This is the great bewilderment: that out of a cold austere cosmos arose the roiling wonder of life, from the tiniest archaeans that have “confronted sulfuric boiling black sea bottoms and stayed” to the cathedral of consciousness ringing with music and mathematics and poems about archaeans; that we are here trembling with all this love and all this suffering, all these vicissitudes of aliveness, and all the while each one of the atoms in our bodies can be traced back to the core of some particular star that died long ago, some insentient cauldron of chemistry and chance.

The star-forming clouds of gas and dust known as Pillars of Creation. (James Webb Space Telescope / NASA)

The question of what life is — how atoms and molecules become living cells, what differentiates a rock from the lichen on it and a robot from a human being — has shaped human thought for as long as we have been thinking. For a long time, it was believed that living beings are animated by some mysterious vital force beyond mere matter — a spark of life, hidden deep within. This view, known as vitalism, crumbled on the anatomy table of Romantic science when the scalpel found no mysterious soul-organ super-added by a divine hand. Everything we are, these heretical discoveries intimated, must be housed in the body, must arise from this mortal matter, must be the product of physical forces that “animate the lifeless clay,” as Mary Shelley (who frequented London’s science lectures) wrote in Frankenstein — that far-seeing reckoning with the mystery of life weighed against its materiality.

Within a century, just before he sparked the dawn of artificial intelligence, the young Alan Turing was bending his pliant mind around the notion that we are built of “living bricks set in dead mortar.”

Few people have advanced our understanding of these living bricks and their bearing on the mystery of life more profoundly than the marine biologist Ernest Everett Just (August 14, 1883–October 27, 1941).

Ernest Everett Just (Marine Biological Laboratory Archives)

Born not long after the development of cell theory began revolutionizing our understanding of life, at a time when the cell was established as the basic biological unit but its inner workings remained an enigma, Just set out to understand how a cell becomes a living organism. Studying a sand dollar during fertilization, he made a landmark discovery of how the egg cell directs its own development — anathema to prior understanding of the inception of life.

A few years before James Baldwin did the same for the same reasons, Just moved to Europe to live and work in self-elected exile freer, though never entirely free, from his homeland’s prejudices. As a world war was breaking out, he published his magnum opus — The Biology of the Cell Surface (public library) — recounting his revelatory research in uncommonly poetic prose bridging the scientific and the existential.

Half a century before the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis gave us her Gaia hypothesis of inter-relation, anchored in her view that “life is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact,” Just anticipates the the new biology of poetic ecology and writes:

We feel the beauty of Nature because we are part of Nature and because we know that however much in our separate domains we abstract from the unity of Nature, this unity remains.

This unity holds up at every scale, from the atoms to the stars:

Nature is both continuous and corpuscular. In the former sense, we pass from lower to higher revelations of organization almost insensibly and with scarcely a break. Every form of matter follows upon another. In the latter sense, we recognize breaks in natural states from electron to atom, from atom to molecule, from molecule to compound, and from compounds in association to living matter. But even conceived of as corpuscular, matter, as we know it, is never purely discrete and absolutely independent from the remainder of nature. Whether we study atoms or stars or that form of matter, known as living, always must we reckon with inter-relations. The universe, however much we fragment it, abstract it, ever retains its unity.

The egg cell also is a universe. And if we could but know it we would feel in its minute confines the majesty and beauty which match the vast wonder of the world outside of us. In it march events that give us the story of all life from the first moment when somehow out of chaos came life and living.

Art by Luisa Uribe from The Vast Wonder of the World — a picture-book biography of Ernest Everett Just

Adding to “the vast wonder of the world,” rather than subtracting from it, is the knowledge that all this ravishing complexity, all this breathtaking pulsating beauty, is made of the most elementary building blocks:

The realm of living things being a part of nature is contiguous to the non-living world. Living things have material composition, are made up finally of units, molecules, atoms, and electrons, as surely as any non-living matter. Like all forms in nature they have chemical structure and physical properties, are physico-chemical systems. As such they obey the laws of physics and chemistry. Would one deny this fact, one would thereby deny the possibility of any scientific investigation of living things. No matter what beliefs we entertain, the noblest and purest, concerning life as something apart from physical and chemical phenomena, we can not with the mental equipment which we now possess reach any estimate of living things as apart from the remainder of the physico-chemical world.

Living things, Just observes, are not made of some special stuff but of the commonest chemical elements, so the difference between life and non-life cannot be attributed to matter alone. The difference, he argues, is not one of composition but of organizing principle — a kind of choreography, orchestrating motion in time. A year before Borges insisted that time is the substance we are made of, Just writes:

Living matter has an organization peculiar to itself. Nowhere except in the living world does matter exhibit this organization. Life, even in the simplest animal or plant, so far as we know, never exists apart from it. Resting above and conditioned by non-living matter, life perhaps arose through the chance combination of the compounds which compose it. But who knows? A living thing is not only structure but structure in motion. As static, it reveals the superlative combination of compounds of matter; as a moving event, it presents the most intricate time-pattern in nature. Life is exquisitely a time-thing, like music.

Anatomy of a bird by French artist Paul Sougy. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

An epoch before Just, responding to the death of vitalism on the anatomy table, Emily Dickinson had captured the irreducibility of life, the way its dissection into parts will never account for the organizing principle that harmonizes the whole:

Split the Lark — and you’ll find the Music…
Scarlet Experiment!…
Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?

Couple with the illustrated story of Ernest Everett Just’s trailblazing life, then revisit the strange science of how alive you really are and Alan Lightman on what happens when you die.

Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conveying the blueness of blue and the wonder of being alive. But it is also a thing of great pliancy and creativity — a living reminder that how we name things changes what we see, changes the seer. (This, of course, is why we have poetry.) It is the birthplace of the imagination and forever its plaything: I remember my unabashed delight when a naturalist friend first introduced me to the various terms for groups of birds — from “a deceit of lapwings” to “a pitying of turtledoves,” and could there be a notion more charming than “an ostentation of peacocks”?

Some of these collective nouns, often called company terms, are based on observable characteristics of the species — “a fall of woodcock” references the bewildering air dance of the courting birds, “a watch of nightingales” pays homage to the nocturnal wakefulness of Earth’s most musical bird, and “a gaggle of geese” turns their migratory cries into delicious onomatopoeia. Some stem from myths and folk beliefs about birds dating back centuries, to a time when Satan was realer than gravity in the human mind, Kepler’s mother could be tried for witchcraft, and superstition was the primary sensemaking tool for causality — an organizing principle for life, reflected in language: “a murder of crows” alludes to various superstitions about crows as emissaries of death, believed capable of killing their own kind in punishment for transgression; “a parliament of owls” draws on ancient Greek mythology, in which an owl accompanies Athena — the goddess of wisdom and reason, representing freedom and democracy across the Western world.

A great many of these company terms originate in one of the first books printed in English after the invention of the Gutenberg Press: the Boke of Seynt Albans [Book of Saint Albans], also known as The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms. Anonymously published in 1486 and written largely in verse, it was lauded as the work of “a gentleman of excellent gifts” — until it was discovered that the author was a woman named Juliana Barnes.

Like Sor Juana two centuries later, Juliana had suffered some great unnamed heartbreak that led her to retreat to a cloister, where she immersed herself in study — convents were often the only way women could access books in an era when formal education was entirely closed to them. Like Montaigne, she became a prolific diarist. Having refined herself as a writer on these private pages, she began writing for the public — an act of tremendous courage and confidence for a woman in the fifteenth century to begin with, and doubly so given she chose to write about masculine endeavors: hunting, fishing, hawking.

Tucked into the middle of her book is a long list of company terms under the heading “THE COMPAYNYS OF BEESTYS AND FOWLYS.” Discernible through the confounding Old English, through the bastarda blackletter script barely legible to modern eyes, are the charming “exaltation of larks” (Exaltyng of Larkis), “murmuration of starlings” (Murmuration of Stares), “watch of nightingales” (Wache of Nyghtingalis), “sedge of herons” (Sege of heronnys), “gaggle of geese” (Gagle of gees), and “unkindness of ravens” (unkyndenes of Ravenes), all still in use today.

Half a millennium after Juliana Barnes died an unknown nun in an English convent on a planet without clocks, calculus, or democracy that thought itself the center of the universe, the English painter and children’s book illustrator Brian Wildsmith (January 22, 1930–August 31, 2016) brought to life the loveliest of these company terms in the 1967 gem Birds by Brian Wildsmith (public library).

