Why Fish Don't Exist
Written by Lulu Miller.
⏱️ The book in three sentences
In life, all that can be expected is the endless, swirling embrace of Chaos.
Chaos will lay claim to everything in due time - achievements, family, ourselves.
Despite it all, there is meaning in this life because we matter to each other.
🪞 Reflections
On the surface Why Fish Don't Exist is about a man named David Starr Jordan. It's about his life and his journey. He was born in Gainesville, New York and raised on a farm, gifted open access to all the curiosities nature has to offer. His intensely Puritan parents, however, didn't see nature as something to be studied. They reasoned, instead, time spent in the rolling fields that surrounded the farm was better spent contributing to the farm's production. David disagreed, and despite his parent's best intentions, they struggled to keep David from spending his days in the wilderness, obsessively picking, sorting, and learning the Latin names for every flower he could find. At night he would sneak into the yard to compare the brightly lit sky to his celestial atlas, memorizing and categorizing each star's name.
As he matured, his obsession with bringing order to nature's biological mayhem did not fade. His taxonomic passions were only redirected. Influenced by a chance opportunity and subsequent mentorship with a famous taxonomist of the time, Jordan's eyes left the comfort of land and focused, instead, on the mysteries of earth's blue waters. Quickly, David made a name for himself as a revolutionary in discovering new fish, not only in the world of taxonomy but the world of science altogether. He found himself a wife, a family, he won awards, and in 1891 he was approached by the very wealthy Leland and Jane Stanford with an offer to become the first president of their newly minted Stanford University.
With new depth to his pockets, David was able to discover, accumulate, name and categorize even more fish. He amassed an enormous collection that grew faster than he could classify them. Until one day lightning struck his campus building, unleashing the wrath of Chaos on a man who dared to put a leash on nature. His collection, his papers - all destroyed in less than a day. Yet, David did not find himself discouraged. Immediately, and with new, creative techniques, he started again. Until once more, on April 18th, 1906, the San Francisco earthquake had its way with David's towering collection of specimens. Thousands of fish, from unwritten locations, unknown depths, and inimitable ocean crevasses, jarred in ethanol and glass, came crashing down in a matter of seconds. David had yet again lost his life's work. But, like the time before, David refused to let Chaos win. Again, he picked himself up and started over. He would eventually be credited with the discovery of over one-fifth of the world's known fish.
It would be a powerful lesson on the necessity of persistence if the book was really about David Starr Jordan, but it's it not. Really, Why Fish Don't Exist is about the author of the book, Lulu Miller. It's a personal, heartbreaking, hope-filling, beautifully written story about her struggle to find purpose in her life. It's about her lifelong campaign to keep going through bouts of depression, suicide, and above all, a creeping shadow of emptiness that she feels following in each of her footsteps. Logical, and raised in a scientific household, she spent much of her life obsessed with David and his ability to stand tall despite the whirling Chaos that weaves its way through life. Surely, she hoped, in all his papers, journals, and sketches, there's a deeper message behind his indestructible will.
Miller recounts her story. Learning everything she can about David, searching endlessly for an answer. Until, as she reaches her breaking point, she finds something truly unpredictable. A dark side to her hero, an unsolved mystery, and a little-known secret. A key to the side of America we often like to forget about but is imperative to remember.
Why Fish Don't Exist is part science non-fiction, part memoir, part murder-mystery, part journal, part philosophy. The author takes the reader on an incredible journey, with crushing lows and soaring highs, concluding, finally, with a powerful message. She plants her flag deep in the topsoil of science-based Nihilism - conquering the idea. A place where the universe's infinity justifies its own insignificance. Lulu always felt that perspective was wrong, but it took her half her life to determine why. We matter because we matter to each other. Miller doesn't just say so, she shows us why.
Oh, and apparently, fish don't exist either.
💥 Personal impact
I found Why Fish Don't Exist completely and unabashedly addicting. I downloaded it to my Kindle app on a Tuesday evening, and by Thursday it wore the little "read" ribbon in the corner of my screen. I read it on the Expo line. I read it while I ate. And I read it at the gym. Any excuse to flip through a few more pages of Lulu's wonderful writing was good enough for me.
Yet, not only did the writing style carry me effortlessly through the book's pages in a matter of days, it made a serious impact as well. I learned, of course, some of the science of taxonomy and its history. But I also learned a lot about Darwin and his ideas beyond just evolution. I learned about his theory on nature's solution to Chaos - variation. As well as some of his personal struggles, particularly his internal battle between his theory of evolution and his deep-rooted faith.
Beyond the realm of scientific theory, the book also contains some powerful journalism on the narrative of eugenics in America. A topic that unfortunately cannot yet be resigned to the history shelf, as Miller bluntly drives home. It's difficult to discuss here without taking away from the book's account, but there are plenty of examples to point at to show that eugenics has not yet been laid to bed.
I think one of the easiest and most tempting moral traps to fall into, is ignoring the existence of evil because you don't see it in your day-to-day life. It's difficult, sometimes, to admit that life beyond your bubble might not be so rosy. It's difficult because it raises the question of what you're doing about it. And if you're not doing anything, should you be?
I'd like to leave a paragraph from the book here. It could go in the "Top three quotes" section, but I think it deserves to be highlighted. For context, this is Lulu's description of her conversation with a woman who was legally sterilized against her will in a Detention Centre. The book goes on to describe much worse, much more despicable and disgusting behaviour, sanctioned by the U.S. government. But, I'll leave that for those of you who read the book.
"She was sterilized against her will at the Lynchburg facility when she was nineteen years old. The year was 1967. But she had first landed inside its brick walls twelve years earlier when she was just seven years old. She and her brothers had been spotted by neighbours playing naked and unattended in a pen behind their home. State workers had come to take them away. It didn’t matter that the kids didn’t want to go. Anna loved her mom, her long hair and overalls, how she’d let Anna climb into bed with her when the nights were cold. But the combination of the neighbours’ worries, her parents’ poverty, and Anna’s low score on an intelligence test were enough to deem this seven-year-old “unfit.” A threat to humankind.
They did not sterilize her right away. First, she was made to cut her long hair, then she was issued an inmate number, and finally she was made to wait. Year after year, to wait, while an alternate childhood roamed free just outside those gates, through the blue-ridged silhouettes in the distance. She said that they were treated like animals in the Colony, corralled into large sleeping quarters, forced to work with no pay, made to line up outside as they waited for meals, even if it was raining, even if it was sleeting. If they disobeyed, they were put in “the blind room.” There were no lights in the blind room, no windows. They were left in the dark, sometimes for days, without food or water or a toilet."
🗣 Top three quotes
"Perhaps the greatest gift ever bestowed on us by evolution is the ability to believe we are more powerful than we are."
"The problem with spending one’s time pondering the futility of it all is that you divert that precious electricity gifted to you by evolution—those sacred ions that could make you feel so many wonderful sensations and think so many wonderful ideas—and you flush it all down the drain of existential inquiry, causing you to literally 'die while the body is still alive.'"
"And so it must be with humans, with us. 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."