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The Inner Galaxy
Loren Eiseley (1907-1977) was not a science fiction writer, but he was a science writer, and a poet. A friend of mine recently shared some excerpts from Eiseley’s essay collection The Star Thrower, and I enjoyed them enough that I wanted to post one here.
I remain oppressed by the thought that the venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever-growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without.
Upon that desolate peak my mind had finally turned inward. It is from that domain, that inner sky, that I choose to speak—a world of dreams, of light and darkness that we will never escape, even on the far edge of Arcturus. The inward skies of man will accompany him across any void upon which he ventures and will be with him to the end of time. There is just one way in which that inward world differs from outer space. It can be more volatile and mobile, more terrible and impoverished, yet withal more ennobling in its self-consciousness, than the universe that gave it birth. To the educators of this revolutionary generation, the transformations we may induce in that inner sky loom in at least equal importance with the work of those whose goals are set beyond the orbit of the moon.
(From the essay “The Inner Galaxy.”)
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