책 ＜물고기는 존재하지 않는다＞Why fish don’t exist

이 책과 관련된 서평, 짧은 거 하나 가져와 올립니다. 영어책 원제는 <Why fish don’t exist>입니다. 꼭꼭 읽어보세요. Lulu Miller. Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life. Simon & Schuster, 2020. (225 pages) I don’t think I can overstate how much I love this book. It is an astonishing, captivating, and mind-bending read full of everything; murder, mystery, science, philosophy, psychology, eugenics, taxonomy, Latin, etymology, history, mythology, and Stanford University. Reading this book will enrapture you in phenomenal storytelling, challenge everything you ever believed, and contort everything you thought you knew. It will even change your life. For me, one of the greatest joys in life is to realize that you’ve been living a lie, that our attentions have been captivated by an illusion (a delusion?), only to be broken open by a sage, a prophet, or a fellow wanderer whose avid curiosity woos you into deep waters. I found this joy over and over again in reading this book, and thank Miller for captivating my attention, supercharging my curiosity, and ministering to my soul. By some feat of what could only be considered divine magic, Miller has woven together these great cyclic paradoxes; accepting the Chaos is the only way to overcome one’s chaos; the fictions by which we live must first be exposed as fallacious so we can construct a life of delusions; the hierarchies we’ve constructed have led us to the ultimate insubordination, that categories do not exist; and that fate has captivated our imaginations to expose that fate itself is a mere fabrication. Some of my favorite terms and ideas are: * “natura non facit saltum,” Latin for “nature doesn’t jump,” that nature has no hard lines or “edges,” that all things are “smoothly” related, interconnected, and incrementally evolved. * “sciosophy,” coined by David Starr Jordan to describe the “unfortunate fusion of science with philosophy,” a bastard and disdainful chimera. * “story editing,” a psychological strategy in which we create a slightly more positive narration of our existence. * “the dandelion principle,” that ecological complexity cannot be humanly comprehended, that all things have a variety of considerable effects in the world. * “linguistic castration,” a term of Frans de Waal to describe how humans use language to disempower animals and maintain our place at the top. Finally, should we heed Miller’s exhortation to “give up the fish,” that would be the ultimate betrayal of our humanity, the great disdain against our pride of place, a concession to a delusion; and it would be the greatest existential gift we could give ourselves and the world. —- ㅁㅁㅁ—- ㅁㅁㅁ—- 아래는 WSJ 서평 What a delightful book, and what a delightfully provocative title. We can be certain, though, that neither Lulu Miller’s book nor her title would have delighted David Starr Jordan (1851-1931), the ostensible subject of “Why Fish Don’t Exist,” a memoir masking as a biography. Professor Jordan was, you see, a world-famous fish researcher, an ichthyologist, and he would have been surprised indeed if anyone had told him that fish didn’t exist. “I’d wish / I might associate with fish,” Jordan chanted in “Eric’s Book of Beasts,” a funny compilation of doggerel and pictures he created for his son. And associate with fish he certainly did, during most of his life, though he wanted them as specimens and not as friends, stowed away on shelves in his lab, floating in murky ethanol, with tin name tags sewn firmly into their skins—a detail that particularly intrigues Ms. Miller. Over several decades, Jordan collected thousands of fish from the rivers, oceans and ponds of the world, naming over a hundred new species in the process, and allowing others to name quite a few after him. His “Genera of Fishes,” published between 1917 and 1920, contained 7,800 names, 1,200 of which, he boasted, had been provided by him or his students. And Jordan’s grasp extended beyond fish: Before he became the founding president of Stanford University, he presided over Indiana University, where I write these lines and where so many things still carry his name: a creek, a building, a street, some scholarships, even a hair salon. It was Jordan’s unflagging cheerfulness that captivated Ms. Miller, a contributor to “Radiolab,” the co-creator of the NPR podcast “Invisibilia” and, as she frankly admits, a woman a bit lacking in the self-confidence department. “Why Fish Don’t Exist” tells her own story—how an atheist scientist’s daughter, dismayed by the idea of a senseless universe, shattered by the end of a long-term relationship (with a curly-haired man who “smelled like cinnamon”), became obsessed with a long-dead, super-confident collector of dead fish, one who, in her words, refused to “surrender to Chaos.” Incongruously but very effectively, Ms. Miller’s book interweaves often intimate details from her own life, including a failed suicide attempt, with milestones from David Starr Jordan’s sheer unstoppable ascent to professional glory. Her main source is a doozy of an autobiography, Jordan’s 1,550-page “The Days of a Man,” the biggest annotated résumé ever attempted: two volumes the size, weight and hernia-inducing capacity of concrete blocks.