WHY FISH DON’T EXIST – by Lulu Miller
Reflections on the Dandelion Principle

“Why Fish Don’t Exist,” the book written by Lulu Miller, may at first seem like a story about taxonomy and classification. Long after finishing it, I found myself asking: why write about classifying fish when the real stake is how humans try to make sense of the world?

The book begins with David Starr Jordan, the celebrated taxonomist and founding president of Stanford University. It soon becomes clear, however, that taxonomy is only the surface of a far more unsettling question: who decides what is “normal,” and what happens to those who do not fit within that order?

The narrator belongs to the second category. Throughout her life she has carried the feeling that she does not fit, that she cannot find a place within the predetermined order of society. Her research into Jordan’s life emerges as a need to understand how an ordinary man — not so different from herself — with no exceptional qualities, could become a superstar capable of shaping millions of lives across two continents, and still be honored today with statues and mountains bearing his name.

On first reading, David Starr Jordan becomes a fantasy of stability: the promise that existence is not chaos, but something that can be understood. Jordan does not merely organize the natural world, but the entire social world as well. More than that, he believes morally in his order. He does not say only “this is how the world looks,” but “this is how the world should look.” In the book, he does not appear as a main character, but as the symbol of an order built without doubt. Not brilliant, not profound, not exceptional — just sufficiently free of ambiguity to name the world on behalf of others. He is not troubled by exceptions, not affected by suffering, and does not pause to reflect on the consequences of his ideas for real people.

It is only the encounter with the two survivors of the eugenics center that reveals the human cost of this order. Until that moment there are classifications and theories; from that moment there are faces, histories, and real lives. The world into which the author was born was not “wrong out of ignorance.” It was built by people for whom any exception became an error that had to be corrected.

Where, then, is one supposed to move? In which direction?

This is the inertia in which she lives at the beginning of the book, and which she cannot overcome through theory or research. The narrator is not paralyzed by a lack of information, but by its excess. The way out comes through encounter — with the women who were classified, reduced to categories, confined and abused, and who nevertheless survived.

Not as ideas. But as living beings.

And perhaps the way out is not to find another box in which to fit, but to accept that not fitting is sometimes the only proof that we are alive.