The Brown Wasps

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. 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