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

by Lulu Miller

To let go, at any point—from his first read of Darwin to his last push for eugenics—would have been to invite a return to vertigo. He would have been transported back to being that lost little boy, shaking before a world that had just taken his brother. A terrified child, powerless before the world, with no way of understanding or controlling it. To let go of that hierarchy would be to release a tornado of life, beetles and hawks and bacteria and sharks, swirling high into the air, all around him, above him. It would have been too disorienting. It would have been Chaos. It would have been— —the very same vision of the world I myself had been fighting so hard not to look at ever since I was a little girl. That sense of falling off the edge of the world, plummeting alongside ants and stars, with no purpose or point. Of glimpsing the glaring, relentless truth so clear from inside the swirl of Chaos. You don’t matter.