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

by Lulu Miller

The category “fish” hides all of this. Hides nuance. Discounts intelligence. It gerrymanders close cousins away from us, creating a false sense of separation to preserve our spot at the top of an imaginary ladder.

That we barely know the world around us, even the simplest things under our feet. That we have been wrong before and we will be wrong again. That the true path to progress is paved not with certainty but doubt, with being “open to revision.”

This and so many more tricks of language are what de Waal has termed “linguistic castration.” 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.”

The best way of ensuring that you don’t miss them, these gifts, the trick that has helped me squint at the bleakness and see them more clearly, is to admit, with every breath, that you have no idea what you are looking at.

a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle.