Thursday, September 27, 2007

The Star Thrower. Loren Eiseley. Signficant Sentences 10.

Significant sentences from Loren Eiseley's The Star Thrower, a collection of Eiseley's essays on nature and humanity's relationship to it.

Title of Essay: "The Star Thrower."

"Death is the only successful collector." p. 172.

"...there is little or nothing that remains unmeasured: nothing, that it, but the mind of man." p. 174.

"Our identity is a dream." p. 175.

"We are process, not reality...." p. 175.

"The power to change is both creative and destructive."

"They [the evolutionists] saw life rushing outward from an unknown center, just as today the astronomer senses the galaxies fleeing into the infinity of darkness." p. 177.

"...tools increasingly revenged themselves upon their creators...." p. 178.

"Man's powers were finite; the forces he had released in nature recognized no such limitations. The irrevocable monsters conjured up by a completely amateur sorcerer." p. 170.

"I love the lost ones, the failures of the world." p. 182.

"Man is...a tale of desolations." p. 183.

"The Thrower who loved not man, but life." p. 185.

"Somewhere, my thought persisted, there is a hurler of stars, and he walks, because he chooses, always in desolation, but not in defeat." p. 185.

Reflections: The star thrower is a man who walks the beaches at dawn, picks up the beached star fish and hurls them back into the ocean, restoring them to life. This belief in life is in stark contrast to man who has unleashed and hurled his tools, his powers of destruction, into the world.

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