by lostberg
The Immense Journey
10:54 am in Uncategorized by lostberg
“It is not a bad symbol of that long wandering, I thought again – the human hand that has been fin and scaly reptile foot and furry paw. If a stone should fall (I cocked an eye at the leaning shelf above my head and waited, fatalistically) let the bones lie here with my message, for those who might decipher it, if they come down late among us from the stars.
Perhaps there is no meaning at all, the thought went inside me, save that of the journey itself, so far as man can see. It has altered with the chances of life, and the chances brought us here; but it was a good journey – long, perhaps – but a good journey under a pleasant sun. Do not look for the purpose. Think of the way we came and be a little proud. Think of this hand – the utter pain of its first venture on the pebbly shore.
Or consider its later wanderings.”
An excerpt from anthropologist/essayist Loren Eiseley’s “The Slit” in The Immense Journey.
Eiseley’s statement is a long way from the motivational poster’s “Success is a journey, not a destination,” but I hear a similar optimism for those of us who are still not “there,” there being wherever we thought we ought to be, socially, financially, intellectually – whatever criteria we choose to measure own inadequacies. Eiseley had the advantage of a thousand years’ perspective, and, if I may, a tenure-track teaching position, which is a comfortable place from which to pontificate, but that does not exempt him from the anxiety of eventual death – he “waited, fatalistically”—nor the consideration that “perhaps there is no meaning at all.”
The last time I felt that way, I freaked out and moved to Mexico. I was twenty at the time, and I was just beginning to face the possibility that my emotional reactions to the “utter pain” of my undergraduate existence had less to do with teenage angst and more to do with duller, broader words like “anxiety” or “dysthymia.” In an effort to get away from some recriminating self-talk – “Why didn’t you get that internship?” “What did you do to drive him away?” “When will you pull yourself together?” – I got out of my country, and, more importantly, my language.