of love for the world “was like the
renunciation of my scientific heritage.”
19
His love of the things of the world bound him in strange
ways to that world and perhaps even to that world of silence he experienced as a child in a desolate
house on the plains of the American Midwest.
Consubstantiality and the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin.
While “consubstantiality” has been used in English since the sixteenth century, Voegelin,
following the work of John Wilson and others of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago,
16
Eiseley, “The Star Thrower” in The Star Thrower, 169-170
17
Eiseley, "The Judgment of the Birds," in The Star Thrower, 27.
18
Ibid., 28.
19
Eiseley, “The Star Thrower,” 182.
Convention