"Why Fish Don't Exist"

Only knew Lulu Miller from her podcasts before this. This is a shapeshifter of a book, going from biography to autobiography to murder mystery to living history to chicken soup for the soul (in a good way). Throughout, the sentences are polished and pleasurable to listen to.

• For years he worked, for decades, so tirelessly that he and his crew would eventually discover a full fifth of fish known to man in his day.
• He seemed to me a lesson in hubris. An Icarus of the fish collection. But as I grew older, as Chaos had her way with me, as I made a wreck of my own life and began to try to piece it back together, I started to wonder about this taxonomist. Maybe he had figured something out—about persistence, or purpose, or how to go on—that I needed to know. Maybe it was okay to have some outsized faith in yourself. Maybe plunging along in complete denial of your doomed chances was not the mark of a fool but—it felt sinful to think it—a victor?
• By the mid-nineteenth century, the obsessive ordering of the natural world was beginning to fall out of fashion. The Age of Discovery had started over four hundred years before,
• (No matter that Linnaeus’s chart was riddled with mistakes: misfiling bats as primates and sea urchins as worms, to name a couple.)
• The drawings are not artful; they are labored, covered in pencil smudges, ink stains, eraser marks, and little tears from overly vigorous coloring in. But in the crudeness you can see it—his obsession, his desperation, the near-muscular effort he was exerting to pin down the forms of the things unknown to him. Beneath each drawing there is, finally, a scientific name... ink runs suddenly smoother, the letters looping with a bit of command. Campanula rotundifolia. Kalmia glauca. Astragalus canadensis. David describes the sensation of speaking the names out loud, those Latin declarations of victory, mastery. “Their appellations,” he writes, “are as honey on my lips.”
• psychologist Werner Muensterberger, who counseled compulsive collectors for decades, notes that the habit often kicks into high gear after some sort of “deprivation or loss or vulnerability,” with each new acquisition flooding the collector with an intoxicating burst of “fantasized omnipotence.”
• The only danger, Muensterberger warns, is that—as with any compulsion—there seems to be a line where the habit can switch from “exhilarating” to “ruinous.”
• As late as the 1850s, for example, many respectable scientists still believed in the idea of “spontaneous generation”—the belief that fleas and maggots could spring forth from particles of dust; a few decades before that, scientists believed in a magical substance called “phlogiston” that determined whether or not a material would burn;
• Its location was ideal: an hour from the mainland, easy enough to access, yet far enough to feel free. So was its size: big enough to roam, but small enough to never get lost. And as for the subjects available for study on Penikese? Well, where to begin. Coating its treeless shores was a lush carpet of seagrass, which whipped in the wind and rustled with treasures—crabs,
• This idea of a moral code hidden in nature—a hierarchy, a ladder or “gradation” of perfection—has been with us for a long time. Aristotle envisioned a holy ladder—later Latinized to Scala Naturae—in which all living organisms could be arranged in a continuum of lowly to divine, with humans at the top,
• “We cannot understand the possible degradation and moral wretchedness of Man, without knowing that his physical nature is rooted in… the Fish,” he writes. To Agassiz, the shockingly similar skeletal plan of fish (their skulls, their vertebrae, their rib-like protrusions) represented a warning to “Man.”

• he swims where it is prohibited, and one day came home declaring he was done with sleeves—after they had toppled his test tubes one too many times. In a huff, he had stormed toward his closet with a pair of scissors and then spent the next few years going to work dressed in a way that can best be described as Academic Pirate.
• You don’t matter seems to fuel his every step, his every bite. So live as you please. He spent years riding a motorbike, drinks copious amounts of beer, and enters the water, whenever possible, with the belliest of flops. He seems to permit himself just one lie to constrain his otherwise voracious hedonism, to form a kind of moral code. While other people don’t matter, either, treat them like they do.
• What could be a grim reality has instead pumped his life full of vigor. Has made him live big and good. I have strived my whole life to follow in his nihilistic, clown-shoed footsteps. To stare our pointlessness in the face, and waddle along toward happiness because of it.
• Refuge. It smelled like cinnamon and its walls were made of bad puns and cheap rhymes, piling higher and higher against the chill of the world.
• she was prickled in goose bumps, hundreds of goose bumps, that I wanted to press flat with my tongue. She smiled as I placed my hand on her waist, as I touched my lips to her neck. The stars wrapped around us. Her steam became mine.

