Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
“There is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” marine biologist Rachel Carson, who sparked the environmental movement with her epoch-making 1962 book Silent Spring, wrote in reflecting on science and our spiritual bond with nature. “We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness,” her contemporary and admirer Loren Eiseley wrote six years later in his beautiful meditation on what a muskrat taught him about reclaiming the miraculous in a mechanical age. “We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.
”In the same era, another splendid writer influenced by both Carson and Eiseley — the great physician, etymologist, poet, and essayist Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913–December 3, 1993) — explored this profoundly humanizing quality of the natural world in a short essay titled “The Tucson Zoo,” originally published in The New England Journal of Medicine and later included in his 1979 collection The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (public library).
Thomas recounts a spontaneous visit to the local zoo during a trip to Tucson, where he found himself walking a curious and magical path between two artificial ponds, one populated by a family of otters and the other by a family of beavers — a kind of open-top, glass-walled tunnel that allows visitors who stand at the center to view both the depths of each pond and its surface. In a passage evocative of Eiseley’s transcendent encounter with the muskrat, Thomas writes:
I was transfixed. As I now recall it, there was only one sensation in my head: pure elation mixed with amazement at such perfection. Swept off my feet, I floated from one side to the other, swiveling my brain, staring astounded at the beavers, then at the otters. I could hear shouts across my corpus callosum, from one hemisphere to the other. I remember thinking, with what was left in charge of my consciousness, that I wanted no part of the science of beavers and otters; I wanted never to know how they performed their marvels; I wished for no news about the physiology of their breathing, the coordination of their muscles, their vision, their endocrine systems, their digestive tracts. I hoped never to have to think of them as collections of cells. All I asked for was the full hairy complexity, then in front of my eyes, of whole, intact beavers and otters in motion.
But unlike Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who spoke so poetically about how knowledge amplifies mystery rather than detracting from it, Thomas finds himself quickly slipping into a kind of habitual reductionism:
Something worth remembering had happened in my mind, I was certain of that; I would have put it somewhere in the brain stem; maybe this was my limbic system at work. I became a…
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