The Star Thrower by Loren Eisley, Part 3

This realization brings about a spiritual release.

Now he sees.

He now knows the question. He also knows that there is an answer, but it is not on the predictable prairie plains of modern science that he has made his fortress. Out of the center of his brain, the primitive layers unfolding in his subconscious, the haunted rooms of his mind are unlocked one by one.


On a conscious level he realizes Darwin, Einstein, and Freud might be said to have released the shadows. The barricade to his spiritual illumination has been removed. The way is now open for him to search for the messenger in the rainbow light.



The seed has grown and opened in flower, leaving behind the dark shadows which threatened him. He feels that he has not been a man for a long time, mired down as he had been with his personal and evolutionary past. He is now free to comprehend that it was men as well as starfish that one seeks to save.



He imitates the example of the inestimable beauty of man in the prism light and throws back the starfish that they might live.



Like God, who throws stars in the far-flung heavens, like Jesus who became a fisher of men, like the Messenger from the East, he finds himself also to be a kind of savior, both of himself as well as of stars and starfish.



He has sorted out the conflict of the evolutionary striving to be the fittest at the expense of the weak. He has chosen instead to become a Thrower who loves life itself and not just individual beings, a man who must walk a lonely path on the beach of Costabel. He is not a man who walks in desultory defeat.



He has a second chance, a second wind for the rest of his life. He makes a small but infinite statement when he says, "I understand".


The images of darkness are scattered by an epiphany of enlightened understanding, moving him in a spiritual evolution from his haunted beginning to the joy of discovery, abounding with hope and the breaking of a new day for him.