The family’s window shades were always drawn, and visitors rarely came. He called her a witch to her face and would hide from her for hours at a time until, driven by panic, she began screaming so loudly that he would finally show himself.

In either case, it mattered little to him, for he grew to hate her with an incandescence that only brightened with the years. Eiseley later wrote of her that she was stone deaf others simply described her as hard of hearing. She was constantly deriding Clyde and all he cared about, punctuating her cruel tirades with flailing arms and hands. Eiseley listened in awe on those rare occasions when his father was moved to recite a passage by the bard, such as these lines from Coriolanus:Īt the opposite end of the family spectrum was Eiseley’s peculiar mother Daisey (née Corey), who was known for her flamboyant hats and razor-sharp tongue. Clyde Eiseley, an itinerant hardware salesman whose meager wages barely kept food on the family table and a roof over their heads, had dreamed of becoming a Shakespearean actor, indeed had once traveled Nebraska’s dust-choked byways with a company of Elizabethan players. Seeing Halley’s comet might have been cold comfort to a shivering child, but it harmonized with what Eiseley clung to in his father. But he never forgot the person in whose arms he rested, who he would always care for more than any other, and who planted in his son the sense of wonder with the world that led Eiseley to create his own genre of prose: science nested beneath the wings of the humanities. Perhaps young Loren understood his father, perhaps not. “It will come back in seventy-five years.” 2 2.Įiseley, The Invisible Pyramid (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970).

“If you live to be an old man, you will see it again”, his father whispered. After a long and reverent silence, Clyde Eiseley told his three-year-old son to remember this night above all others, for the boy had a good chance of beating the odds that he would see the celestial visitor but once in his life. On the far horizon, a radiant Halley’s comet rent the firmament like a gigantic sword. It was there, where the overwhelming vastness fuses with the midnight stars, that Eiseley’s father held him aloft one chilly night, in 1910. Loren Eiseley, The Night Country (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971). Writing of his birth on the eastern edge of the Great Plains, the literary naturalist Loren Eiseley cast his nativity in the language of the poet: “I was born in the first decade of the century, conceived in and part of the rolling yellow cloud that occasionally raises up a rainy silver eye to look upon itself before subsiding into dust again.” 1 1.

The invisible pyramid by loren eiseley