It is impossible to imagine more appropriate last words or a more fittingsumming-up of Eiseley’s personal Odyssey, for like T. S. Eliot’s “LittleGidding” (1943) they proclaimed in fact that “What we call the beginningis often the end/And to make an end is to make a beginning./The end iswhere we start from” (p. 58).The man who makes a vow in childhood, Eiseley noted (quotingChesterton) in All the Strange Hours (1975a, “makes an appointment withhimself at some distant time or place” (p. 166). Eiseley’s first vow, he toldus, was to read, and his reading, of course, changed him irrevocably. Buthe made other vows as well, other childhood commitments. Eiseley (1970)recounted how in 1910 he watched Haley’s Comet pass overhead while“held in [his] father’s arms under the cottonwoods of a cold and leaflessspring to see the hurtling emissary of the void.” He recalled—in one of hisearliest and most cherished memories—how his father had explained tohim that the comet would come again only after his death, in his son’s oldage, and that it would be necessary for the young Eiseley to “live to seeit” in his stead. Eiseley acquiesced to his father’s expressed wish, “out oflove for a sad man who clung to me as I to him” (Eiseley, 1970, pp. 7–8).Eiseley did not, however, live to keep his appointment with the comet