why fish don't exist (1)

David Starr Jordan was born on an apple orchard in upstate New York in 1851. As a boy he was fascinated by the stars and curious about the name and significance of the celestial bodies. When he was about eight, he got an atlas of astronomical charts and began comparing what he saw on the page to what he saw above his head. In five years he got his curiosity satisfied.

He then turned to the terrestrial. In between the chores his parents assigned him to do, and with the help of his big brother Rufus, he drew maps of his family's orchard, his walk to school, then copied charts of distant townships, states, countries, continents, all the way to every corner of the globe his hungry little fingers could crawl over.

Such eagerness worried his mother. One day she threw away piles of his son's creased, sweat stained maps and told him to find something “more relevant” to do with his time.

He obeyed and stopped making maps, but picked up the habit of picking wild flowers and plants he saw in his countryside surroundings to learn their names and locations in the biological map.

After graduating from Cornell University with both a Bachelor's degree in Science and a Master's in Botany in three years, he landed a job in Illinois teaching science at a small Christian university. But after attending a summer camp in Penikese Island, Massachusetts, organized by then famous naturalist Louis Agassiz to train young scholars for explorative collection of marine and botanical life, he decided to set his sights on the water. “The literature of Ichthyology (study of fishes) was inexact and incomplete,” he wrote, “with few comparative studies, so that the field seemed wide open, as indeed it was.”

As he jumped from teaching job to teaching job at schools all over the Midwest, he set himself the goal of discovering every freshwater fish in North America, while taking a job from the US Census Bureau in 1880 to catalog the fish species that lived along the Pacific coast.

He then journeyed back to Bloomington, Indiana, where he had finally secured a permanent job as a professor of science at Indiana University. Six years later, when he was 34, the board of trustees asked him to become president of the institution. He accepted, making him the youngest university president in the entire country.

He now led a crew of burly, bespectacled taxonomists discovering fish faster than they could name them. They were preserving them in jars of ethanol and stacking them on shelves inside David’s secluded lab on the top floor of the science building. Thousands of mysterious creatures being piled higher and higher, awaiting their sacred naming ceremony.

Late one night in July of 1883, the lab caught fire. Jars exploded, fish vaporized, every last specimen was destroyed, and more: a secret document that David had been working for years, that mapped the connections of never-before-seen branches of tree of life, completely torched. “The flames of an hour had near undone his life work,” a reporter wrote on the local newspaper.

But David refused to be stalled by the catastrophe. He dusted up the ashes, and headed right back out to the nation’s bodies of water to retrieve what he had lost. He claimed to have learned only one lesson from the whole ordeal: “To publish at once,” he wrote.

Just two years later, another disaster struck. His wife, Susan, came down with a cough. Days later, she was dead. Killed, as their daughter Edith explains, by a bout of pneumonia the “rural town doctors were unable to cure.”

Again, David moved quickly. He held a simple but ceremonial funeral and then, as he had with the fish, headed right back out to the nation’s wilds, to retrieve what he had lost. Less than two years after Susan’s death, he had caught himself a new wife. A college sophomore named Jessie Knight, who's youthful, energetic, and enjoy traveling with him.

In time, a wealthy California couple heard about David—this cheerful, swashbuckling giant with hundreds of notches of scientific discovery on his belt. Their names were Leland and Jane Stanford, and one day in 1890, they traveled all the way to Bloomington to ask if he would become the first president of their little academic experiment in the farmlands of Palo Alto.

In 1891, he was sworn in as the founding president of Stanford University. He had just turned forty years old.

He immediately built a shiny new marine research facility on the tip of the Monterey Peninsula, the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory, modeled after Agassiz’s summer camp on Penikese Island.

Unhindered by financial constraints, at Stanford David commissioned fish-collecting expeditions to the places he had only been able to dream of, and map, as a boy. To Samoa he went, and to Russia, Cuba, Hawaii, Albania, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Greece, and beyond. Overall they collected and gave names to around one thousand new fish species, and many more piling higher and higher inside the lab at Stanford.

