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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Lulu Miller
Read between
June 27 - July 1, 2025
It’s lost to time what the campers talked about as they chugged into the waves. Maybe they asked one another to which kingdom they pledged their allegiance: animal, vegetable, or mineral. If asked, perhaps David replied with one of his favorite jokes, that due to the dense ivy that overtook the walls of his boyhood home, he became a “botanist in self-defense.”
Im sort of bought in to the geekiness of this book
“The swallows flew in and out of the building in the soft [summer] air, for they did not know that it was no longer a barn but a temple,” writes David Starr Jordan, finally able to use his words again.
Glaaaze
Less than two years after Susan’s death, he had caught himself a new wife. A college sophomore named Jessie Knight, who was, in many ways, an upgrade for David.
eww this guy was a college president
Once an eighteen-year-old Jessie landed in Bloomington, she sent David’s two eldest children away to boarding school—an act that Edith, ten years old at the time, said forever steeled her against her stepmother. “I knew then that I would never call her mother,”
Yah also because she's 8 years older than you
I liked Chicago. The cold of it. The anonymity of it. I could be anyone. I put on Converse sneakers and walked along the gritty sidewalks, which seemed to contain just a dash of carbonation. I bounced. I felt like I could become the person I wanted to be.
Sometimes i think this writing is kind of corny
Multiple studies found that extreme denial and delusion were maladaptive. But gentle lies, white lies, little rosy rosebuds of lies? Those could be hugely beneficial. The idea was that if you could take a person who was struggling, and help guide her story of herself into a slightly more positive one—one in which she was a bit stronger than she was, kinder than she was, where her breakup was not as much her fault as maybe it was—then you could see profound effects in her life.
Im sort of confused. This breakup was absolutely her fault. No therapist would ever suggest to use framing to make it seem like it was not as much her fault as it was. Maybe they would use it to suggest that the consequences of it arent terrible or that it doesnt mean that the author is necessarily a terrible person. Im having a real hard time caring about the author's struggles with this. I get how it broke her but i really dont feel sorry for her. Also, while i know that outwardly she SAYS that she knows she doesnt deserve sympathy, it feels like this whole section is based around the idea that you feel a little bad for her. Which I dont
“Does it matter that you’re lying to yourself?” I asked Wilson. “What’s the harm?” he replied. “If it conquers a fear and doesn’t lead to maladaptive behaviors in the future, I see no problem with it.” “A little lie can go a long way?” “Sure.”
Like entering a self destructive depressive episode because you did a horrible thing WHILE also lowk harrassing the guy and then instead of acknowledging it and working through it you drink a ton and the realize you can lie to yourself feels icky to me. This is leading to maladative behavior! I also know how good of a point it is that there's a lot of guilt in not being able to see grandeur in this view, but this author seems so wrapped up in a self-pitiful and destructive hole of feeling sorry for herself. I hate to sound like the borderline abusive stoic dad here but we are all on a rock! Escape the suffocating prison of constantly self-justifying and trying to shape the world to YOUR view and instead acknoledge that things happen as part of the entire world and move through that.
As I read through this seemingly bottomless Mary Poppins bag of goodies that positive illusions could apparently bring—deeper sense of well-being, more success at work and in relationships, even better physical health—it dawned on me that perhaps my dad had steered me astray with his insistence on nose-to-the-ants humility. Perhaps the greatest gift ever bestowed on us by evolution is the ability to believe we are more powerful than we are.
I really hate this. The greatest gift we have is to aknowledge the struggles of the people around us, and further, people we will never know and meet. The desire to do things for them and to work to understand other worldviews is so powerful, and the reason i bring that up is that it feels almost antithetical to self-importance. You need to try to live in the rational world
You walk around with the knowledge that the world is fundamentally uncaring, that no matter how hard you work there is no promise of success, that you are competing against billions, that you are vulnerable to the elements, and that everything you ever love will eventually be destroyed. A little lie can take the edge off, can help you keep charging forward into the gauntlet of life, where you sometimes, accidentally, prevail.
