Tuesday, October 9, 2007

The Star Thrower. Loren Eiseley. Significant Sentences 15.

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 Lethal Factor."

"Before we pass, it is well to think of what our final image as a race may be." p. 255.

"Humanity's restless mind would try all paths, all horrors, all betrayals." p. 256.

"...great music would lift him momentarily into some pure domain of peace." p. 256.

"He would kill for shadowy ideas more ferociously than other creatures kill for food; then, in a generation or less, forget what bloody dream had so oppressed him." p. 256.

"...it appears that behind every unifying effort in the life of man there is an opposite tendency to disruption, as if the force symbolized in the story of the Tower of Babel had been felt by man since the beginning." p. 258.

"...with bigness there often emerges a dogmatic rigidity." p. 260.

C.S. Lewis: "...in the modern era the good appears to be getting better and the evil more terrifying." p. 260.

"I am just primitive enough to hope that somehow, somewhere, a cardinal may still be whistling on a green bush when the last man goes blind before his man-made sun." p. 261.

"If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives...it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure." p. 261.

Thomas Beddoes: "Thou art, old world/ a hoary, atheistic, murdering star." p. 261.

Erich Frank: "History and the world do not change, but man's attitude to the world changes." p. 265.

Reflections: A pessimistic Eiseley reflects on "Judgment Day." Our "man-made sun" will blind and then destroy the planet, and it's a shame that we will take the frog and the cardinal with us.

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