in the plain colors of reality. Circe and whatever she represents havevanished. Much as Darwin might have viewed the Galapagos in oldage, Odysseus passes the scenes of the marvelous voyage with all theobstacles reduced to trifles. The nostalgia of space, which is what theGreeks meant by nostalgia, that is, the hunger for home, is transmutedby Pascoli into the hunger for lost time, for the forever vanished days.The Sirens no longer sing, but Pascoli’s Odysseus, having read hisinward journey, understands them. Knowledge without sympatheticperception is barren. Odysseus in his death is carried by the wavesto Calypso, who hides him in her hair. “Nobody” has come home toNothingness (p. 22).Eiseley concluded that it was thus Pascoli’s great insight “to visualize anend in which the trivial and magicless themselves are transmuted by hu-man wisdom into a timeless dimension having its own enchanted reality”(p. 22).LorenEiseleyattainedintheendasimilarwisdom.InhisownOdysseyas a writer he, too, returned home—though from a vision quest not a war—and he, too, sought to retrace his steps only to discover finally that his pur-suit of distance and his archaeological obsession with time had come toseem an illusion, his great adventure had become indistinguishable fromthe plain colors of reality. In the end, he too came home to Nothingness.So, too, Eiseley had come to believe, must the species come home, “matur-ing to finiteness,” “dying” into what the earth requires of it