ANTHROPOLOGIST SPEAKS
Modern man living in future
Man today lives increasingly in the future and neglects the present, said Loren Eiseley, noted anthropologist, speaking at yesterday afternoon's Inter-Century Seminar on Man and the Future.
"A people who essay to do this have an insatiable demand for soothsayers and oracles to assure and comfort them about the insubstantial road they tread," Eiseley said.
"BY CONTRAST, I am a person known very largely, if at all, as one committed to the human past—to the broken columns of lost civilizations, to what can be discovered in the depths of tombs, or dredged from ice-age gravels, or drawn from the features of equally ancient crania."
He said that as he travels about the country performing various scientific errands, he has found that the American public rarely asks about antiquarian matters. Intsead they invariably ask: what will man be like a million years from now?
"We are literally enduring a future that has not yet culminated, that has, perhaps, been hovering in the air since man arose. The lunging, rocking juggernaut of our civilization has charged by," he said.
TODAY PEOPLE wait for an act of divination or a sanctified guess, Eiseley said.
"As in the case of the ancient
Greeks, chresmologues, dealers in crumbling parchment and uncertain prophecy, pass among us. I am such a one.
"But the chresmologue's profession demands that he be alert to signs and portents in both the natural and human worlds — events or sayings that others might regard as trivial but to which the gods may have entrusted momentary meaning, pertinence or power.
"Such words may be uttered by those unconscious of their significance. They may also be spoken upon journeys for it is then that man in the role of the stranger must constantly confront reality and decide his pathway."
Eiseley told of an occasion not long ago when he overheard a statement from a ragged derelict which he said would have been out of place in any age except that of the Roman twilight and our time. He said that it was the kind of remark which would have been examined by the Greeks for a hidden meaning from the gods or it would have caused a military commander to postpone a crucial battle.
"I HAD COME into the smoking compartment of a train," he related, "at midnight, out of the tumult of a New York weekend. As I settled into an inconspicuous corner I noticed a man with a paper sack a few seats beyond
me. His eyes were closed, his head flung back. He either drowsed from exhaustion or liquor, or both. In that city at midnight there were many like him."
When asked for a ticket, the old man, Eiseley said, produced a roll of bills, and said, "Give me a ticket to wherever it is." The stunned conductor selected the price of Philadelphia and thrust the remaining bills into the old man's hand.
"In a single sentence that caverous individual had epitomized modern time as opposed to Christian time and in the same breath had pronounced the destination of the modern world." Eiseley said. "This shabby creature had personalized in a breath the terror of an open-ended universe."
Eiseley said, as one professionally qualified to recognize an oracle. "I heard the destination asked for. It does not matter that the remark was cryptic. 'A ticket to wherever it is' carries the weight of a moral judgment."
TURNING TO THE concept of time, Eiseley said it is the one difference which psychologically separates the mind of present man from that of the classical world. Ancient man thought of time as what has been, passes, and will be. Now, man changes this phrase to what is will not be.
'But with the agony in the
garden at Gethsemane came the concern for last things, for the end of the story of man. A solitary individual, one who prayed sleepless that his fate might pass, had spoken before the Pharisees, 'I know whence I have come and wither I am going.' No man had said such a thing before and none would do so after him."
The Student Union Activities sponsored event will feature nationally known entertainer Johnny Rivers. Performing with Rivers will be the Fabulous Flippers and the Blue Things.
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KU's centennial week social celebration will reach an end Saturday with a students' dance at Allen Field House from 8 p.m. to midnight.
Tickets, $1.50 per person, are on sale at the information booth, the Kansas Union, Kief's Records and Weaver's department store.
Dance to end social feting
Rivers, the Louisiana-born singer who made "Memphis" and "I'll Make Believe" best sellers two weeks after their release, will give two performances during Saturday's dance.
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"In a small way I too am a world changer and am hopefully tampering with the planetary axis. Most of my experiments with the future will come to nothing but some may not," he said.
This one event alone changed the drama of man's life, he said. The nature of Christ's words made him a world changer. Self-examination and self-knowledge intensified after this event. Nature came to be thought of as the Second Book of God's Revelation.
10 Daily Kansan Tuesday, April 12. 1966
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