Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

by Lulu Miller

You don’t matter seems to fuel his every step, his every bite. So live as you please. He spent years riding a motorbike, drinks copious amounts of beer, and enters the water, whenever possible, with the belliest of flops. He seems to permit himself just one lie to constrain his otherwise voracious hedonism, to form a kind of moral code. While other people don’t matter, either, treat them like they do.

Perhaps he had cracked something essential about how to have hope in a world of no promises, about how to carry forward on the darkest days. About how to have faith without Faith.

Ethanol, though fabulous at stalling the universe’s attempts at decay, is friend to fire.

When people have this feeling of personal inefficiency, compulsive collecting helps them in feeling better.

Imagine seeing thirty years of your life undone in one instant. Imagine whatever it is you do all day, whatever it is you care about, whatever you foolishly pick and prod at each day, hoping, against all signs that suggest otherwise, that it matters.

This is when the bastard, the wonderful bastard, takes out his sewing needle and plunges it straight into our ruler’s throat.

Maybe such unruly persistence is beautiful. Maybe it is not mad, after all. Maybe it is the quiet work of believing in Good. Of believing in a warmth, which you know does not exist in the stars, to exist in the hearts of fellow humans. Maybe it is something like trust.

“Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy.”

“Nowhere is the sky so blue, the grass so green, the sunshine so bright, the shade so welcome, as right here, now, today.”

despair is a choice.

There is grandeur in this view of life.

There is grandeur, and if you can’t see it, shame on you.

I decided to do the thing that best helped me hope. Drink.

the Indestructible—the thing at the bottom of each individual that keeps going whether they feel like going or not.

It is the lesson of earthquake and fire that man cannot be shaken and cannot be burned. The houses he builds are houses of cards, but he stands outside of them and can build again. It is a wonderful thing to build a great city. More wonderful still is it to be a city, for a city is composed of men, and forever man must rise above his own creations. That which is in man is greater than all that he can do.

Those people, on the other hand, with that oh-so-hailed virtue of accurate perception? Ding ding ding, you guessed it: clinically depressed.

Perhaps the greatest gift ever bestowed on us by evolution is the ability to believe we are more powerful than we are.

“Every age gets the lunatics it deserves,” British historian Roy Porter once wrote.

Was I doing exactly what I was beginning to suspect David of, twisting the facts to keep my worldview intact, to confirm my daddy’s belief that confidence corrupts?

Homogeneity is a death sentence.

“Man can act only on external and visible characters; nature cares nothing for appearances.… She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life.”

“dandelion principle”: in some contexts a dandelion might be considered a weed to be culled; in others, it’s a valuable medicinal herb to be cultivated.

The ruling that made this all possible, by the way, is still on the books. That’s right. The Supreme Court ruling has never been overturned. At our highest level, it is still written into law that if the government deems you “unfit,” officials have the authority to pull you from your home, stick a knife through your abdomen, and terminate your bloodline.

Eugenic ideology is anything but dead in this country; we are sticky with the stuff.

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,”

He complete trust in himself gave him the idea that he was doing "gods work" or laving the way for science - mans was delusional af

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.

YEP!! This is him to a T

And when he thought he saw humanity beginning to slip, he felt called to rescue it by any means necessary.

And there you have it - how eugenics was born

To let go, at any point—from his first read of Darwin to his last push for eugenics—would have been to invite a return to vertigo. He would have been transported back to being that lost little boy, shaking before a world

There was no way of overcoming Chaos, no guide or shortcut or magic phrase to guarantee everything would end up okay.

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.

It was the dandelion principle! 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.

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.

In other words, he was a pacifist as a means of accomplishing his eugenicist ends.

The fact that many of his fish were in fact discovered by the very targets of his eugenicist campaign—the immigrants and “paupers” whose value to society he dismissed—was something David chose to omit from the scientific record.

That “fish” as a sound evolutionary category is totally bunk. It would be like saying, as Yoon puts it, “all the animals with red spots on them” are in the same category,

Your mom? Absolutely. A fish.

That category of creature so precious to David, the one that he turned to in times of trouble, that he dedicated his life to seeing clearly, was never there at all.

“When you give up the stars you get a universe. So what happens when you give up the fish?”

humans do all the time—downplay similarities between us and other animals, as a way of maintaining our spot at the top of our imaginary ladder.

“linguistic castration.” The way we use our tongues to disempower animals, the way we invent words to maintain our spot at the top.

“Growing up,” she told me, “is learning to stop believing people’s words about you.”

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.

Scientists have discovered, it’s true, that employing positive illusions will help you achieve your goals. But I have slowly come to believe that far better things await outside of the tunnel vision of your goals.