Not all of these terms have remained the same across space and time — different eras and different regions have devised their own strange and wondrous lexicon for the same bird groupings. Juliana Barnes’s “sedge of herons” gave way to the “siege of herons” more popular today, shifting focus from the silent silhouettes of these dignified birds rising from the edge of the pond like tall grass to the inelegant and rather violent-sounding vocalizations they make during flight; in Wildsmith’s painted aviary owls are not a “parliament” but a “stare,” the term now brinking on the obsolete, having peaked in use the year before the book was published.

A stare of owls

Usage frequency in printed sources

Emerging from these changing terms is a testament to Toni Morrison’s insistence that language is best understood “partly as a system, partly as a living thing” — evidence that language is but a microcosm of life, subject to its own evolutionary forces of adaptation to context akin to those that transformed the dinosaurs into birds. Lest we forget, words too face the peril of extinction.

A fall of woodcock

A wedge of swans

A sedge of herons

A rafter of turkeys

A congregation of plover

A party of jays

A walk of snipe

A siege of bitterns

Complement with the fascinating science of the owl sensorium and some stunning centuries-old illustrations of birds of paradise — which, if they moved in groups, deserve the company term “constellation” — then revisit the story of how the clouds, those eternal companions of the birds, got their names.

Every once in a while, the curtain of consciousness we mistake for reality parts and we glimpse what glows beyond it.

Some call it mystery.

Some call it God.

Some find it in the molecular structure of mycelium under a microscope.

Some in the color of the light after a summer storm.

Some in the gaze of an osprey.

Some in Bach.

Nowhere is our contact with the sacred more direct, or more disorienting, than in love — that strange and wondrous mirror for the mystery we are. “Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love,” the young Susan Sontag wrote in her diary. And at the same time nothing reveals us to ourselves more completely or better maps our incompleteness. As we feel its mystery unfold in us, we touch the sacred. “Love is my religion,” Keats wrote in his letters to the love of his short life. “Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being,” urged Rumi as he anchored his devotional poetry in love.

The Kiss by Gustav Klimt, 1907-1908. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

This understanding of love as a portal to the sacred comes alive with great passion and poignancy in the poet Christian Wiman’s meditative memoir My Bright Abyss (public library). (As with Rumi, as with the gospels, one need not share Wiman’s particular flavor of faith to be moved by the spiritual truth in his writing.)

In consonance with the science of limbic revision and its haunting corollary that “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love,” he writes:

There is a sense in which love’s truth is proved by its end, by what it becomes in us, and what we, by virtue of love, become. But love, like faith, occurs in the innermost recesses of a person’s spirit, and we can see only inward in this regard, and not very clearly.

With an eye to his own experience, he considers how any large and luminous love transcends the personal — the realm of the self — and unselves us into the sacred:

I did not know what love was until I encountered one that kept opening and opening and opening. And until I acknowledged that what that love was opening onto, and into, was God… In any true love — a mother’s for her child, a husband’s for his wife, a friend’s for a friend — there is an excess energy that always wants to be in motion. Moreover, it seems to move not simply from one person to another but through them, toward something else… This is why we can be so baffled and overwhelmed by such love… It wants to be more than it is; it cries out inside of us to make it more than it is. And what it is crying out for, finally, is its essence and origin: God.

The Dove No. 1 by Hilma af Klint, 1915. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Wiman’s God is the traditional Christian God, but the sentiment holds true — and perhaps even truer — if the word were mystery. Surrendering to it — to this transcendent not-knowing that beckons beyond the bounds of what we can hold on to — may be the essence of love. Wiman writes:

Love, which awakens our souls and to which we cling like the splendid mortal creatures that we are, asks us to let it go, to let it be more than it is… We feel love leave us in unthreatening ways. We feel it reenter us at once more truly and more strange, like a simple kiss that has a bite of starlight to it.

Perhaps this spiritual dimension of love stems from a simple equivalence: At its core, love is the quality of attention we confer upon another; and as Simone Weil observed in her timeless meditation on the nature of grace, “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” All of love’s gravity and all of its grace are found in our acts of attention.

Uncommon Presents from the Past: Gifts for the Science-Lover and Nature-Ecstatic in Your Life, Benefitting the Nature Conservancy