And then at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, the San Francisco earthquake struck. In just forty-seven seconds, decades of David's work got eliminated. Eels severed by shelves. Blowfish popped by shards of glass. For many of those specimens left intact, hundreds of them, nearly a thousand, their holy name tags had scattered all over the laboratory floor, his meticulously named fish had become an amorphous unknown again.

So what did David do?

To prevent the piles of fish from decaying, he had his crew water-hose them day and night before the ethanol he ordered arrived.

Then he sorted out the fish he could recognize, and sewed their name tag directly to their body. To its throat. To its tail. To its eyeball. So they would never get separated again.

David served Stanford as president until 1913 and then chancellor until his retirement in 1916. He died at his home on the Stanford campus after suffering a series of strokes over two years on September 19, 1931.

authenticity

In the fifties and early sixties, American TV shows idealized traditional families and suburban life so much people had an undercurrent fear that they might become a cookie cutter human being defined by the externals.

Today, with selfies, social media branding, and managing your profile on LinkedIn and Facebook, everyone seems to have become their own unabashed promoter. The new social mantra "Follow your passions. Do what you love" enjoins everyone to have some dream about their life and you are authentic to the extent that you doggedly pursue that vision as though it were your essence.

What does authenticity mean, and what does it mean to live authentically?  

  

In Camus' novel "The Stranger", the protagonist commits a senseless murder but, in the end, is sentenced to death largely because he refuses to tell the officials and others what they want to hear, namely that he is sorry, which he isn't. 

"In order to be, never try to seem," that seems to be one stern advise Camus wants to tell us through the story. 

Is there, however, more to authenticity than just "don't pretend"? Though Sartre tries, he can find no precise distinction between sincerity and authenticity as one might differentiate between tables and chairs, nor is it possible to generate an unambiguous criterion for deciding whether or not we are leading authentic lives. Perhaps like all ingredients of inner life, authenticity is something you just can't put on a scale and tell how much it weighs.

Etymologically speaking, both in Latin and in German, the idea of authenticity comes from the notion of making something your own. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, many 19- and 20-year-olds, many of them first-generation college students whose parents had to dig deeply to send them to college, boarded buses southbound to help register voters and fight racism, knowing full well the maelstrom of violence they were driving into. That was authenticity on two counts. They were not taking marching orders from their parents or society in general, and they were acting on their own conviction.

"Be true to yourself", then, sounds like one great simple way to be authentic. The trick, and the trap to avoid, though, is how not to become a narcissist or self-righteous bigot following such easily turned self-serving moral guideline. After all, it could be argued that there were millions of Nazis who did just that, and hundreds of thousands of Americans who gave their last breath defending slavery.

"If authenticity is being true to ourselves ... then perhaps we can only achieve it integrally if we recognize that this sentiment connects us to a wider whole," says contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor in his book "The Ethics of Authenticity".

Relational creatures as we humans are, it could be that becoming our own person is only possible via strong bonds to something outside of ourselves. For Kierkegaard it is God, while Taylor submits this connection can take the form of binding yourself to a "political cause or tending to the earth."

Maybe we have taken this all wrong. Authenticity is not something we can work at, all we can do is to make efforts to avoid inauthenticity. So, for example, being vulnerable makes you closer to authenticity, while "faking it until you make it" makes you less so. 

Or maybe authenticity is something we were born with, that got lost/buried under layers of layers of pseudo knowledge as we got "educated" by culture, society and lots of our own "self-help" efforts. The task then is to shake off the chaff and shackles and get back to the original, "返璞歸真," as the Taoists would say. 

Or follow a plan that is there from the start, to become who you truly are in God, as Kierkegaard would say.

* This writing is based on Chapter "Authenticity" of the book "The Existentialist's Survival Guide".