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

by Lulu Miller

the Master to the youth: “We have come in search of truth, Trying with uncertain key Door by door of mystery: We are reaching, through His laws, To the garment-hem of Cause, Him, the endless, unbegun, The Unnamable, the One, Light of all our light, the Source, Life of life, and Force of force. As with fingers of the blind, We are groping here to find What the hieroglyphics mean Of the Unseen in the seen.

Take posture, for example. Humans revealed their superiority by how they stood, “looking heavenward,”

But other hierarchies were more subtle. Look at the parrot, the ostrich, and the songbird. Who among them is the highest on the ladder? If you could crack that, Agassiz figured, then you could learn which mattered more to God: speech, size, or song.

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

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