Comparisons

Notes of an Alchemist
Poems by Loren Eiseley
Illustrated by Laszlo Kubinyi
New York : Charles Scribner’s Sons (1972)

Found in a local used bookstore, after what struck me as a dreary drive past pot stores, fast food joints, and numerous other businesses that have no reason for existing, other than to satisfy a society that prizes bad habits and unhealthy living; past men and women pushing shopping carts bearing all of their earthly belongings; over acres of asphalt and concrete stained with oil and lined with litter and a stray poppy here and there; through traffic that lunged and lurched like a hurt, angry animal.

A promising book, by a writer, thinker, and naturalist some have compared to Thoreau — comparisons, yes, always comparisons, as if we were all putting letters into cubbyholes. And once they’re in, we’re unlikely to take them out again, unless told to do so by someone we respect, someone who makes his living as a literary postmaster.

I’m joking, of course. It’s all good, as the saying goes. It must be, or we wouldn’t be here.

So we / our wise men / in their wildernesses / have sought /

to charm to similar translucence / the cloudy crystal of the mind.

We must understand / that order strives / against the unmitigated chaos lurking /

along the convulsive backbone of the world.

[ from the title poem, pg. 16 ]

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