• I wondered what it was that allowed him to keep plunging his sewing needle at Chaos, in spite of all the clear warnings that he would never prevail. I wondered if he had stumbled across some trick, some prescription for hope in an uncaring world.
• He writes, “I went over to the evolutionists with the grace of a cat the boy ‘leads’ by its tail across the carpet!”
• I picture a meek and murky man, dusty and pale, sliding by unnoticed, slowly filling up with that light, that air, that radiant matter, whatever it is, of Purpose.
• With each new fish, each new catch, each new name placed on a formerly unknown piece of the universe, came that impossibly intoxicating feeling. That sweet honey on the tongue. That hit of fantasized omnipotence. That lovely sensation of order. What a salve, a name.
• There’s an idea in philosophy that certain things don’t exist until they get a name. Abstract things like justice, nostalgia, infinity, love, or sin. The thinking goes that these concepts do not sit out there on some ethereal plane waiting to be discovered by humans but instead snap into being when someone invents a name for them. The moment the name is uttered, the concept becomes “real,” in the sense that it can affect reality.
• when Chaos struck out, he doubled down, hitting back harder. He began inventing more aggressive techniques for capturing fish. Blowing them out of the water with dynamite, hammering them out of coral, and perhaps most ingenious, for the “myriads of little fishes” that hid inside the tiny cracks in tide pools: poison. David began sprinkling a few pinches of poison into tide pools and watching as, presto, a cornucopia of dead sculpins and sea stars and gobies came bobbing to the surface.
• He was beginning to feel a leavening in his chest, a sweetness, that feeling of orderliness, of understanding, of agency, regained. And there sat the world, quietly, patiently, the size of the world, ready to prove him wrong.
• To plant his flag on the unknown, he would punch the holy name into a tin tag, drop the tag into the jar alongside the specimen, and seal the lid. Another corner of the universe captured.
• and the crumbling of the great unfinished library and almost-completed gymnasium, which (having no adequate support of steel) went down like a house of cards.” Realizing that he was not just a man, still alive on Earth, but also the ruler of this crumbled kingdom, David hurried as quickly as he could to the campus.
• But far worse than any of the carnal damage was the existential. For many of those specimens left intact, hundreds of them, nearly a thousand, their holy name tags had scattered all over the laboratory floor. In those forty-seven seconds, Genesis had been reversed: his meticulously named fish had become an amorphous unknown again.
• So David turned to his men, his disciples on the mission of order, and, unable to think of anything else, commanded they arm themselves with hoses. “The wreckage lay on the floor, kept wet with water from hoses manned day and night by Professors Snyder and Starks,” comes one of the most beautiful images I have ever encountered, from one of the least likely of sources: A Catalogue of the Type Specimens of Recent Fishes in the Natural History Museum of Stanford University, by J. Böhlke, The Stanford Ichthyological Bulletin, Volume 5... Day and night. He allowed the students to sleep outside on the lawn, as many of them were now terrified of ceilings, of shelter. Day and night. Friends and colleagues were lowered into the earth. Dust to Dust. The dust temporarily settling, as though in a temporary truce, then rising, swirling and rushing David’s laboratory windows, bearing mites and putrescine and bacteria, threatening to begin its irreversible process of decay. The men watered and watered and watered. Maybe such unruly persistence is beautiful.
• Maybe it is not mad, after all. Maybe it is the quiet work of believing in Good. Of believing in a warmth, which you know does not exist in the stars, to exist in the hearts of fellow humans. Maybe it is something like trust.
• He would have tied a new name tag directly to the flesh itself and, boom, the creature would have popped back into existence. Evermannia panamensis! That one tiny tendril of Chaos recaptured, thanks to David’s unflappable persistence, and brought back into order.

• felt good to have faith in something, faith that there are entities that transcended words, actions. Even if that faith was moth-eaten with doubt.
• Each one started out warm and brimming with hope, a hope that I could find the words—for a story, a love letter, a mantra—that would lead me out of the mess... But by the end of each day, the coffee cup would be heavy with cold, grainy soot. So heavy I couldn’t lift it. The mugs began accumulating on my windowsills. By the time I finished my thesis, my apartment, a yellow-walled attic, had taken on the sunken smell of soil.
• According to legend, before his execution Bruno quipped, “Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy.”
• Whichever way we turn we may describe the course of life in metaphors of discouragement.”
• he quotes Thoreau—“There is no hope for you unless this bit of sod under your feet is the sweetest to you in this world—in any world”—
• Kafka calls it the Indestructible—the thing at the bottom of each individual that keeps going whether they feel like going or not. The Indestructible is a place that has nothing to do with optimism—instead, it’s something far deeper and far less self-conscious than optimism
• The Indestructible seemed like an affliction for Fools. Romantics. Sad-King-Loving Posers so fueled by an internal passion it could fog up their view of the world.
• Many therapists started practicing techniques like “story editing” or “reframing” to gently coax a patient into tinting her perception of herself into a more rosy one. The self-deception had to be moderate, that was key. Multiple studies found that extreme denial and delusion were maladaptive. But gentle lies, white lies, little rosy rosebuds of lies? Those could be hugely beneficial.
• An odd alchemy of delusion right before your eyes. Little lies transmuting into bronze, silver, gold. Forget millennia of warnings to stay humble; maybe this is just how it works in a godless system. Maybe David Starr Jordan is proof that a steady dose of hubris is the best way of overcoming doomed odds.
• “Every age gets the lunatics it deserves,” British historian Roy Porter once wrote.

