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

by Lulu Miller

people experiencing stress or anxiety would turn to collecting to soothe their pain.

“science, generally, hates beliefs.”

The way out, the way to enlightenment, was to keep looking, closer, longer, at the pebbles and petals and pelts of this world.

It felt like he had been waiting eagerly, for my whole life, for me to finally ask. He informed me that there is no meaning of life. There is no point. There is no God. No one watching you or caring in any way. There is no afterlife. No destiny. No plan. And don’t believe anyone who tells you there is. These are all things people dream up to comfort themselves against the scary feeling that none of this matters and you don’t matter. But the truth is, none of this matters and you don’t matter. Then he patted me on the head.

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.

I have strived my whole life to follow in his nihilistic, clown-shoed footsteps.

Imagine how troubling that would be to you if you were a taxonomist. Learning that the objects you held in your hands were not puzzle pieces after all, not clues, but products of randomness. They were not pages in a sacred text, not symbols in a holy code, not rungs on a divine ladder. They were snapshots of Chaos in motion. For some, the idea was too maddening. It made the earth feel too bleak, their pursuit too pointless. Louis Agassiz remained adamantly opposed to Darwin until his dying day. He lectured widely on the topic, calling the idea that humans could have evolved from apes “repulsive.”

the universe cracked her knuckles—those tiny pockets of ions hiding in the air—and released a lightning bolt

In his syllabus for a course on evolution, for example, he sneaks in a whole section on the cosmic impotence of man. “Nature no respecter of persons,” he writes. “Tampering impossible.… Her laws immutable.… He who defies them wields a club of air.” I can only imagine the impassioned diatribes that accompanied these notes, his fist held high in the air. His cosmically impotent fist.

"Wielding a club of air" is my new "tilting at windmills"

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.”

There is grandeur in this view of life.