We Are the Music, We Are the Spark: Pioneering Biologist Ernest Everett Just on What Makes Life Alive

“Life is exquisitely a time-thing, like music.”

This is the great bewilderment: that out of a cold austere cosmos arose the roiling wonder of life, from the tiniest archaeans that have “confronted sulfuric boiling black sea bottoms and stayed” to the cathedral of consciousness ringing with music and mathematics and poems about archaeans; that we are here trembling with all this love and all this suffering, all these vicissitudes of aliveness, and all the while each one of the atoms in our bodie...