You have probably heard the story of “The Star Thrower” in a sermon or motivational talk sometime. I first heard it in the late 1960s. It goes something like this. A wise old professor goes for an early morning walk on a beach just as the tide is going out. He sees a young fellow also out for a walk. Every now and then the young man picks up a starfish and throws it far into the receding waters. The old man asks what he is doing and the young one points out that the starfish will die once the tide is out. The old man looks down the long beach and sees hundreds, maybe thousands of stranded starfish. “There’s no point in doing that,” he says.  “It won’t make a difference.” The young man looks down the beach, thinks about it a little, nods, and walks on. Then he picks up another starfish and throws it into the sea. “It made a difference for that one,” he replies. Now it is the old professor’s turn to think a little and nod. He joins the young man on his walk, finds a starfish, and throws it in.

            That is the short version. I had not read the original until I found a great little reprint of Loren Eiseley’s essays, available at Amazon. Eiseley was a true naturalist, a physical anthropologist and paleontologist by training and vocation, but a lover of all the natural world and endowed with great talents of observation and poetic/philosophic commentary. His writing is simply brilliant (though at times a little turgid because of his broad vocabulary, excellent diction, and depth of thought). He has been compared to Thoreau, but Thoreau did not have the scientific understanding and historical depth that Professor Eiseley had.

            Like many of his essays, “The Star Thrower” is about the meaning of life, the purpose of man’s existence, and our relationship to the universe. It runs seventeen pages and concludes with this insightful passage:

“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. It was the subtle cleft in nature before which biological thinking had faltered. We had reached the last shore of an invisible island—yet, strangely, also a shore that the primitives had always known. They had sensed intuitively that man cannot exist spiritually without life, his brother, even if he slays. . . .

“. . . I would walk remembering Bacon’s forgotten words “for the use of life.” I would walk with the knowledge of the discontinuities of the unexpected universe. I would walk knowing of the rift revealed by the thrower, a hint that there looms, inexplicably, in nature something above the role men give her. I knew it from the man at the foot of the rainbow, the starfish thrower on the beaches of Costabel.”

            “The Star Thrower” is but one of the ruminations in this book. Included are the author’s observations of spiders, birds, flowers, frogs, fossils, and more, each filled with anecdotes of his experiences with nature and awe at its beauty and goodness. There are essays on Thoreau and Emerson, Leakey and Snow, and many others, including references to Tolkien and a host of great writers, historians, and philosophers. He at times quotes the Bible.

            And that raises an important question. Did Professor Eiseley believe in God? He clearly understood the vastness, the greatness of Nature. And he clearly believes in a greater power than Man, poor man strutting and fretting his time on the world stage. As W. H. Auden points out in the Introduction, living creatures, photosynthesis, and especially man cannot be explained by chance. These are miracles. Loren Eiseley clearly agrees.

            He certainly did not care much for the organized religion he met through the years, but he knew there is a greater power, and he seems to recognize Jesus of Nazareth as connected to it. Towards the end of an interesting essay about the relationship between past, present, and future, titled “The Lethal Factor,” he writes:

“By some I have been castigated because I am an evolutionist. In one church which I had attended as the guest of a member I had been made the covert object of a sermon in which I had recognizably played the role of a sinning scientist. I cannot deny that the role may have fitted me, but I could not feel that the hospitality, under the circumstance, was Christian. I had seen fanatical sectarian signs of ignorant and contentious sects painted on rocks all over America, particularly in desert places. I had gazed unmoved on them all. . .

“But before my mind’s eye, like an ineradicable mote, persisted the vision of that lost receding figure on the dreadful hill of Calvary who whispered with his last breath, ‘It is finished.’ It was not for himself he cried—it was for man against eternity, for us of every human generation who perform against the future the acts which justify creation or annul it. . . . if we possess great fortitude, each one of us can say against the future he has not seen, ‘It is finished.’

“At that moment we will have passed beyond the reach of time into a still and hidden place where it was said, ‘He who loses his life will find it.’ And in that place we will have found an ancient and an undistorted way.”