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

by Lulu Miller

Chaos is the only sure thing in this world.

entropy is only growing; it can never be diminished, no matter what we do.

that in a world ruled by Chaos, any attempts at order are doomed to fail eventually.

He could not just enjoy their twinkling; he found them a mess he needed ordered, known.

“The little ones,” he wrote, “even though not beautiful, meant more to me than a hundred big ones all of a kind.

The hidden and insignificant.

his obsession, his desperation, the near-muscular effort he was exerting to pin down the forms of the things unknown to him.

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

as with any compulsion—there seems to be a line where the habit can switch from “exhilarating” to “ruinous.”

“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,”

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.

To stare our pointlessness in the face, and waddle along toward happiness because of it.

when I felt for a backbone all I found was sand.

that there is grandeur—if you look hard enough, you’ll find it. But sometimes it felt like an accusation. If you can’t see it, shame on you.

Perhaps he had cracked something essential about how to have hope in a world of no promises, about how to carry forward on the darkest days. About how to have faith without Faith.

Nature has no edges, no hard lines.

reminder to stay humble, to stay wary of what we believe, about even the most basic things in our lives.

When people have this feeling of personal inefficiency, compulsive collecting helps them in feeling better.

“Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy.”

the trouble with the scientific worldview was that when you pointed it at the meaning of life, it showed you one thing. Futility:

“Happiness comes from doing, helping, working, loving, fighting, conquering,”

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

“Nowhere is the sky so blue, the grass so green, the sunshine so bright, the shade so welcome, as right here, now, today.”

How hard it can be to watch your words fall flat, kersplat, before another person. How lonely it can feel inside a head with ideas you can’t figure out how to spit out.

the thing at the bottom of each individual that keeps going whether they feel like going or not. The Indestructible

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.

a dash of self-deception… was good for the bones.

Traumatized people taught to tweak their story of what had happened made their way more quickly to a sense of peace.

Perhaps the greatest gift ever bestowed on us by evolution is the ability to believe we are more powerful than we are.

nature cares nothing for appearances.… She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life.”

in some contexts a dandelion might be considered a weed to be culled; in others, it’s a valuable medicinal herb to be cultivated.

When you actually examine the range of life on Earth, it takes a lot of acrobatics to sort it into a single hierarchy with humans at the top.

A way of turning that roiling morass, of the sea, of the stars, of his dizzying life, into clear, shining order.

That sense of falling off the edge of the world, plummeting alongside ants and stars, with no purpose or point.

You don’t matter.

There was no way of overcoming Chaos, no guide or shortcut or magic phrase to guarantee everything would end up okay.

the evil that we tell our schoolchildren started with the Nazis, the others, the bad guys—we were the first in the world to make it national policy.

white curtain billowed in the breeze, not realizing there was no one left inside to protect from the sun, to soothe, to hide.

to care for the state’s children, but not her own.

This sort of invisible thread between the two women. How vigilantly they tend to each other, swatting away the other’s sadness, volleying back every joke, laboring to keep the atmosphere light.

This small web of people keeping one another afloat. All these miniscule interactions—a friendly wave, a pencil sketch, some plastic beads strung up a nylon cord—they might not look like much from the outside, but for the people caught inside that web? They might be everything, the very tethers that keep one bound to this planet.

perspectives. From the perspective of an apartment in Lynchburg, Virginia, that very same human could be so much more. A stand-in mother. A source of laughter. A way of surviving one’s darkest years.

This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see: that there is never just one way of ranking nature’s organisms. To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the “whole machinery of life.” The work of good science is to try to peer beyond the “convenient” lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition, where something wilder lives. To know that in every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend.

there’s a chance that his very last vision was his very first love: the stars lingering in the twilight sky.

the natural world does not actually arrange itself into the categories we set for it.

That people will never exchange comfort for truth.I

It makes my skin prickle with the most forbidden atheist fantasies. That somehow, out there, encoded in the cold math of Chaos, there is a sort of cosmic justice after all.

She spoke about how hard it must have been for people in his day to look up at the stars and fathom that the stars were not the ones moving.

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

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.