susan cortesi says:

I’m now eighty-seven, and so far I have eaten, drunk and breathed in eight hundred tons of food, water and air – which became temporarily my hair and got cut off, became my skin and got rubbed off, and so on. Everything in me changes every seven years. I am not yesterday’s breakfast. That’s very clear to m, although my breakfast does temporarily become my hair.

We used to have the words “animate” and “inanimate”. In playing the game of twenty questions, where you had to find out what I was thinking about by asking me no more than twenty questions, two of the questions were always, “Is it animate?” or is it inanimate?’

When we said animate we’d think of warm and soft; inanimate was hard and cold.

Now we used to say that biology was the study of animate things, of living things. After a while, biologists got into the study of genetics, to study genes and chromosomes (the microscopic chemical chains that determine the inherited traits of organisms.)

The biologists who were looking into genetics began studying fruit flies, because they regenerate very rapidly and thus gave the biologists a chance to find out how patterns of development were inherited. Then they discovered that tobacco mosaic virus regenerated even more rapidly than the fruit fly, and this brought them into virology, the study of viruses. And inside the viruses they discovered that the chemicals were arranged like crystals.

Now crystals had always been considered as inanimate, lifeless. But here the physical characteristics of living things, of you and me, are being determined by these crystal-like chemicals called DNA and RNA. And these chemicals are composed of molecules, and they in turn are formed by atoms.

Now at this level you have all of the scientists converging. The biologists, the physicists, the mathematicians are all there studying the same thing. But they’ve become so excited about what they are discovering that they haven’t been very good philosophers. They haven’t seen the significance of what they are dealing with.

We’re seeing more and more things that are inanimate, and just what is animate is getting less clear. We know that life has to be in there somewhere, because we started with biology, with living things. But when people die, all that’s left is chemicals. People have been weighed as they are dying, and scientists have found that the weight doesn’t change. So whatever life is, we know it doesn’t weigh anything.

I’m assuming that no one ever did die, and that others whom we can’t see may be trying to talk to us right now. I know that there’s really great wisdom that’s available to us that can affect is a great deal, and that’s why I have been trying to listen to my thoughts, thinking that others may be trying to talk to us. That may be the way we get our fresh thoughts.

Postscript: Richard Buckminster Fuller died July 1, 1983, eleven days before what would have been both his eighty-eighth birthday and the sixty-sixth anniversary of his marriage to his beloved Anne. He died of a heart attack suffered at Anne’s bedside in a Los Angeles hospital. Anne died two days later.

Fuller’s Earth pages 125,126.