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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Lulu Miller
Read between
March 27 - March 30, 2025
Maybe it was okay to have some outsized faith in yourself. Maybe plunging along in complete denial of your doomed chances was not the mark of a fool but—it felt sinful to think it—a victor?
A special proof of scientific as distinguished from aesthetic interest is to care for the hidden and insignificant.” The hidden and insignificant.
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.
As with fingers of the blind, We are groping here to find What the hieroglyphics mean Of the Unseen in the seen.
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
To stare our pointlessness in the face, and waddle along toward happiness because of it.
“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.
With each new fish, each new catch, each new name placed on a formerly unknown piece of the universe, came that impossibly intoxicating feeling. That sweet honey on the tongue. That hit of fantasized omnipotence. That lovely sensation of order. What a salve, a name.
When people have this feeling of personal inefficiency, compulsive collecting helps them in feeling better.
The men watered and watered and watered. 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.
It felt good to have faith in something, faith that there are entities that transcended words, actions. Even if that faith was moth-eaten with doubt.
“Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy.”
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.
Perhaps the greatest gift ever bestowed on us by evolution is the ability to believe we are more powerful than we are.
“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.”
The US government has admitted to forcefully sterilizing over 2,500 Native American women in the early 1970s. The Eugenics Board of North Carolina sought out and sterilized hundreds of black women during the 1960s and 1970s. And, mind bogglingly, approximately a third of all Puerto Rican women were sterilized by the US government between 1933 and 1968. 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
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The sheer range of creatures in existence, great and small, feathered and glowing, goitered and smooth, was proof that there are endless ways of surviving and thriving in this world.
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.
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.
That the true path to progress is paved not with certainty but doubt, with being “open to revision.”
“Growing up,” she told me, “is learning to stop believing people’s words about you.”
I wanted so badly to see past them, past the lines we draw over nature, to the land that Darwin promised was there, to the land that the taxonomists could see, the gridless place where fish don’t exist and nature is more boundless and bountiful than anything we can imagine.
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.
And the world cracks open a bit. I am reminded to do as Darwin did: to wonder about the reality waiting behind our assumptions. Perhaps that unsightly bacteria is producing the oxygen you need to breathe. Perhaps that heartbreak will prove to be a gift, the hard edge off which you reluctantly bounce to find a better match. Perhaps even your dreams need examining. Perhaps even your hope… needs some doubt.
To turn the key all you have to do… is stay wary of words. If fish don’t exist, what else do we have wrong? Slow dawning for me, a scientist’s daughter, but when I give up the fish, I realize that science itself is flawed. Not the beacon toward truth I had always thought it was, but a blunt tool that can wreak a lot of havoc along the way.