• To that, David and Dr. Waterhouse came up with a most logical explanation: “hysteria.” Of course. Jane was faking being poisoned! Faking the convulsions! Faking the… death? How marvelous it is to watch the acrobat as he flips through the air, pulling turns and accomplishing the seemingly impossible, to gaslight even someone’s experience of death.
• His favorite trick for catching the peskiest of fish, the ones that evade capture by darting into the cracks of tide pools? Poison. The particular variety he recommends? A dangerous and powerful substance, one he once described as “the bitterest thing in the world.” Strychnine.

• Unfit! Such a catchy word, so evocative, so trim. It could take his opinions about which groups of people deserved to live and wrap them in the cloak of science. Unfit! Not one man’s judgment, just a reality of
• But eugenics seemed as roaring a part of American culture as flappers and the Model T. This was not a fringe movement; it crossed party lines; the first five presidents of the twentieth century hailed its promise; eugenics courses were taught at prestigious universities all across the country, from Harvard to Stanford to Yale to UC Berkeley to Princeton and back again. There were eugenics magazines. Eugenics cosmetics.
• evidence to the Supreme Court, asserting that “moral delinquency” was encoded in the blood and could be eliminated through mandatory sterilization. This notion that had once been a hazy idea in David’s mind had, through his proselytizing, become a thing of this Earth. An entity so real it was poised on the precipice of entering federal law.
• Asked during her first hearing if she had anything to say for herself, she had replied, “No, sir, I have not.… It is up to my people.” Her people voted 8 to 1 to make compulsory sterilizations legal “in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence.”
• Carrie’s case paved the way for over 60,000 sterilizations, performed legally and against people’s will, all over America in the name of “public welfare.”
• And, mind bogglingly, approximately a third of all Puerto Rican women were sterilized by the US government between 1933 and 1968.

• We don’t matter. This is the cold truth of the universe. We are specks, flickering in and out of existence, with no significance to the cosmos. To ignore this truth is, oddly enough, to behave exactly like David Starr Jordan, whose ridiculous belief in his own superiority allowed him to perpetrate such unthinkable violence. No, to be clear-eyed and Good was to concede with every breath, with every step, our insignificance. To say otherwise was to sin, to lie, to march oneself off toward delusion, madness, or worse.
• From the perspective of the stars or infinity or some eugenic dream of perfection, sure, one human life might not seem to matter. It might be a speck on a speck on a speck, soon gone. But that was just one of infinite perspectives.
• This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see: that there is never just one way of ranking nature’s organisms. To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the “whole machinery of life.” The work of good science is to try to peer beyond the “convenient” lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition, where something wilder lives.
• What David Starr Jordan set in motion by practicing the art of taxonomy, by following Darwin’s advice to sort creatures by evolutionary closeness, led to a fateful discovery. In the 1980s taxonomists realized that fish, as a legitimate category of creature, do not exist. Birds exist. Mammals exist. Amphibians exist. But fish, in particular, do not exist.
• Carol Kaesuk Yoon’s marvelous book Naming Nature.
• as much as a bat might look like a winged rodent, it’s actually more closely related to camels. Or that whales are actually ungulates (the family to which deer belong)!
• The category “fish” hides all of this. Hides nuance. Discounts intelligence. It gerrymanders close cousins away from us, creating a false sense of separation to preserve our spot at the top of an imaginary ladder.
• “Growing up,” she told me, “is learning to stop believing people’s words about you.”
• It was only the living world that was in shambles. What his case and others (just google “category-specific semantic deficits” to find them) suggest is that there may be a kind of order-creating mechanism inside of us—that we come into the world predisposed to acquire a very specific set of beliefs about how to sort nature.
• “There is another world, but it is in this one,” says a quote attributed to W. B. Yeats that I kept tacked to my wall for years.
• This was not the life I had envisioned, chasing after a pint-size woman, seven years my junior, who beats me on bikes and rolls her eyes at me a lot. But it is the life I want. I broke through the category. Peered beyond those nature-printed curtains. Saw the world for what it is, a place of infinite possibility. All categories, imaginary. It was the best feeling in the world.
• On Neptune, it rains diamonds; it really does.
• When I give up the fish, I get a skeleton key. A fish-shaped skeleton key that pops the grid of rules off this world and lets you step through to a wilder place. The other world within this one. The gridless place out the window where fish don’t exist and diamonds rain from the sky and each and every dandelion is reverberating with possibility. To turn the key all you have to do… is stay wary of words. If fish don’t exist, what else do we have wrong?
• That it is our life’s work to mistrust our measures. Especially those about moral and mental standing. To remember that behind every ruler there is a Ruler. To remember that a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle.