Skip directly to site content Skip directly to page options Skip directly to A-Z link Skip directly to A-Z link Skip directly to A-Z link
Volume 11, Number 12—December 2005
Another Dimension

The Enigma We Answer by Living

Cite This Article

Einstein didn't speak as a child
waiting till a sentence formed and
emerged full-blown from his head.
I do the thing, he later wrote, which
nature drives me to do. Does a fish
know the water in which he swims?
This came up in conversation
with a man I met by chance,
friend of a friend of a friend,
who passed through town carrying
three specimen boxes of insects
he'd collected in the Grand Canyon—
one for mosquitoes, one for honeybees,
one for butterflies and skippers,
each lined up in a row, pinned and labeled,
tiny morphologic differences
revealing how adaptation
happened over time. The deeper down
he hiked, the older the rock
and the younger
the strategy for living in that place.
And in my dining room the universe
found its way into this man
bent on cataloguing each innovation,
though he knows it will all disappear—
the labels, the skippers, the canyon.
We agreed then, the old friends and the new,
that it's wrong to think people are a thing apart
from the whole, as if we'd sprung
from an idea out in space, rather than emerging
from the sequenced larval mess of creation
that binds us with the others,
all playing the endgame of a beautiful planet
that's made us want to name
each thing and try to tell
its story against the vanishing.

From Genius Loci by Alison Hawthorne Deming

Copyright 2005 by Alison Hawthorne Deming. Used by permission of Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Top

Cite This Article

DOI: 10.3201/eid1112.ad1112

Related Links

Top

Table of Contents – Volume 11, Number 12—December 2005

EID Search Options
presentation_01 Advanced Article Search – Search articles by author and/or keyword.
presentation_01 Articles by Country Search – Search articles by the topic country.
presentation_01 Article Type Search – Search articles by article type and issue.

Top

Page created: February 02, 2012
Page updated: February 02, 2012
Page reviewed: February 02, 2012
The conclusions, findings, and opinions expressed by authors contributing to this journal do not necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Public Health Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the authors' affiliated institutions. Use of trade names is for identification only and does not imply endorsement by any of the groups named above.
file_external