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

by Lulu Miller

Like a good boy, he obeyed: he stopped making maps. But like a real boy, he did not. Not really.

“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.

“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.”

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.

It’s a hard lot being a human, these psychologists explain. 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.

This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see. There is no ladder. Natura non facit saltum, he cries in his scientist’s tongue.

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

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.

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.”

This ladder, it is still alive. This ladder, it is a dangerous fiction. Fish don’t exist. A fish-shaped sledgehammer to split it down.