The Star Thrower | Loren Eiseley

The Star Thrower | Loren Eiseley | Pure poetry

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The Star Thrower

	The Star Thrower Loren Eiseley Harvest Books, 1979 - 324 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A collection of the author?s favorite essays and poems. This volume includes selections that span Eiseley?s entire writing career and provide a sampling of the author as naturalist, poet, scientist, and humanist. ?Loren Eiseley?s work changed my life? (Ray Bradbury). Introduction by W. H. Auden.

Truly Amazing

Loren Eiseley can take a moment in time, analyze it, and explain it from a perspective of deep knowlege, understanding, and an intimate connection with the essence of nature, and this earth on which we all reside. His writings will take you away from this hectic lifestyle we lead, and help you to appreciate the little things in life all around you that you usually ignore, and will let you see a new dimension of this world. He transcends the normal thought process that most of us have of categorizing experiences, immediately judging what we see, then forgetting whatever is not immediately beneficial to us. He sees the miracles that occur all around us each and every day, and understands that the complexity of life comes from millions and millions of years of slow change on this earth. He appreciates what nature has created in animals, plants, and the earth's ecosystem, and how nature has created the human mind. He was truly a revolutionary thinker, a poet, and a voice of reason.

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Pure poetry

Eiseley's prose is pure poetry. His message ageless. I wish I had discovered him sooner.

Beautiful favorite

I discovered this writer in college and consistently pass this book out to friends. They must enjoy it because I never get a copy back!

The Star Thrower - Review

I did not get into the rhythm of the author's prose immediately. It appears at first to be very heavy reading, but you will note as you advance, the author purposely loosely disconnects thoughts and is nebulous, apparently his consistent style. The introduction for the book of essays and poetry is done by W.H. Auden, whose style is also very vague and uncoordinated. Eiseley's thoughts on evolution are poetry, though, and delightful and addicting. "Apes were to become men," he says, "in the inscrutable wisdom of nature, because flowers had produced seeds and fruits in such tremendous quantities that a new and totally different store of energy had become available in concentrated form." We do not have enough information to confirm his findings as a professor of Anthropology and History of Science. He was naturalist, humanist, poet, and speaker. He received many honorary degrees and awards. The only part of his writing I thought was exceptional was an essay entitled "The Star Thrower" from the book, The Star Thrower.
"It had begun when, after years of separation, I had gone dutifully home to a house from which the final occupant had departed. In a musty attic--among old trunks, a broken aquarium, and a dusty heap of fossil shells collected in childhood--I found a satchel. The satchel was already a shabby antique, in whose depths I turned up a jackknife and a "rat" of hair such as women wore at the beginning of the century. Beneath these lay a pile of old photographs and a note--two notes, rather, evidently dropped into the bag at different times. Each, in a thin, ornate hand, reiterated a single message that the writer had believed important. "This satchel belongs to my son, Loren Eiseley." It was the last message. The rat of hair had belonged to my mother, and there were also two incredibly pointed slippers that looked as though they had been intended for a formal ball, to which I knew well my mother would never in her life have been invited. I undid the rotted string around the studio portraits.
Mostly they consisted of stiff, upright bearded men and heavily clothed women... I recognized at once the two sisters at the edge of the photograph, the younger clinging reluctantly to the older. ... Here it began, her pain and mine. The eyes in the photograph were already remote and shadowed by some inner turmoil. The poise of the body was already that of one miserably departing the peripheries of the human estate. The gaze was mutely clairvoyant and lonely. It was the gaze of a child who knew unbearable difference and impending isolation.
I dropped the notes and pictures once more into the bag.... The child in the photograph had survived to be an ill-taught prairie artist. She had been deaf. All her life she had walked the precipice of mental breakdown. Here on this faded porch it had begun--the long crucifixion of life. I slipped downstairs and out of the house I walked for miles through the streets.
Man is himself, like the universe he inhabits, like the demonical stirrings of the ooze from which he sprang, a tale of desolations. He walks in his mind from birth to death the long resounding shores of endless disillusionment. Finally, the commitment to life departs or turns to bitterness. But out of such desolation emerges the awesome freedom to choose--to choose beyond the narrowly circumscribed circle that delimits the animal being. In that widening ring of human choice, chaos and order renew their symbolic struggle in the role of titans. They contend for the destiny of a world.
...On a point of land, as though projecting into a domain beyond us, I found the star thrower. In the sweet rain-swept morning, that great many-hued rainbow still lurked and wavered tentatively beyond him. Silently I sought and picked up a still-living star, spinning it far out into the waves. I spoke once briefly. "I understand," I said. "Call me another thrower." Only then I allowed myself to think. He is not alone any longer. After us there will be others.
We were part of the rainbow--an unexplained projection into the natural. As I went down the beach I could feel the drawing of a circle in men's minds, like that lowering, shifting realm of color in which the thrower labored. It was a visible model of something toward which man's mind had striven, the circle of perfection.
...I flung and flung again while all about us roared the insatiable waters of death.
But we, pale and alone and small in that immensity, hurled back the living stars.
...I picked up a star whose tube feet ventured timidly among my fingers while, like a true star, it cried soundlessly for life. I saw it with an unaccustomed clarity and cast far out. With it, I flung myself as forfeit, for the first time, into some unknown dimension of existence. From Darwin's tangled bank of unceasing struggle, selfishness, and death, had arisen, incomprehensibly, the thrower who loved not man, but life...We had reached the last shore of an invisible island...a shore the primitives had always known... that man cannot exist spiritually without life, his brother. ... Somewhere, my thought persisted, there is a hurler of stars, and he walks, because he chooses, always in desolation, but not in defeat.
Trish New, author of The Thrill of Hope and South State Street Journal

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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