Microbes challenge my very understanding of myself—what am “I,” in the end, if half of me isn’t me, and the half of me that isn’t me dictates some of “my” thinking and feeling? What does it mean to be a person whose consciousness, whose love and longing and fear, can be snuffed out by an overgrowth of bacteria that neither love nor long nor fear? How absurd that I can be murdered by that venomous little atom!
