E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten
Miller Why Fish Don't Exist
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80533-760-7
Verlag: ONE
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
A Story of Finding Our Way in a Chaotic World
E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80533-760-7
Verlag: ONE
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Lulu Miller is the cohost of Radiolab, host of the kids podcast Terrestrials, and author of the bestselling book Why Fish Don't Exist.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
avid Jordan was born on an apple orchard in upstate New York in 1851 at the darkest time of the year, which is perhaps why he became so preoccupied with the stars. “While husking corn on autumn evenings,” he writes of his boyhood, “I became curious as to the names and significance of the celestial bodies.” He could not just enjoy their twinkling; he found them a mess he needed ordered, known. When he was about eight years old, he got his hands on an atlas of astronomical charts and began comparing what he saw on the page to what he saw above his head. Night by night he went, creeping out of the house, attempting to learn the name of every star in the sky. And according to him, it took only five years to bring order to the entire night sky. As a reward, he chose “Starr” as his middle name, and wore it proudly for the rest of his life.
Having mastered the celestial, David Starr Jordan turned to the terrestrial. His family’s land swelled and rolled with its own unique constellations of trees, boulders, farm buildings, and livestock. His parents kept him busy with chores, shearing the sheep, clearing brush, and—David’s specialty—sewing rags into rugs (his flexor tendons learning early how to wield a needle). But in between chores, David began to map the land.
For help, he turned to his big brother, Rufus, thirteen years older, a quiet and gentle nature lover with deep brown eyes. Rufus taught David how to settle the horses, with long strokes down the neck, where in the thickets to find the juiciest blueberries. Watching Rufus demystify the earth, David was transfixed; he says he held Rufus in “absolute worship.” Slowly, David began drawing intricate maps of everything they saw. He drew maps of his family’s orchard, his walk to school, and when he finished the land he knew, he turned to places far away. He copied charts of distant townships, states, countries, continents, until his hungry little fingers had crawled over nearly every corner of the globe.
“The eagerness I then displayed,” he writes, “rather worried my mother,” a large woman named Huldah. One day, having had enough, she took his whole pile of maps, creased and stained with his boyish sweat, and chucked it.
Why? Who knows. Perhaps it was because Huldah and her husband, Hiram, were devout Puritans. They prided themselves on martyr-y accomplishments like never laughing out loud and beating the sun to the fields each morning. Spending one’s time making maps of lands already mapped would have seemed like a frivolity, an insult to the use of a day, especially when they were struggling as they were, when there were apples to pick and potatoes to hoe and rags to sew.
Or perhaps Huldah’s disapproval was simply a reflection of the times. By the mid-nineteenth century, the obsessive ordering of the natural world was beginning to fall out of fashion. The Age of Discovery had started over four hundred years before, and pretty much wrapped up in 1758, when the father of modern taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, finished his masterpiece, Systema Naturae, a proposed blueprint for all the interconnections of life. (No matter that Linnaeus’s chart was riddled with mistakes: misfiling bats as primates and sea urchins as worms, to name a couple.) As boats raced more frequently from port to port, the excitement of glimpsing exotic specimens and maps—once a way of luring people into shops, taverns, coffeehouses—was wearing off. Dust was collecting upon cabinets of curiosity; the world, it seemed, had become known.
Though there’s a chance it could have been something else. At that very moment, a blasphemous text was screeching through the presses. On the Origin of Species was released to the masses in 1859, just as little David was beginning to scrunch his nose up at the stars. Is there any possibility that Huldah could have read the newspapers, could have sensed that the world’s order was about to cave in?
Whatever the reason, Huldah would not budge. With her fist full of David’s crumpled maps, she told her son to find something “more relevant” to do with his time.
Like a good boy, he obeyed: he stopped making maps. But like a real boy, he did not. Not really.
“The country round about my home was very rich in wild flowers,” he writes, trying to blame the earth for his sin. On his way home from school he began to ever so occasionally pluck a velvety blue pom-pom or silken orange star from the grass. Some he’d sniff and let fall to the ground, but occasionally one would linger in his fingers and make it back to his bedroom, where it would lie on the bed and taunt him with its mysterious arrangement of petals. He would try to suppress this desire to know it, its name, its exact location on the tree of life. And he did pretty well, until puberty hit.
On his first day of middle school, David secreted home from the library “a little book on flowers.” And back in the privacy of his room, he’d sit, manual in hand, desk dirty with flowers, discerning which flower was which, unbuttoning its genus, its species. A near man now, with some hair on his toes, his voice dropping, he’d occasionally taunt his mother by revealing the scientific names of the blossoms they walked by—transmuting periwinkles into Vinca major or sunflowers into Helianthus annuus—as though to say that this passion of his could not be swatted out of him, crumpled up or thrown away. “I perhaps strained a point by adorning the conveniently white walls of my bedroom with the names of the different plants as I identified them in turn,” he writes.
He began keeping questionable company, with a poor farmer up the road named Joshua Ellenwood who had learned the scientific name of almost every plant in the region. For accomplishing such a feat, the old man was regarded by his neighbors as “shiftless and a waster of time.”
David was in awe of him. He began trailing the old man on his walks through the countryside, trying to seep up as many of his tricks as possible—the ways species revealed themselves in leaf shape or petal count or aroma. After meeting Joshua, David renounced his love of beauty, declaring that the dull and ugly flowers—the dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) and buttercups (Ranunculus acris)—held better clues to nature’s blueprint. “The little ones,” he wrote, “even though not beautiful, meant more to me than a hundred big ones all of a kind. A special proof of scientific as distinguished from aesthetic interest is to care for the hidden and insignificant.”
The hidden and insignificant.
Could David be revealing something about himself in there? Though he doesn’t let on to it much in his memoir, the human world could be hard on him. The historian Edward McNall Burns writes that when David’s parents enrolled him in a boarding school, “the girls did not consider [him] too promising, for it is said that other young males were sometimes hauled up at night [to the girls’ dorm] in a basket intended to be used for elevating fuel.” David, alas, never once got to experience the miracle of basket flight.
As he grew up, the outside world seemed to grow harsher. He writes of skating out onto an ice pond only to get in a tussle with a boy much smaller than him, of trying to sing but being told to quit by his music teacher, of the baseball game he joined at the age of sixteen that ended abruptly when he dove for a fly ball and was “led off with a broken nose, which, being badly set, has ever since remained slightly askew.” And then there was his first teaching gig, his pupils a group of unruly boys in a nearby town. For weeks David attempted to maintain some semblance of order by conducting class with a wooden pointer; he’d wave it around, trying to focus their attention, occasionally even whapping the worst of the boys with it. Until, that is, the boys revolted. They descended upon David, grabbed his trusty pointer, and set it on fire.
He writes of turning to more solitary pleasures—reading adventure stories and poetry, consuming himself with the task of trying to “clasp [my] hands and jump through them.” But even in solitude he wasn’t safe. One day, when David was eleven years old and happily “engaged in the congenial task of burning stumps,” his older sister, Lucia, appeared at the doorway to their farmhouse, screaming, as he recalls it, “that if I wanted to see my brother alive I must hurry to the house.”
David was confused. Rufus wasn’t even supposed to be home. A passionate abolitionist, he had recently left to enlist in the Union army. But before getting to set foot on the battlefield, before getting to test the strength of his conviction, Rufus had contracted a mysterious illness in training camp. It was a sickness that moved quickly through his body, raising his temperature and boiling his skin with rose-colored spots—a disease with no known cause or cure in those days, called, simply, “army fever.” (Decades later it would be called...