No!!! Everything is special BECAUSE it is fleeting!!! because its random and nonsensical and heartless and chaotic
An odd alchemy of delusion right before your eyes. Little lies transmuting into bronze, silver, gold. Forget millennia of warnings to stay humble; maybe this is 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.
Have a feeling that the author is about to side with me
So what will become of us? This nation programming its kids to ignore reality when convenient. To whisper anything they need to keep themselves going. Is there any downside to living life behind rose-colored lenses?
YES BRO okay she's boutta cook
Delroy Paulhus found that while college students are initially drawn to those students with inflated self-esteem, over time the group grows weary of them, rating them more negatively.
Watch out Laura
One of the most widely cited studies claiming that positive illusions correlate with better physical health turned out to contain errors that rendered the results not significant.
over time, an overconfident person’s boasting can end up alienating others; while the overconfident person might not ever realize it, they may be losing out on benefits that come from being well-regarded in a community.
You’re setting yourself up for disappointment, was how Robins and Beer explained it: “short-term benefits but long-term costs.” In other words, the lie catches up. The power of the rosy lens seems to have a limit. And when it runs out, the fact of your impotence will really sting.
Odd, too, how many people who might score high on tests for positive illusions share a peculiar quirk with David Starr Jordan, a belief that they can control Chaos with their very own hands.
Four days after landing on the island, he told the New York Times that as “a doctor of medicine” (a degree he himself had once called “scarcely earned”) he was “more sure than ever that she was not poisoned.” Her death? Due to gingerbread.
This whole section has been incredible. He totally killed her. I am so excited for this book to agree with me
instructing him to wait until after he set sail for home so he wouldn’t risk any awkward confrontations with the doctors. After that, David had just one thing left to do. He threw on a nice suit, washed his hands of ink, strolled over to the Central Union Church in Honolulu, and slipped his freshly scrubbed palm around the cold handle of Jane Stanford’s coffin. He took a deep breath and braced his quads for the task of serving as one of her pallbearers.
LOL
“When she died under mysterious circumstances in February 1905, Jordan rushed to Hawaii to claim the body—and, some believe, to quash reports that she had been poisoned.” Although even these allusions are recent additions. For nearly a century, it was widely accepted that Jane had died of natural causes; any rumors of more nefarious explanations had been so effectively discounted they had pretty much disappeared.
Richard White, a Stanford historian, began teaching a class called Who Killed Jane Stanford? to try to uncover more clues. Each semester, he unleashes a dozen students or so on the archives to find new information.
Omg dream class
His students keep uncovering more of David’s shady behavior in the wake of Jane’s death: the letter from David’s acquaintance assuring him that it is possible to die from eating too much food, the letter from an unknown person telling David he will be “judged in the afterlife” for covering up a crime, the letter from Jane’s spy telling David his “silence can’t be bought.” There’s also the oddness of David’s continuing to insist that Jane had died of natural causes, decades after anybody was suggesting otherwise. It crops up in weird places—speeches, newspaper articles, letters—as David ages.
And yet not a single one of these arguments, philosophical, moral, or scientific, seemed to penetrate David’s certainty about eugenics. He, along with other eugenicists, dismissed their dissenters as naïve, sentimental, too dim to see the bigger picture.
Unbridled perseverence and grit leads to self obsession. You can only lie to yourself for so long before you just stop engaging with anything rational
He persuaded his friend the wealthy widow Mary Harriman to give over half a million dollars (about $13 million today) to seed the Eugenics Record Office, a shiny, new pro-eugenics research hub in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The ERO would go on to collect boatloads of data on tens of thousands of Americans.
“Boatloads of data”
How had that sweet boy, so devoted to caring for the “hidden and insignificant,” turned into a man who would so readily kill off the same? Where in his story had he changed? And why? Looking at the full spread of David’s emotional anatomy, the most obvious culprit seems to be that thick “shield of optimism” he was so proud to possess. He had “a terrifying capacity for convincing himself that what he wanted was right,”
As much as David had railed publicly against self-delusion, privately he seemed to rely on it, especially in times of trial. It is the will of man that shapes the fates. Perhaps that group of psychologists had been right, the ones who warned that positive illusions can ferment into a vicious thing if left unchecked, capable of striking out against anything that stands in our way.
