Monday, October 15, 2007

The Star Thrower. Loren Eiseley. Significant Sentences 18.

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 Inner Galaxy"

"I remain oppressed by the thought that the venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion." p. 298.

"...a play in which man was destined always to be a searcher, and it would be his true nature he would seek." p. 300.

Montaigne: "The conviction of wisdom is the plague of man." p. 310.

"Century after century, humanity studies itself in the mirror of fashion, and ever the mirror gives back distortions, which for the moment impose themselves upon man's real image." p. 301.

Montaigne: "We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn." p. 302.

"It is man's folly, as it is perhaps a sign of his spiritual aspirations, that he is forever scrutinizing and redefining himself." p. 303.

"Few of us can be saints; few of us are total monsters." p. 304.

"Man's altruistic and innately cooperative character has brought him along the road to civilization...." p. 305.

"The world...is open-ended, unpredictable." p. 306.

"Perhaps, it is always the destined role of the compassionate to be strangers among men." p. 310.

"For the seed of man is thistledown, and a puff of breath may govern it, or a word from a poet torment it into greatness." p. 310.

"It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes. This is the final paradox, which men call evolution." p. 311.

Comment: I think this last quote is one of my most memorable from Loren Eiseley: "It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes. This is the final paradox, which men call evolution." It comes at the end of an essay devoted to man's exploration--not the exploration of continents and space--but man's inner exploration in search of his own nature. And, Eiseley decides, that inner nature is a paradox.

This essay concludes the significant sentences from Loren Eiseley's The Star Thrower. According to some, Eiseley himself was a failure as a scientist and as a college administrator. One could infer from his biography--Fox at the Wood's Edge by Gale Christiansen--that he was also a failure as a teacher and perhaps, measured by some critics, as a man--as his father was also a failure. One scientist said of Eiseley's essays, "It's cute, but it's not science."

In my opinion, Eiseley successfully explored humanity and nature with a scientist's insight and a poet's sensitivity and expressed his explorations in memorable words. It is my hope that people will continue to read his essays and be as inspired as I have been to believe in and fulfill the evolving and improving nature of humanity.

What do you think?

RayS.

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