The Read: Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist

Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving

Why did I get this book?

Well, I knew it was coming out and I’d planned to get it as soon as possible, because the author is a former student of mine, but the author got ahead of me and sent it to me. So I was fated to have it regardless.

Is it what I thought it was?

I had no idea what it was going to be other than really interesting, and I knew that because I also have listened to the author’s work with NPR’s Invisibilia.

It was vastly more than really interesting. We say it too casually too often at this end of mountains of cultural creation, but this book is a true original. It is nothing other than itself, and what it is is wondrous. History, biography, memoir, rumination on science, philosophical exploration, a mystery, a confession, a prayer. Itself.

What continuing uses might I have for it?

It’s the kind of book that makes me want to think of a class that would be appropriate for it. I frequently teach classes that are really just a way for me to distribute treasures to students. Oh, I hide some spinach inside the sweets most of the time, and of course at least sometimes what I gleefully assign falls flat because you pretty much have to have my own peculiar history of reading to see what is delightful about it.

I feel pretty certain my students would love this book. The problem is just figuring out where to fit it in. I’m using it already this summer in a class I’m teaching on writing for college, just a little smidgen of it. I could see it in the course on higher education that I’ve taught for the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore.

Reducing the book to its usefulness seems a mean and lowly way to appreciate it, though. I think the biggest use I would have for it is to say to any who want to hear it: read it!

Quotes

This is a hard book to quote, actually—the prose is so beautiful and varied and so tightly interlocked. It’s not really meant to be brandished as argument or evidence—it is in that sense very much like reading the best fiction. In some sense, I also want to avoid spoilers: the book has a delightful sense of mischief, and ultimately fury in how it unravels and reveals the life of its central focal point. (It’s also a murder mystery, too.) So I’ll just quote a few passages to give the feel of it.

“Picture the person you love the most. Picture them sitting on the couch, eating cereal, ranting about something totally charming, like how it bothers them when people sign their emails with a single initial instead of taking those four extra keystrokes to just finish the job—Chaos will get them. Chaos will crack them from the outside—with a falling branch, a speeding car, a bullet—or unravel them from the inside with the mutiny of their very own cells. Chaos will rot your plants and kill your dog and rust your bike. It will decay your most precious memories, topple your favorite cities, wreck any sanctuary you can ever build.”

“The quiet, skinned-knee, dirty-elbowed crawling around in nature that David so loved was looked down upon as child’s play. And so it could have gone for David. Him, desperately driven to collect flowers. The world, unconvinced of his calling’s worthiness. Time passing, as he slowly dug himself deeper and deeper into a leafy loneliness. Had he not stepped foot on Penikese Island.”

“I don’t think I had the language as a seven-year old to put into words the cold feeling that was starting to swirl up my lungs. ‘So what’s the point of any of this? Why go to school? Why glue macaroni to paper?’ But I spent my childhood quietly inspecting my father’s behaviors to find out. He’s a lively man. A biochemist with shaky hands who studies ions, the particles that carry the electricity that powers all life—heartbeat, lightning, even thought itself. He doesn’t use seat belts or return addresses; he swims where it is prohibited, and one day he 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 towards 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.”

“One important rule about holotypes. If one is ever lost, you cannot simply swap a new specimen into the holy jar. No, that loss is honored, mourned, marked. The species line is forever tarnished, left without its maker. A new specimen will be chosen to serve as the physical representative of the species, but it is demoted to the lowly rank of ‘neotype’. Neotype: a specimen later selected to serve as the representative specimen for a species when the original holotype has been lost or destroyed. Even scientists like ritual.”

“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. He displayed his discoveries like trophies, names facing outward as though to taunt the world, stacking them higher and higher, until the amount of Chaos he had brought into order towered nearly two stories high.”

“The quake had thrown the statue of Louis Agassiz headfirst into the concrete. A ludicrous sight. A punch line. His feet pointing to the sky, his little marble hand still clutching its scientific book—this text he believed would chart the course to order, having led him finally to its inevitable end, his head buried in the (for what is concrete, but water mixed with…) sand. If I were the director of this particular play, I’d tell the set designer to dial it back a notch. But there you go, this is what the universe gave us. To me, there is no clearer message: Chaos reigns.”

