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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Lulu Miller
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July 6 - July 13, 2025
My scientist father taught me early that there is no escaping the Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy is only growing; it can never be diminished, no matter what we do.
My scientist father taught me early that there is no escaping the Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy is only growing; it can never be diminished, no matter what we do.
He did not heed what seemed to be the clear message of the quake: that in a world ruled by Chaos, any attempts at order are doomed to fail eventually.
He did not heed what seemed to be the clear message of the quake: that in a world ruled by Chaos, any attempts at order are doomed to fail eventually.
Maybe he had figured something out—about persistence, or purpose, or how to go on—that I needed to know.
Maybe he had figured something out—about persistence, or purpose, or how to go on—that I needed to know.
Who are you? I wondered. A cautionary tale? Or a model of how to be?
Who are you? I wondered. A cautionary tale? Or a model of how to be?
Psychologists have studied this, by the way, the sweet salve that collecting can offer in times of anguish. In Collecting: An Unruly Passion, psychologist Werner Muensterberger, who counseled compulsive collectors for decades, notes that the habit often kicks into high gear after some sort of “deprivation or loss or vulnerability,” with each new acquisition flooding the collector with an intoxicating burst of “fantasized omnipotence.” Francisca López-Torrecillas, who has been studying collectors for years at the University of Granada, noted a similar phenomenon, that people experiencing stress
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Psychologists have studied this, by the way, the sweet salve that collecting can offer in times of anguish. In Collecting: An Unruly Passion, psychologist Werner Muensterberger, who counseled compulsive collectors for decades, notes that the habit often kicks into high gear after some sort of “deprivation or loss or vulnerability,” with each new acquisition flooding the collector with an intoxicating burst of “fantasized omnipotence.” Francisca López-Torrecillas, who has been studying collectors for years at the University of Granada, noted a similar phenomenon, that people experiencing stress
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No, if you were satisfied with the beliefs of the day, Agassiz worried, it kept you stunted, stymied, sick. The way out, the way to enlightenment, was to keep looking, closer, longer, at the pebbles and petals and pelts of this world.
No, if you were satisfied with the beliefs of the day, Agassiz worried, it kept you stunted, stymied, sick. The way out, the way to enlightenment, was to keep looking, closer, longer, at the pebbles and petals and pelts of this world.
Indeed, in his writings Agassiz is clear: he believes that every single species is a “thought of God,” and that the work of taxonomy is to literally “translat[e] into human language… the thoughts of the Creator.”
Chaos, he informed me, was our only ruler. This massive swirl of dumb forces was what made us, accidentally, and would destroy us, imminently. It cared nothing for us, not our dreams, our intentions, our most virtuous of actions.
“Never forget,” he said, pointing to the pine-needly soil beneath the deck, “as special as you might feel, you are no different than an ant.
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. He has made my mom coffee almost every morning for
My dad seemed weary of both of us, though, impatient for us to buck up, to get it together, see the good in life and enjoy our time on this rock before it was over. “There is grandeur in this view,” scolds a quote from Darwin hanging over my dad’s desk at his lab. The words are written in looping brown calligraphy, enclosed in a varnished wooden frame. The quote comes from the last sentence of On the Origin of Species. It is Darwin’s sweet nothing, his apology for deflowering the world of its God, his promise that there is grandeur—if you look hard enough, you’ll find it. But sometimes it felt
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I remember thinking that there didn’t seem to be anywhere good to get to. That the outside world offered only vicious hallways, empty horizons. The inside world, only slamming doors. I see nothing gleaming, I wrote in my journal on April 8, 1999.
I felt like I had found the thing I had thought could never exist. Refuge.
wondered what it was that allowed him to keep plunging his sewing needle at Chaos, in spite of all the clear warnings that he would never prevail. I wondered if he had stumbled across some trick, some prescription for hope in an uncaring world.
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.
and indeed all those fussy ranks taxonomists believed to be immutable in nature (genus, family, order, class, etc.)—were human inventions. Useful but arbitrary lines we draw around an ever-evolving flow of life for our “convenience.” “Natura non facit saltum,” he writes. Nature doesn’t jump. Nature has no edges, no hard lines.
In a scientific paper, David proposed that the sea squirt, a sedentary sac of a filter feeder, had once been a higher fish but had “degraded” into its current form due to a combination of “idleness,” “inactivity and dependence.” He wasn’t sure of the exact mechanisms that would cause such a deterioration, but to David, the sea squirt was a clear warning. A cautionary tale in laziness. A literal sad sack.
