I wanted to share a new read I enjoyed — Why Fish Don’t Exist. It is a memoir by Lulu Miller, an NPR science reporter. I stumbled upon this book after a few lukewarm reads recently. During one of her field assignments, Miller learns about a late 19th century taxonomist, David Starr Jordan, whose diaries reveal his lifetime focus and zeal to identify, name, and classify fish. Much of Miller’s book is focused on Jordan’s life and work and how it has inspired her own.

After 20 years of grueling work, Jordan’s lab, with all his named specimens, catches fire in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and his work is instantly ruined. Right after the incident, he was seen sowing a needle with the name tag into the first fish he recognized, and he rebuilt his entire body of work from the ground up.

Jordan is known to have named one-fifth of all the fishes in the world. He spends his entire life meticulously creating boundaries and clean edges on a species where none exists (as per Darwin’s definition of the word), and as an extension of his work, becomes one of first proponents of eugenics attempting to build a perfect human society. (As fate would have it, scientists later discover that the category Jordan was studying all his life was nonexistent — all fish do not have a common ancestor.)

Jordan was also the first president of Stanford university and was, in fact, suspected to have played a role in killing one of its founders! His life reads like a Shakespearean play with passion, drama, love and intrigue. 

In the book, Lulu Miller, through Jordan’s life, explores our need to classify and bucketize the world and how, in the process, we lose the subtleties and richness of existence. Limited by language, and the inherent need to rank and file and make sense of the world, leaves us stunted of its inconceivable breadth.  Part existential, part hopeful, Miller explores Jordan’s life in all its complexity, with grace and poignance, as well as her own.

Here are some quotes from the book that capture its essence.

In response to the question of “What are we here for?” that Miller asks her father when she was eight and going with him on a nature walk, her father, who was a man of science and similar to David Starr Jordan in spirit and in “seeing the grandeur,” responds with these:  

We are specks, flickering in and out of existence, with no significance to the cosmos.

And …

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.

But still, her father advises:

While other people don’t matter, either, treat them like they do.

Here is an excerpt from Jordan’s diary. His scribbles shed light on his obsession, his desperation, the near-muscular effort to restart when his lab burns down destroying all his work:

“Happiness comes from doing, helping, working, loving, fighting, conquering,” he writes in a syllabus from around the same time, “from the exercise of functions; from self-activity.” Don’t overthink it, I think, is his point. Enjoy the journey. Savor the small things. The “luscious” taste of a peach, the “lavish” colors of tropical fish, the rush from exercise that allows one to experience “the stern joy which warriors feel.” Toward the end of the book, he quotes Thoreau — “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 then he sends his readers off with a rousing dose of carpe diem. “Nowhere is the sky so blue, the grass so green, the sunshine so bright, the shade so welcome, as right here, now, today.”

And finally, here is an astute summation of Jordan by the author, which I found very insightful:

Whatever the case, it works for him. He loses a wife, and wins another quickly. He loses a fish collection, and rebuilds a bigger one. He is promoted to higher and higher offices. The awards and medals start clattering in, for teaching, for ichthyology, for contributions to higher ed. An odd alchemy of delusion right before your eyes. Little lies transmuting into bronze, silver, gold. Forget millennia of warnings to stay humble; maybe this is just how it works in a godless system. Maybe David Starr Jordan is proof that a steady dose of hubris is the best way of overcoming doomed odds.

Why Fish Don’t Exist
Author: Lulu Miller
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: April 2020

---

Contributor: Sanjana Nair