Not surprisingly for a man who thought of the pursuit of knowledgeas a vision quest, Eiseley was intuitively fascinated with the story of theOdyssey, both with Homer’s original version and later recreations of it byDante, Celli, Tennyson, Pascoli, and Kazantzakis. His books are studdedwith allusions to these poems: from “The Ghost Continent” in The Unex-pected Universe (1969), an extended comparison of the immense journeyof the species as revealed by Darwin and Homer’s epic, to All the StrangeHours (1975a), where the epigraph for Part One is a line from The Odyssey:“There is nothing worse for mortal men than wandering.” His own life inscience, in fact, seemed to him “transformed inwardly into something thatwas whispered to Odysseus long ago” (1969, p. 3) and his own autobiog-raphy Odyssean in origin:I have penetrated as far as I could dare among rain-dimmed crags andseascapes. But there is more, assuredly there is still more, as Circe triedto tell Odysseus when she warned that death would come to him fromthe sea. She meant, I think now, the upwelling of that inner tide whichengulfs each traveler.I have listened belatedly to the warning of the great enchantress. Ihave cast, while there was yet time, my own oracles on the sun-washeddeck. My attempt to read the results contains elements of autobiogra-phy. I set it down just as the surge begins to lift, towering and relentlessagainst the reefs of age (1969, p. 25).“That inner tide” returns at a pivotal moment in All the StrangeHours (1975a) in which the end of his and the species’ Odyssey, his death