The Star Thrower. Loren Eiseley.

The Star Thrower
Loren Eiseley
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

Why read it? Loren Eiseley is a remarkable essayist. A professional scientist, he used words as an artist. Unlike scientists who analyze and dissect to kill, Eiseley retained his understanding of the mystery of life. His essays usually begin with a brief anecdote and then extend to its implications for science and for humanity. He is of the school that sees people as a part of nature and nature as one with people, not as people who dominate nature. And he sees evolution as promising that human beings will one day improve itself, that human personality will match the wonders of scientific findings. This book collects some of Eiseley’s thought-provoking, memorable essays. When you finish an essay by Loren Eiseley, you will not be finished because you cannot stop thinking about what he has said.

Some sample ideas from these essays: “…those who have retained a true taste for the marvelous and who are capable of discerning in the flow of ordinary events the point at which the mundane world gives way to quite another dimension.” “It is worth at least a wistful thought that someday the porpoise may talk to us and we to him.” “Man is himself a consuming fire.” “…the wide-eyed, innocent fox inviting me to play, with the innate courtesy of its two forepaws placed appealingly together, along with a mock shake of the head.” “A little while ago—about one hundred million years, as the geologist estimated time in the history of our four-billion-year-old planet….” “There is something, particularly in a spider monkey’s tail, that is too bold and purposeful to be easily called the product of simple chance.” “…on the other hand the machine does not bleed, ache, hang for hours in the empty sky in a torment of hope to learn the fate of another machine nor does it cry out with joy nor dance in the air with the fierce passion of a bird.”

“I was the only man in the world who saw him do it. Everybody else was hurrying.” On the faces of Easter Isle: “…the inscrutable, stylized faces…. No tears are marked upon the faces. The faces are formless, nameless; they represent no living style, are therefore all men and no man and they stare indifferently upon that rolling waste which has seen man come and will see him fade once more into the primal elements from which he came.” “Sometimes the best teacher teaches only once to a small child or to a grownup past hope. I once received an unexpected lesson from a spider.”

Summary of the story, “The Fifth Planet”: An amateur astronomer has been led to believe that between Mars and Jupiter there had been a fifth planet that had been blown to bits and that meteors from it were hitting Earth. He kept studying these meteors, hoping o find fossils which would prove life was “out there.” But, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he no longer cares whether he finds evidence of life on that fifth planet. He concludes that that planet, if life existed on it, probably met the fate that this planet inevitably must—blown to bits by our own technology.

“The Star Thrower”: Observes a man, alone, walking the beach at dawn, picking up stranded starfish and throwing them back into the sea. Death is the only successful collector. There is little or nothing that remains unmeasured: nothing, that is, but the mind of man. Tools increasingly revenged themselves upon their creators. Somewhere, my thought persisted, there is a hurler of stars, and he walks because he chooses, always in desolation, but not in defeat.

Quote: “The whole of existence frightens me,” protested the philosopher Sören Kierkegaard: “From the smallest fly to the mystery of the Incarnation, everything is unintelligible to me, most of all myself.”

Quote: :We fear the awesome powers we have lifted out of nature and cannot return to her.”