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All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life

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Reading Loren Eiseley, you are a visitor in a world shaped by experiences that seldom have found a voice such as his. An isolated Nebraska childhood in the early decades of the 20th century, and an even more isolating experience riding the rails as a drifter during the Great Depression -- these are not auspicious beginnings for a respected writer or a scholar. His family was poor, and his deaf, deranged mother haunted his life. From early on, he was a loner, with a poet's sensibility, who learned to welcome the gifts of solitude and nature.

On fossil digs on the High Plains during his university summers, he developed a fascination for the evolution of life on planet Earth. He was at ease fathoming the great sweep of millennia in which this present era is hardly more than a brief moment. While very much a scientist of the mid-20th century, he regarded the Ice Age as a recent event. And this perspective colors his thoughts with a sense of wonder that modern day readers are not accustomed to finding in books on any topic.

Eiseley wrote as a scientist, but his vision was always personal, even when he was writing about vast subjects. As a writer, he had a remarkable ability to make his subject matter exciting and accessible to nonscientists. Though he was celebrated as a great nature writer, one of the best since Thoreau, his true subject is Time. In "All the Strange Hours" he looks back over his life of 75 years.

Not quite an autobiography, it is a collection of episodes that were key points in his life. Some are humorous, some poignant, some grimly sad, some angry. There are accounts of recovering his health in the Mojave of California, a trip to Tijuana, where his entire energy is spent keeping a drunken companion out of trouble, a "perfect day" drinking grape pop under a railway water tank with three other drifters.

He writes of academic politics, student unrest in the 60s, losing his hearing, stray dogs, wasps, dancing cranes, a cat that bows and another one that talks, ancient burial chambers, a jail break in a blizzard, and the impact of homo sapiens' discovery of fire. And there are fascinating accounts of dreams. As a writer, Eiseley has a wide ranging knowledge of many subjects, and the connections he makes between them are unpredictable and sometimes breath-taking.

This is a beautifully written personal meditation on the impermance of life against the passage of time and the attendant sense of loss by a deeply compassionate existentialist who searches for the meaning within the design of nature. There is a palatable sense of both truth and despair. There is also a consistant thread of both awed respect and admiration for the immensity of "the terrible beauty" of existance. If you are looking for a book that balances the invisibly fine line between the light and the dark of insight from the perspective of a honest man who grasps both, this is your book.

I read this book after having read several of Eiseley's books, and I gained even more respect for him. Eiseley led a fascinating life. For example, as a young man he rode the rails as a hobo for some time before going to college. Eiseley was a dynamic writer and one of my favorite things about his writing is the way he was able to take seemingly ordinary events and turn them into epiphanies. One extraordinary event in his life, however, was when he temporarily lost his hearing. You will be mesmerized by his account of this episode. I can't recommend this book enough. In my opinion he is one of the truly great men of history.

This is a strange sort of autobiography - let's just call it a memoir. Eiseley does not really tell you much about his life. He was, it seems, a reasonably successful academic archeologist, and was certainly a well-known and well-loved writer of essays that are beautifully-written speculations on the nature of man, of time, and of nature.

He has been a solitary since his lonely and isolated childhood. It's clear that he has always loved animals, who are creatures he can love and who yet do not break in on that solitude. He married, but had no children. He intimates that perhaps his upbringing was responsible for this (failure?).

If you are interested in this book, it is almost certainly because you have been entranced or transported by some of Loren Eiseley's essays. Here you will not be disappointed in the prose, which still has an otherworldly charm, but you may be left hungry for more actual details of his life. We read biography because we want to know what a person did, who he knew, and what happened to him. Here, you will find much interior monologue, and a few key incidents, but be left wondering about much. It was not clear to me how his character was forged out of his Nebraska childhood; though there are hints of his mother's role, there is not much on his father. He seemed to have had a reasonable amount of worldly success, but we're never sure how he fared as a writer and as an academic. His attitudes seem always to be those of a scorned outsider, yet this cannot be entirely accurate (otherwise why this book?). He was a teacher and a scientist, but we never get a good sense of what he did in those lines. These central activities get only the barest indirect mentions.

The control here is rather loose; at one point Eiseley spends a number of pages talking about paradigms (as we would call them now) in science, in connection with the book Darwin's Century, which he published in 1958. This is intrinsically interesting stuff, but really does not belong in a book devoted to a quite different topic - namely the life of the author. While we could excuse it by calling this an intellectual biography, it really is not, as the rest of the book attests.

