as space, he had been completely unfaithful to his father’s fervent hopefor him. His vow to his father has been broken: his appointment with hisfuture self had brought him only grief. And yet, as his steps quickened theboy on the tricycle called out to the departing stranger a question: “Do youlive here mister?” To answer the question Eiseley took “a firm grip on airynothing—to be precise, on the bole of a great tree,” and responds firmly,“I do.” For he realized that in his imagination he had come home, an easyaccomplishment. His imagination, at least, had never left home. Havingbeen formed there, its own centripetal force inclined it always toward itshome, its center.Like Yeats in “Among School Children,” Eiseley had discovered thatonly the symbol of a tree can answer man’s perpetual questions aboutillusion and reality, life and death, innocence and maturity, the near and thefar. In a tree it is impossible to distinguish “the dancer from the dance,” orbeingfrombecoming,andalloppositesbecomeunited—evennearnessanddistance. In answer to the child’s question—and is not the child an avatarof Eiseley’s own young tree-planting self?—Eiseley’s reply of “I do” wastruly a marriage vow. Because he understood–like Pascoli’s Odysseus—that his journey away from home, and all the trials of that journey, hadall been illusory, just as the tree itself had been. He wedded his own rootswith his own growth, his strangeness with his commonality, his prodigalitywith his point of departure. In the irony of such an insight his eyes openedto a world “in which the trivial and magicless themselves are transmutedby human wisdom into a timeless dimension having its own enchantedreality.” Nobody comes home to nothingness.Mankind’s uniqueness, Bronowski (1973) once observed, comes fromthe fact that we, alone among all living creatures, have experiences thatnever happen, except in our imaginations, experiences that are every bitas important as those that do happen. Though “non-existent,” Eiseley’stree, in his imagination, shaped his entire life’s journey. The truly “con-crete,”Whitehead(1925)explainsinScienceandtheModernWorld,is“thatwhichhasgrowntogether”(p. 174).Thoughimaginary,nothinginEiseley’sodyssey had served more powerfully as a concrete force in shaping his ex-perience than the tree. Like the always centered point of Donne’s famouscompass in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” it had grounded hisjourney into time and space, centering it always in its place and time oforigin. Eiseley’s odyssey, like the original one, had been a journey “from theperiphery toward [a] center,” a center that was, in fact, a tree. His journeyhad, in fact, been the tree’s real growth; and his reply to the boy’s questionwas true, but a truth Eiseley had only just discovered.As Howard Gruber (1978) has taught us to see, creative work is oftenguided by an “image of wide scope”: “a schema capable of assimilating to