Making
a Difference: the Star Thrower
Faced with disaster on a grand scale, with more than 150,000 dead,
whole villages wiped away and millions homeless, we may feel totally
inadequate. “What can I possibly do that would mean anything?” we
ask. “I’m only one person.” What follows, an abridged
version of an earlier piece in the Epistle, reminds us again of the
answer to that question.
At a low ebb in his life, shorn of hope and feeling, the scientist and
writer Loren Eiseley found himself alone on the beaches of Costabel in
Spain. There, the uncaring sea cast up its creatures on the
shore, where they struggled vainly to return. Gulls tore them to
pieces, the sun broiled them dry, the sand clogged the pores of the
starfish and suffocated them. The sea that was their mother
rejected them and they died by the hundreds, the thousands in a silent
slaughter over miles of beach. In the hour before dawn Eiseley
saw moving lights upon the beaches, the lights of professional shell
collectors who plucked the sea creatures from the sand and, with some
still living, took them back to the hotel and boiled out their flesh in
huge cauldrons to make souvenirs for tourists.
In the darkness that gripped him Eiseley saw nothing
but death everywhere he looked. The hollowness at his center
grew. In his despair he walked the dawn beach far past the other,
crossed a headland, and descended to an isolated strip of beach exposed
to the full blast of the wind. And there, afar off, under a
rainbow that had just formed, he saw a tiny human figure. It was
a man picking stranded starfish off the strand and throwing them back
into the sea.
Eiseley at first thought the exercise foolish.
“The star thrower is a man,” he wrote, “and death is running more fleet
than he along every sea beach in the world.” He and the star thrower
passed a few words and he left, still wrapped in despair. But the
image of the star thrower would not let him be, would not let him
sleep, until he saw the meaning of it. What he had witnessed was
something beyond science and beyond Darwin. It was the reverence
for life itself, displayed in a lone figure who acted as if he was the
only man on the planet.
Eiseley could have said, and first did say in his
mind, “Amid all this death, what difference are you possibly making?”
And the star thrower, hurling his starfish into the
boiling surf, could have truly said, “I made a difference to that one,
and that one, and that one.”
And so do we, whenever we act as the star thrower did.
A postscript: Eiseley went back and joined the star thrower. “I
understand,” he told him. “Call me another thrower.”
Silently, together, they did what they could.
-Bill Blundell