Eiseley could be the dedicated and disciplined scholar, as in Darwin's Century, but preferred the speculative essay. This book is really such an essay, but rather larger than he was used to writing. It has not the coherence of his shorter pieces, so is mainly missing the revelatory power his prose could bring to bear on a small incident. Yet, for what it does say about the mind and feelings of a remarkable man that I wish I had known personally, and for the graceful way it says it, this book is well worth reading.

There are few books written today that I don't want to rewrite. All the Strange Hours is one of them. This is the real thing- forget "Magical-Realism" and forget all other memoirs. This is unlike any memoir, or book I've ever read before, and should be getting out to a larger audience. You don't need to be into science, archeology, or even know who Eiseley is to appreciate this work. His writing is so good that it doesn't matter.
He also doesn't delve into the mundane things that most writers would- in fact, you go through the entire book, and you don't even know his wife's name. If I met Eiseley, I'd feel that I'd know little about what he likes to eat, or what kind of music he enjoys, or if he's a morning or night person. But none of that matters- because I feel like I know him on the inside. People who knew Eiseley say that those who read his works often knew him better than those who knew him in person. I'd list Eiseley easily as one of the greatest writers of all time, and at minimum I'd put him in the top 3 of great prose writers. Check him out, and you'll see. You won't be disappointed. Trust me- - I don't like most contemporary stuff, and if you don't either, this is great literature for you.

An excerpt from 'All the Strange Hours'

"...Oncoming age is to me a vast wild autumn country strewn with broken seed pods,hurrying cloud wrack,abondoned farm machinery,and circling crows..."
Frankly I lost my reference notes.But this is a wonderful read.You enter deep into the thinkings and passions from the heart of one man.Eiseley will invite you into his thoughts and observations about life and people like a quite and unassuming gentlemen.These stories bring you deep into the core of the Midwest cast of mind.
Great Read

Loren Eiseley was an anthropologist who's book The Immense Journey, a humanistic, beautifully written story of evolution, has been widely read and praised. All the Strange Hours is hard to classify. It is a memoir, yet its form is different from the traditional life-story and the structure often disturbs the reader's equilibrium. Nevertheless, having finished the last page, you know in your heart that the book's searing vignettes and courageous philosophical musings will stay with you until your own last days.

The book is divided into three parts: Days of a Drifter, Days of a Thinker, and Days of a Doubter.

Days of a Drifter starts with the author about to give a lecture at a conference, which he is only doing because of financial necessity. During his presentation his mind appears to split, because he starts thinking about an incident that almost cost him his life when he was riding the rails as a young drifter. This duality foreshadows the structure of the book: Life events are "excavated" and then reflected upon from different perspectives.

If you are a writer, or yearn to become one, this book is a gift. When the author was an undergraduate one of his professor's returned his paper with the comment, "You didn't compose this; it is too well written." Loren Eiseley did not defend himself because he felt it would be useless. As gifted a scientist as he was, his humanistic writing equals, or even surpasses, his scientific skills.

Reading All the Strange Hours is an unforgettable, enjoyable, life-changing, experience.

Eiseley wrights with a poets touch and an academicts sensabilities. He was a hobo for 10 years and then became one of the greatest anthopoligists and poet/writers of our time.

First, let me say that I am an avid fan of Loren Eiseley. I have read and re-read everything of his that I can get my hands on. So I picked up this autobiography with great expectations several years ago. And I was not disappointed. Much of the stuff that he writes about in this book he has referred to in his other writings. Also, Eiseley is a master of the personal essay, and All the Strange Hours is one of the best examples of his mastery. This is not a straightforward narrative as many autobiographies are; rather Eiseley picks and chooses incidents from his life which illustrate the major themes in his writings. For a more conventional biography, I recommend Gale Christianson's Fox at the Wood's Edge. Here he sets the record straight about some of Eiseley's memoirs. It is interesting to see how Eiseley shaped many of the incidents in All the Strange Hours, compared with the more realistice approach of Christianson. Christianson's book adds a different dimemsion to Eiseley's book. Still, All the Strange Hours is a great book, and I highly recommend it to Eiseley enthusiasts and novices alike.

Loren Eiseley does an incredible job of making his experiences your own to learn from. Even in the short time that has passed since his youth, the world is a vastly different place and people just can't do what he did anymore. Through his writing, you can catch a glimpse of what a less technological world looked like. He also shows you what is possible if we only had the time to take a few years to think about our surroundings and our role in them.