the shape of things

i can hardly add words to this passage from a book i'm reading, so i'll just paste the quote:

"it did not help in the least to make out finally that the creature who had assigned himself to me was an absurdly spotted dog of dubious affinities nor did it help that his coat had the curious properties generally attributed to a magician. for how, after all, could i assert with surety what shape this dog had originally possessed a half mile down the road? there was no way of securing his word for it. the dog was, in actuality, an illusory succession of forms finally, but momentarily, frozen into the shape 'dog' by me. a word, no more. but as it turned away into the night how was i to know it would remain 'dog'? by experience? no, it had been picked by me out of a running weave of colors and faces into which it would lapse once more as it bounded silently into the inhuman, unpopulated wood. we deceive ourselves if we think our self-drawn categories exist there. the dog would simply become once more an endless running series of forms, which would not, the instant i might vanish, any longer know themselves as 'dog.' by a mental effort peculiar to man, i had wrenched a leaping phantom into the flesh 'dog,' but the shape could not be held, neither his nor my own. we were contradictions and unreal. a nerve net and the lens of an eye had created us. like the dog, i was destined to leap away at last into the unknown wood. my flesh , my own seeming unique individuality was already slipping like flying mist, like the colors of the dog, away from the little parcel of my bones. if there was order in us, it was the order of change." (59)

loren eiseley, the star thrower