The Shift

My sophomore year in college, I finally got around to taking the required freshman biology course. The study of biology had never particularly interested me: I would rather pet a dog than delve into its morphology, rather look dreamily through a tree's branches than demand that it validate to me the mechanical utility of its green-ness. And so I worked half-heartedly through the first semester, heedless of the textbook's introductory admonition to stay abreast of an extremely fact-filled course that, for instance, required its students to learn more new terms than a freshman foreign language course did. My scores on tests were mediocre and by the end of the semester I needed to do well on the final exam. In the tradition of college students, I crammed a review of the entire semester's material into the night before the test. Fueled by coffee, anxiety, and determination, I sat all night at my desk, going over and over chapters that I had merely skimmed before. And a curioius thing happened: I became increasingly interested in the subject. The study of physical life, seen in its entire sweep, from mitochondria to the whole taxonomic hierarchy of phyla and kingdoms, excited me far more than any of its constituent details ever had.

Then, about four a.m., I came to a realization. It happened when I was feverishly reading-, yet again, the chapter on carbohydrate synthesis. It was Chapter Nineteen -- I've never forgotten, although it's been forty-two years ago. Somehow, in peering at all of those circular diagrams of the transformatin of food into energy and flesh, I was receiveing a bit of information that went beyond what was on the page. I closed the book and stared at the wall for a few minutes, trying to piece together what it was. Somehow it had to do with the noticeably automatic nature of metablism. The organism doesn't have to "do" anything at all in order to accomplish the process. Rather, things are so constructed that if a bit of food is introduced, the chain of chemical reactions takes place automatically. In fact, nothing can prevent it except a disease or the death of the organism. It's an autonomous process. Then I thought about the fact that it is but part of an interlocking series of processes that occur automatically and autonomously, outside the will or desire of the organism whose life they sustain.

Suddenly I saw living organisms in a new way. Earlier in the chapter, the book's author had noted that arnimals are made of the same carbon-based materials that they burn as fuel. It's as if a coal-fired furnace were made of blocks of coal. I saw then that not only animals but organisms as a whole are made of the same stuff as the universe all around them, and that that stuff is constantly being drawn into, and passing through, a series of processes that are independent of the organism's own will. Bits of "universe" are drawn in, as by a vortex, spend time as part of the organism, and then pass out again as energy expenditure or excretion or, ultimately, as wormfood. While it is within the organism, the material is this thing we hold precious: living matter. And if it happens to be part of a human being, then we consider it sacred, involable, protected by all sorts of laws, rules, and morals. But before and afterward, it is just part of the universe, part of the stuff all around us, just like the trash in the gutter. The material stuff, then, cannot define a living organism, much less a person. The material that we are made of at any given instant is just like the dust that has been picked up moments before by a dust devil and will be dropped again in a moment as new dust is drawn into the vortex. What is more, there is no clearly defined moment when "food" becomes "organism," nor can one say exactly when a bit of an organism stops being alive as it is burned away to fuel the life of the whole. No clear boundaries exist: living things are smears that merge fuzzily with the world that is constantly moving through them. They are the vortexes. They are bits universe passing through processes.

As soon as I saw that, the world I had grown up in passed away for me. Gone was the comfortable division between the living and the not-living, gone the definition of an organism as a living object, gone the ancient definition of persons as self-directed creatures with clear boundaries around them, drawn in black-line as by a cartoonist. And if such fundamentals were gone, what was left? What pat and comfortable belief that I had grown up with could be held anymore with the old smug sureness?

I had lost certaintude but felt triumphant. I had lost bearings but felt reassured. In that hour, tradition and authority loosened their grip on me. I saw that everything had to be questioned. Finally, I was becoming educable.