This is just conjecture, of course, but how does a man go so quickly from being unnoticed by the human world—mocked for his pursuits and occasionally even abused—to being exalted by it? I picture a meek and murky man, dusty and pale, sliding by unnoticed, slowly filling up with that light, that air, that radiant matter, whatever it is, of Purpose.
There’s an idea in philosophy that certain things don’t exist until they get a name. Abstract things like justice, nostalgia, infinity, love, or sin. The thinking goes that these concepts do not sit out there on some ethereal plane waiting to be discovered by humans but instead snap into being when someone invents a name for them. The moment the name is uttered, the concept becomes “real,” in the sense that it can affect reality. We
When people have this feeling of personal inefficiency, compulsive collecting helps them in feeling better.
he hails Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century astronomer burned at the stake for believing Earth was not the center of the universe, as a hero. According to legend, before his execution Bruno quipped, “Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy.”
The way to live was, in every breath, to concede your insignificance, and make your meaning from there.
Why, in the end, was he so opposed to drugs? Because they allow you to feel more powerful than you are! Or, as he puts it, they “forc[e] the nervous system to lie.” Alcohol, for example, lets drinkers “feel warm when they are really cold, to feel good without warrant, to feel emancipated from those restraints and reserves which constitute the essence of character building.” In other words, a rosy view of yourself was anathema to self-development. A way to keep yourself stagnant, stunted, morally inchoate. A fast track to sad-sackery.
A small black book called The Philosophy of Despair. In it, David confesses that the trouble with the scientific worldview was that when you pointed it at the meaning of life, it showed you one thing. Futility: “The fires we kindle die away in coals; castles we build vanish before our eyes. The river sinks in the sands of the desert.… Whichever way we turn we may describe the course of life in metaphors of discouragement.” So what were you supposed to do? Puritan that he is, David recommends the un-idling of hands. The “soul-ache… vanishes,” he writes, “with active out-of-door life and the
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Toward the end of his lecture, he offers his students a kind of magic spell. A way of diffusing the chill of Chaos. In Courier type, just eight words long: There is grandeur in this view of life. I was horrified. There it was. My dad’s same trick. The same words that hang in a frame over his desk, to this day. Darwin’s call to arms. As different as David had seemed from my dad—as defiant, and hopeful, and full of faith—he had nothing new to offer me after all. Just a reminder of what I’d always been told. There is grandeur, and if you can’t see it, shame on you.
and your story—the man who builds something so precious, so ornate… only to see it all crumble… where does he re-locate his will to go on? Kafka calls it the Indestructible—the thing at the bottom of each individual that keeps going whether they feel like going or not. The Indestructible is a place that has nothing to do with optimism—instead, it’s something far deeper and far less self-conscious than optimism—the Indestructible is the thing we mask with all sorts of other symbols, hopes, and ambitions—that don’t force you to acknowledge what is underneath. Well… if you do (or are forced to)
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Uberman/Zarathustra
It promised simply that if I disobeyed it, it would tear me apart.
For it is man, after all, that survives and it is the will of man that shapes the fates.
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.
What a wonderful, rousing call to arms. What a glorious pat on the back, and squeeze of the shoulders. With only one tiny problem. If you examine his words closely, you will discover it. The tiny grain of lie that forms the pearl. It is the will of man that shapes the fates. It was the kind of lie he promised he would never tell himself. It was the kind of lie he had warned would lead to evil. It was the kind of lie he had spent his career crusading against—Nature no respecter of persons!—the kind of lie he said was worth fighting to the death. Even he needed to believe it was true, so as not
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Stephan Crane...a man said to the universe
self-delusion, calling hubris
Is it self delusional to consider your will? seems like a stretch.
Self-delusion was seen as a mental defect by influential psychologists like Freud, Maslow, and Erikson, a problem in vision to be corrected with therapy. An accurate view, on the other hand, was seen as a “hallmark of mental health.”
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.
The 1990s brought Pogs, Magic cards, and a statement in a National Institute of Mental Health report that “considerable evidence suggests positive psychological benefits for people who believe their future will be rosier than they have any right to expect. Such optimism keeps people in a positive mood, motivates them to work toward future goals, fosters creative, productive work, and gives them a sense of being in control of their destiny.”
I disagree with this and dislike it. what about being pragmatic? also, is fostering "creative, productive work" the sole motivator of optimism? I believe it should be the inverse: when your surroundings are positive (which you must work hard to create and defy systems that suck), optimism will ensue. I think it's a combo of both internal and external factors that lead to satisfactionn. and these factors are different for everyone.
