The Invisible Pyramid Book

Echoing Socrates, the Roman philosopher Seneca asks in one of his letters, "What good does it do you to go overseas, to move from city to city? If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you're needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person."

The same sentiment animates much of Loren Eiseley's The Invisible Pyramid. This book collects a series of lectures delivered by Eiseley shortly after the Apollo moon landing. It was a heady time but Eiseley warns against scientific triumphalism and the temptations of magical thinking. Beware the intoxication of accomplishment, he says. You may travel to the stars, but at what cost and for what gain? Look at the mess we make of things here at home and ask yourself whether this is something we can in good conscience export to other worlds. The human species is poised to become, perhaps, a cosmic parasite, a spore bearer, a galactic infestation.

People have an impressive capacity for memory (especially as aided by language, etc.), but they have no lesser talent for forgetting. How is it, after all, that men of the same generation that saw hell unleashed twice in wars of near-global scale could allow themselves to indulge in utopian visions of a future beyond this planet? Would we not be planting the same species of world-eaters in any new lands we managed to reach?

We human beings have a longing for transformation that will not be educated by experience. We are blind to what we actually are and see only what we imagine we may be. Our technologies enable us only to amplify and extend our conflicted, tempestuous nature; they do not heal us.

"Every man tracks himself through life," Thoreau wrote in his journals, and Eiseley comments: "Thoreau meant that the individual in all his reading, his traveling, his observations, would follow only his own footprints in the snows of this world. He would see what his temperament dictated, hear what voices his ears allowed him to hear, and not one whit more. This is the fate of every man. What is less well known is that civilizations, which are the products of men, are in their way equally obtuse."

This is not to say that transformation (or transfiguration, if you like) does not occur. Eiseley would of course point out that it happens through the process of evolution, but only according to timescales that delete civilizations in the blink of an eye, and in ways that are finally unpredictable and no guarantee of moral betterment. I would suggest that transformation may happen, too, by more numinous means - means that work upon individuals more effectively than upon populations. But either way, heaven, if and when it finds us, will not be of our own making.