“I was horrified. There it was. My dad’s very same trick. The words that hang in a frame over his desk, to this very day. Darwin’s call to arms. As different as David had seemed from my dad—as defiant, and hopeful, and full of faith—he had nothing new to offer me after all. Just a reminder of what I’d always been told. There is grandeur, and if you can’t see it, shame on you.”

“Whatever the case, it works for him. He loses a wife, and wins another quickly. He loses a fish collection and rebuilds a bigger one. He is promoted to higher and higher offices. The awards and medals start clattering in, for teaching, for ichthyology, for contributions to higher ed. An odd alchemy of delusion right before your eyes. Little lies transmuting into bronzer, silver, gold. Forget millennia of warnings to stay humble; maybe this 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.”

“Baumeister and his colleague Brad J. Bushman discovered what depressed people had known all along. If you tell a person with low self-esteem ‘You suck’, they say ‘You’re right,’ and roll back under the covers. It’s the esteem-bloated person, who has enough belief in himself to classify such an insult as untrue, who bothers striking back.”

“It was chilling. His brutality. His remorselessness. The sheer depth of his descent, the breadth of his rampage. I felt sick. I had been fashioning myself after a villain, after all. A man so sure of himself and his ideas that he was capable of ignoring reason, of ignoring morality, of ignoring the clamor of thousands of people begging him to see the error of his ways—I am a humanbeen as well as you.”

“To some people, a dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it’s a medicine—a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it’s a pigment; to a hippie, a crown; a child, a wish. To a butterfly, it’s sustenance; to a bee, a mating bed; to an ant, one point in a vast olfactory atlas.”

Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints

So I don’t seem to be over-mystifying it, the book is an extended meditation on the life of Stanford’s first president, David Starr Jordan, who was also known as a taxonomist focused on fish (having been trained by Louis Agassiz) and then after his time at Stanford as a major advocate of eugenics. Weaving in between that is Lulu Miller’s own life and her reflections on episodes of depression from childhood into her adulthood.

This is a personal newsletter: if you are reading it even part of the week, as I deluge you with my thoughts, many of them repetitions and reiterations of things I have said over the years to anyone damn fool enough to read along, you will at least have some sense of me. And yet, there are vast private wildernesses beyond the cultivated gardens that I here lay out. I hardly know how to speak to some of the things that this book stirred in me.

I have never been more moved by anything in my career than than the thought that the author of this book learned something, anything, from me. And I am both more shamed and more motivated than ever to try and finish a long-stalled project that has none of the beauty and craft of this book but has something of its spirit—that we find the most meaning in history and in the world around us in the details of individual human life—that the mess we make of ourselves and is made in us is not to be straightened or neatened by order and laws and reductions.

Lulu (I’ll take the privilege here of using a first name) also for me thinks about depression in a way that I can connect to and learn from. I have never found writing that means to be about depression and sadness of any use whatsoever to me in my own midnight thoughts; a clinical voice or a story of healing through will or technique repels me. It is without context, without meaning: it is always life edited towards a pill, a therapy, a diagnosis, an explanation, a reduction. This is one of the very few times where I have read a writer putting a self and a feeling and a struggle into a gloriously sprawling tangle of relations that do not reduce but instead connect and expand and collect meanings as dew on the spider’s web that she invokes late in the book.

So to go back to “uses”, I think for me this is the best thing I’ve read that gives me a way to talk about mental health, including the way mental health does or does not become visible or knowable in a college. I think in new ways now about the kinds of sadness and struggle, worry and weakness, that pass by each other unnoted between students, within students, between students and faculty, between colleagues, in the work and the life within a university’s walls and grounds. And then in the worlds of work beyond and after, in the structures we make or inherit. And why some of the way that universities—and a wider world—make it all worse even while promising healing and support. How so much of our world is not just misnamed “Jordan” (or is named for other men like him) but how that leaves the rest of us unnamed—even though we are the sea within which all human life and vitality must swim. I’ve been on about the better futures we might begin to live towards since I started this new blog, but this book to me is a better planting of those hopeful seeds than I could ever manage.