A microcosm writ large
Hey, come here, I want you to meet someone. This is Lewis Thomas, and he thinks you’re pretty great.
Why? Well, first off, you’re alive. Yeah, I know that sounds either facetious or creepy, but think about it; somehow you, a thinking, reasoning animal, came into being and started walking around and expressing complex thoughts in word and action and changing the world around you. But that’s only the outward appearance of the awesome that is you. Internally you are a collection of untold numbers of life forms who have all, for reasons of their own, agreed to do the millions of delicate and difficult things it takes to keep you moving and breathing and thinking and singing and listening to Bach. (Lewis Thomas really likes Bach.)
And then there’s the fact that you’re human. Human beings are the best and brightest things around, according to Thomas. No, seriously, he’s got an article all about it. You should read it sometime; you’ll realize that you’re something pretty amazing.
I first met Lewis Thomas when I was feeling anything but amazing. My wife and I had just quit a very lucrative (but stressful) job in Alaska and were living in her parents’ basement looking for work. One night when I was feeling particularly insomniac I was browsing through her father’s library and discovered a little volume called “The Lives of a Cell”. Thinking it was going to be a dry treatise all about biology I picked it up and figured I’d be asleep within ten minutes. I finished the book that night, tired but almost explodingly happy.
The next morning I read up on Lewis Thomas himself. This was a man who really knew his stuff. Not just some random enthusiast, he was a doctor, Dean of Yale medical school, and a forerunner in the research of microbiology and pathology. In other words, he knew his stuff. Any one of these things would be enough to entitle him to be a bit grumpy, but his articles are infused with an optimism and love of the world that makes you happy to be part of all this. But back to the book.
The Lives of a Cell is a collection of essays that starts by comparing the entire world to a single cell, with all its seemingly unrelated yet interworking parts, each doing what they do best, each contributing to the value of the whole. The writing is graceful, fun, exciting, witty, and an exercise in vocabulary. It’s best to have a dictionary handy while reading this one, as Thomas has an excellent command of the English language and isn’t afraid to use it. This might be off-putting to some; personally, I love it.
The book explores the universality of music, how humans, birds, whales, bugs, and seemingly every living thing send signals that don’t seem to mean anything concrete, but seem to be the essence of who we are. He jokes that the great classical masterpieces have to be more than just a way of saying “’Beethoven here’, answered a century later by ‘Bartok here’”. From this he also speculates that the songs of nightingales must also be richer than just telling other nightingales that they’ve found a good place to eat.
From there he wanders into the nature of language. There’s more than one essay tracking a word from its Sumerian roots to modern day English, marveling that through all the twists and turns along the way the word still retains its essence, but adapted for the needs of modern people. Language, it seems, is just as alive as the rest of us.
There are some startling revelations, such as an essay suggesting that one of the things that makes people better than computers is our ability to make really grandiose mistakes, and that from these mistakes we gain our individuality and some of our best ideas.
Throughout the entire book, appropriately, is the theme of interconnectedness, how we are all part of one another, and that the real miracle is all of us, working together. Perhaps this quote best sums it up:
“We pass thoughts around, from mind to mind, so compulsively and with such speed that the brains of mankind often appear, functionally, to be undergoing fusion.”
You have a limited amount of time, so why spend it reading about things that suck or are only kind of okay? Favorite thing EVER is not a review site. We're unrepentant fans, and this is the stuff we love. Hope you like gushing, because we're about to embarrass ourselves.
This sounds like exactly the sort of thing I will love and love and love. Also, I feel like someone should lend it to Ryan North.
Ooh. Fantastic! I’m snapping this up.