The Sun Is Our Only Star

The Sun Is Our Only Star is a phrase in Barry Seaman’s lecture that draws a sharp boundary between figurative stars and the actual sun. Seaman moves from the starfish Marius Newell tried to keep alive to the many meanings of “stars,” then insists on the sun as the one star that is neither metaphor nor semblance. That distinction opens into a meditation on distance: the sun sustains life when seen from afar, but becomes an overwhelming danger when approached.

From starfish to metaphor

Seaman’s account begins with Marius Newell’s starfish and the pump he tried to steal for its tank. Seaman and Nelson Sanchez accompanied him to a rare-fish store in Colchester Sun, where a man confronted them with a shotgun. Marius explained that the pump was for his starfish; the group backed away, and Marius calmly directed Nelson to drive off only after the armed man had stopped pursuing them. The pump proved useless: despite Marius’s care, the starfish died a week or two later and was thrown away. This small, failed rescue gives Seaman’s later language of stars a material point of departure: the living creature’s name does not make it a heavenly body, and affection cannot guarantee survival.

Seaman then makes “star” a sequence of figurative uses. A movie star, stars in the sky, and the stars someone sees after taking a hard blow to the chin are all metaphors. He describes metaphor as a way of losing oneself in semblances, or treading water in a sea of seeming. The image of a life jacket complicates the promise of figurative language: some jackets float, while others sink like lead. Metaphor may keep a person afloat, but it may also fail precisely when reliance on appearances is most dangerous.

The literal star and the danger of distance

Against those shifting meanings, Seaman identifies the sun as the one star that is not semblance, metaphor, dream, or nightmare. It is outside, physically present and available to everyone. The declaration is not a rejection of figurative language so much as a limit placed upon it: the sun remains real whether or not it is made into an image.

To show what that reality entails, Seaman recalls a science-fiction film in which a rocket ship drifts off course toward the sun. The astronauts first develop headaches, then sweat profusely; even after removing their spacesuits, they cannot stop sweating and soon become dehydrated. The sun’s gravity keeps pulling the ship inward while its hull begins to melt. Seaman remembers the viewer’s bodily sense of oppressive heat, but admits that he has forgotten the ending. He only seems to recall a last-minute rescue, a corrected course toward Earth, and the sun left behind as a frenzied star in space. The remembered escape supplies the passage with a reversal: survival depends not on conquering the sun but on turning away before its nearness becomes fatal.

Usefulness, smiles, and appearances

Seaman follows the image of danger with a qualification: the sun is useful and beautiful from far away, while close up it is hell. He compares this change of value with the changing meaning of a smile. In the 1950s, he says, a smile could open doors; salespeople and people in many occupations were expected to wear one. Cops and prison guards were the exception, and Seaman says that has not changed.

In the present he describes, a smile no longer reliably signals friendliness. People distrust it because they suspect the smiling person wants something from them. Yet television displays increasingly perfect teeth and bodies, and Seaman distinguishes this public display from an attempt to earn trust: its aim, as he describes it, is to be seen and admired. The smile thus returns the lecture to semblance. Like the figurative star, it can suggest a meaning that does not hold; like the sun, it demands attention, but its visible brilliance is not proof of warmth or goodness.

The expression’s force

The phrase’s central contrast is between the sun’s physical reality and the unstable meanings attached to stars, smiles, and images. Seaman does not treat reality as automatically safe: the sun is useful at a distance and deadly up close. Nor does he dismiss appearances as wholly useless; his life-jacket image allows that metaphors can sustain people, even as some sink. The lecture’s argument rests on this tension. What appears vivid may deceive, what is real may overwhelm, and judgment depends in part on recognizing the distance between an image and the thing it names.