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

by Lulu Miller

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 can declare war, truce, bankruptcy, love, innocence, or guilt, and in so doing, change the course of people’s lives. The name itself is a thing of great power, then, the vessel that drags the idea from the imaginary to the earthly realm. Before the word, however, the thinking goes, the concept is largely inert.

Even scientists like ritual.

There is no hope for you unless this bit of sod under your feet is the sweetest to you in this world—in any world”—and

He says that the problem with spending one’s time pondering the futility of it all is that you divert that precious electricity gifted to you by evolution—those sacred ions that could make you feel so many wonderful sensations and solve so many scientific puzzles—and you flush it all down the drain of existential inquiry, causing you to literally “die while the body is still alive.”

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.