The Brown Wasps In Loren Eiseley’s Essay The Brown Wasps, Eiseley shows that humans and animals act in similar ways. He says that humans and animals cling to the things they know very strongly. Sometimes they even act as if nothing even changed. Humans and animals tend to want to return to things that they are familiar to as they grow older. Loren Eiseley shows how humans and animals try to cling or recreate an important or favorite place.
This essay is about memory, home, places in time. Loren Eiseley does a great job describing the place that he is talking about to make the reader visualize and make them feel like they are there. Some examples are the old men, the brown wasps, the mice, the pigeons, the blind man, and even himself. He recalls his childhood in Nebraska and how the train stations used to be and how the pigeons would fly around waiting for people boarding the trains to feed them. Loren Eiseley once planted a tree with his father, when he was a boy and he acts like it has been there the whole time.
Years later he returned to the house where they had planted the tree and realized that the tree he had been imaging all his life was gone. In the beginning Eiseley describes the appearance of the train station and tells of the men that sleep on the benches. The lonely old men come into the train station for shelter and to get some rest. Whether they sleep for an hour or just take up space on the benches, they all come in from the outside to seek shelter and be around others.
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Once inside, away from the cold and knowing there are others near, one of the sleepers will die in his sleep. Eiseley compares this to the brown wasp that wishes to die in the center of the hive. The men came inside the train station to be around other people so that they did not die alone. Sometimes it is the place that matters the most, the center of the hive for the brown wasp and the bench in the train station for the old man. “We cling to a time and place because without them man is lost, not only man but life.” (79).
Later Eiseley tells of a mouse that made a home in one of the flower pots in his living room.
This was no ordinary house mouse, this was a field mouse; the one that he had seen in the field of the site of the new suburban store. It ran away from the field where the bulldozers were and headed towards Eiseley’s apartment building. The mouse made a burrow in the flower pot and was quick to hide and not be seen. He tried to dig the burrow deeper but failed.
Eiseley then refilled the burrow with the dirt and did not expect to see the mouse again. To his surprise the burrow reopened but there was no sign of the field mouse. Not even the temptation of food would draw the mouse out. He thought it would end up in some trap or someone else’s apartment. The El in Philadelphia was the familiar place for the pigeons to come and know that they would be feed by people near by. The sound of the approaching train, the sound of a work man hammering, or someone jingling change in their pockets would always draw the pigeons near the tracks with hope that crumbs would be thrown their way.
When the El was torn down and replaced by a subway, the pigeons flew around day after day looking for crowds, listening for the sound of the train until they finally flew away. “I thought I had seen the last of them about the El, but there was a revival and it provided a curious instance of the memory of living things for a way of life or a locality that has long been cherished” (77).
Like the pigeons, there was a blind man that clung to a stairway leading to the change booth with a cup. He too was forced to give his place up. One morning, Eiseley saw some familiar pigeons return the area where the El once was because some shouting of workmen and sound of wreckers could be heard.
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The pigeons returned looking for people to toss crumbs their way once more. They flew through the empty windows and watched carefully. Even the blind man was still there, sitting in a chair at the same corner and as far as he knew the crowd was still boarding the train. “I have said my life has been passed in the shade of a nonexistent tree, so that such sights do not offend me” (78).
Eiseley tells about when he and his father planted the tree when he was a boy. He took a journey to his past to see this tree he and his father planted.
He had imagined it for sixty years and when he got to the house, there was nothing to see. The house had remained the same, it had not been altered. All these years, he had a memory of the tree and as the years past by, the tree would grow and go through its seasons. “It was obvious I was attached by a thread to a thing that had never been there, or certainly not for long.
Something that had to be held in the air, or sustained in the mind, because it was part of my orientation in the universe and I could not survive without it. There was more that an animal’s attachment to a place. There was something else, the attachment of the spirit to a grouping of events in time; it was part of our mortality” (79).
This essay did an outstanding job of relating humans and animals and stating that the place or the memory is what we hold on to. All places will change through time but the memory that we take with us lives on inside. Memories are ours to look back at too.
Whether it is a specific time or event in our life, animals and humans all have attachment to places in time. No one wants to die alone, so they wander into a crowd and blend in for the moment to die.