To let go of that hierarchy would be to release a tornado of life, beetles and hawks and bacteria and sharks, swirling high into the air, all around him, above him. It would have been too disorienting. It would have been Chaos.
I was back on the earth I had been trying so hard to escape. The bleak one, with no refuge or promises no matter what you do, how much you believe in your mission, or how hard you repent. I had messed up a lot of the good things in my life. And I wasn’t going to lie to myself any longer. The curly-haired man was never coming back. David Starr Jordan wasn’t going to lead me into some beautiful new existence. There was no way of overcoming Chaos, no guide or shortcut or magic phrase to guarantee everything would end up okay. So what do you do after letting go of hope? Where do you go?
The very mind-set we define our national identity in opposition to—the evil that we tell our schoolchildren started with the Nazis, the others, the bad guys—we were the first in the world to make it national policy.
Not to be the worst but didnt they do ts in sparta and stuff? The author keeps hammering home that we were the first and i def get that we were the first to call it eugenics and base it off darwin but i feel like there's more history here
Slowly, it came into focus. This small web of people keeping one another afloat. All these miniscule interactions—a friendly wave, a pencil sketch, some plastic beads strung up a nylon cord—they might not look like much from the outside, but for the people caught inside that web? They might be everything, the very tethers that keep one bound to this planet. That was what was so maddening about the eugenicists. They failed to even consider the possibility of a web like this.
Really do not need convincing that eugenics is evil I get it
This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see: that there is never just one way of ranking nature’s organisms. To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the “whole machinery of life.” The work of good science is to try to peer beyond the “convenient” lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition, where something wilder lives. To know that in every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend.
Feel like tbis book gives darwin too much credit
logic, I often felt as if I’d somehow been tricked, fooled by some kind of sleight of hand.
It's spelled sleight of hand???
I asked Balcombe, jokingly, what everyone was supposed to do, ha, stop eating fish, ha? He quietly said, “Yeah.” I’m not there yet, but I do agree with his thesis: that swimming in that water are creatures with far more cognitive complexity than we typically think. That “fish,” in a certain sense, is a derogatory term. A word we use to hide that complexity, to keep ourselves comfortable, to feel further away from them than we actually are.
Ive become frustrated with this writing style. We def dont use The term fish to keep ourselves comfortable.
My oldest sister had no problem letting go of the fish. She let the whole category slide right out of her hand. When I asked her why it was so easy for her, she said, “Because it’s a fact of life. Humans get things wrong.” She said people have been wrong about her, time and time again, for her whole life. She’s been misdiagnosed by doctors, misunderstood by classmates, by neighbors, by our parents, by me. “Growing up,” she told me, “is learning to stop believing people’s words about you.”
Feeling a litte eye-rolly at the writing style and stuff here. Def not bought in to the book anymore
I kissed her. This was not so strange. Kissing girls, as I knew too well, was something I liked to do. But I had always thought it was for fun, that they tasted good but would be too hard to live with. I was sure I needed a man. To calm my soul and make me feel small and protected against the big bad world. But, man, did she taste good. Like lavender and rubies and the hard-candy lies you roll around on your tongue to cut class. She made me laugh. One summer night, lying in bed with her, she said out of the blue, “I respect your sexuality,” referring to the fact that I should be classified as
...more
Ts pmo bc of the way it’s written. Bisexual. Bi.
We had picked out the cheapest Airbnb on the island. A small apartment whose dot on the map was far from all the resorts.
Just say it was far from the resorts brah
When I give up the fish, I get, at long last, that thing I had been searching for: a mantra, a trick, a prescription for hope. I get the promise that there are good things in store. Not because I deserve them. Not because I worked for them. But because they are as much a part of Chaos as destruction and loss. Life, the flip side of death. Growth, of rot.
I like this
the trick that has helped me squint at the bleakness and see them more clearly, is to admit, with every breath, that you have no idea what you are looking at. To examine each object in the avalanche of Chaos with curiosity, with doubt.
