Looking for a star, I found my vocation's path and companions to walk with me

In March 1975, I was 19 years old and an enthusiastic philosophy student, filled with grand dreams of helping transform the world, awakening people to their rights, and working for justice. Along with a group of friends who shared the conviction that philosophy was not an office-bound discipline but an instrument for social change, we produced a modest magazine using the means available at the time. In it, I published the short story I now share.

Not long ago, I found it among the things my father had kept over the years. Reading it again, I felt as though I were hearing from afar the echoes of a search that had once been intense and, at times, anguishing.

The Red Star

He set out in search of a red star, radiant and as immense as his longing to find it. He abandoned his comfortable life as a counter of stars — stars he never had time to admire. With all his soul, he desired to possess a great, brilliant red star, to gaze upon it day and night, to place it in a niche or hang it in his room and worship it as only a star can be worshipped.

His first problem was deciding where to search for it.

He began with the sea, that blue desert sown with blue dunes — dunes as fleeting as roses shedding their petals in the wind, like the romantic love of adolescence.

He scrutinized every wave the sea offered him during the long hours he spent sitting on the shore, his hands tirelessly turning over the damp, soft, deceptive, hypocritical sand. But he did not find it.

He plunged beneath the surface and descended to the depths of every sea in the world. He was embraced by the waters of all the oceans. He made a companion of every grain of salt and a friend of every drop of water. He walked for a long, long time, leaving upon the sandy seabed sad, mortal, futile footprints that the sea erased behind him because they would serve no one anymore.

But there were no stars there.

He wanted to go deeper still, to sink to the center of the earth, to the fiery core where red stars are born. But he was not permitted to do so because he had not been sufficiently purified.

Someone told him that he had not known how to search, that the sea was filled with stars of many colors, that they were like flowers in valleys untouched by human hands, like Neptune's smiles scattered by the sea nymphs.

But he was not looking for smiles or flowers. He wanted only a red star, one that burned hotter than the sun, one that would paint his afternoons, his days, and his nights red — a torrent of Red that would embrace him and claim him forever.

So, he began to travel the endless roads of the earth, roads that do not arrive but depart, roads that move inexorably toward nothingness, a circular path in which every moment is different.

Along his journey he heard the voices of children calling for his presence, the words of women inviting him or offering to accompany him, and the cries of men who envied his destiny or wished to help him.

But he kept going, his gaze fixed straight ahead and his ears attentive only to the footsteps of his Star. Yet by walking so long without listening, he became deaf.

And he did not hear his Star.

Then he wished to continue his search in the fishless seas, in the abyssal ocean of the universe, along infinite routes even more boundless than the earth's circular path, in a solitude lonelier than that of the sea whipped by the winds.

He thought to call out to his Star. But if she answered, he could not hear her; and if he heard her, he did not listen, because the language she spoke was not human, because her voice lay beyond all sound.

And he kept walking along ethereal paths that he himself was creating.

Many other stars crossed his way, small, white, everyday stars. But he could see nothing except his own, the one that perhaps did not even exist. The small stars of every night tried to show him the Way, but he could not see, and from walking so long without seeing, he became blind.

And he did not see his Star.

Some cold wandering nebulae, drifting along their eternal circular routes, touched him, enveloped him, embraced him, made him their own, and he never noticed. He awaited only the burning embrace of the red fire of his red Star.

And while waiting to find warmth, he could feel neither the cold nor even what was merely warm. By walking so long without feeling, he became numb.

And he did not feel his Star.

After centuries of wandering — after millennia — a being who could not see searched, alone, for a Great Red Star; a being who could not hear searched, alone, for a star whose footsteps sounded like rustling leaves; a being who could not feel searched, alone, for a warm Star.

And he did not find it.