I recently gave the book Fish Don’t Exist a quick read in WeChat Reads because Meng Yan recommended it on the No One Knows podcast.
The book wasn’t long and was read fairly quickly. The author, Lulu Miller, has her own life in shambles because she cheated on her boyfriend and broke up with him, which is why she started researching David Starr Jordan.
From the first half of the book I learned that David was a taxonomist and the first president of Stanford University. His life was a quest to establish order; as a child he studied the classification of plants, and as an adult he began to study the classification of fish and name them. After experiencing an earthquake, he recovers tenaciously and restores order by sewing fish and nameplates together with a needle.
And the second half of the book shifts to the other side of David, who pushed eugenics and was involved in pushing for eugenic sterilization to be written into law in the U.S. The David that the author admires became a different person altogether, and this was before Hitler’s Nazi theories and gave them to the Nazis. And many people were sterilized or discriminated against because of the eugenic theories David advocated, two of whom the author interviews. David himself, on the other hand, has had a successful life. Toward the end of the book, the author again discovers that the classification of fish has been ruled non-existent by the latest branched-order taxonomy, and if that’s the case, does David’s work cease to exist. Interspersed with descriptions of David, the book also contains descriptions of the author’s own life and her pursuit of David’s traces.
The world is disorganized and chaotic, each of us is small, and David uses his power to build what he believes to be order, and that is what drives him to do many things. As individuals we need to accept our smallness and the chaos of everyday life.
The following is an excerpt from the content:
◆ Scientific values are different from aesthetic interests, and one of the qualities of the former is the focus on the insignificant in hidden corners.
◆ Life has no meaning, no significance
◆ Chaos is our only ruler.
◆ That’s what attracted me to David Starr Jordan. I wanted to know what drove him to keep lifting his sewing needle to mend the chaos of the world, ignoring all the warnings that he would not succeed. Did he stumble upon some trick, a hopeful antidote to the world’s indifference? He was a scientist, so maybe there was something behind his perseverance that would fit in with Dad’s worldview, and I clung to the faintest glimmer of possibility. Maybe he had discovered the key: how to have hope in a hopeless world, how to keep going in dark days, how to persevere in faith when there was no God to support him.
◆ It’s the honey on the tongue, the illusion of omnipotence, the pleasure of order.
◆ The problem with the scientific worldview is that when you use it to explore the meaning of life, it will tell you only one thing: futility.
◆ “By this view, how magnificent and grand is life.”
◆ The indestructible has nothing to do with optimism; on the contrary, it is deeper than optimism and lies deeper in consciousness. The indestructible is something that we whitewash with symbols, hopes and ambitions, and does not require us to see it for what it really is.
◆ Those who have experienced trauma are able to achieve inner peace more quickly after learning to look at what happened to them in a different way.
◆ We walk in the world and realize in our hearts that the world doesn’t care if we live or die, and that no matter how hard we try, we won’t always be able to succeed.
◆ We are constantly in competition with billions of people, defenseless against natural disasters, and everything we love ends up in destruction
◆ One of the most important traits is the ability to keep going after a setback, to keep pushing forward even when there is no evidence that your goals are likely to be achieved
◆ In the whirlwind of chaos, the brutal, unforgiving truth is clear: you are irrelevant.
◆ From a stellar, eternal, or eugenic perspective of perfection, one’s life may seem inconsequential; we are but a particle on a particle on a particle, fleetingly passing away. But that’s just one of the endless perspectives. In an apartment in Lynchburg, Virginia, a seemingly insignificant person will become significant. She is a stand-in mother, a source of laughter, and she sustains another through her darkest hours.
Fish do not exist, “fish” do not exist. The category that was so important to David, the species he sought solace in, the species he spent his life trying to see, did not exist.
◆ We know so little about the world around us that we lack understanding of even the simplest things around our feet. We have made mistakes and we will continue to make them. The road to true development is not paved with certainty, but with doubt, and therefore requires a state of “openness to correction”.
About my reading, I think I can’t write well, the subject matter of this book is very attractive, the content of both science, but also about David’s biography, but also about the meaning of life and philosophical thinking, interested in or to read the book yourself.
Finally, I’m attaching the address for this episode of Meng Yan’s podcast:https://www.xiaoyuzhoufm.com/episode/6720836fbad346ebe6399017