Overcoming Inertia
In a galaxy far, far away, back when I was teaching, on the first day of Biology 101, a pop test. Take out a sheet of paper (can you feel the prickly sensation in your arm pits?) and write the answer to this one question:
WHAT IS LIFE?
Take the test. Do not cheat. You have five minutes. Then turn here for the larger image and the wrong answers.
I think it is the approach of gardening season that made me think of this question. And all the invisible life, like I see here-- life that has overwintered in the moisture that clings to tree bark, and in stems of dead grass, and slime of last year's nutrients adhering to a round, cold rock in the creek. It is still bleak mid-winter out my window. But the cycles that we think of as beginning again every spring never cease, even though at times--like this week--it seems I am living on a lifeless planet.
A microscope and some warmed creek samples or bark scrapings might be the best antidote to the winter droops next year. Give me rotifers! Euglena! Vorticella! Movement, the student answered. Life is things that move. I think I can accept that answer. From December until the end of February.
Comments
Whatever it is, I like the fact that it is trying so hard to survive and reproduce, so that when the conditions are right, it flourishes in its intricate, unexpected, dazzling forms.
Posted by: Denny | February 25, 2004 1:52 PM
I can't say why exactly, but your post reminded me of something from a college Lit class. I liked it then, and still do, so thanks for the nudge towards a treasured piece of memory. It's called "My Son, My Executioner" by Donald Hall.
My son, my executioner,
I take you in my arms,
Quiet and small and just astir,
And whom my body warms.
Sweet death, small son, our instrument
Of immortality,
Your cries and hungers document
Our bodily decay.
We twenty-five and twenty-two,
Who seemed to live forever,
Observe enduring life in you
And start to die together.
---
A link offering more information about Donald Hall can be found here: http://interviews-with-poets.com/donald-hall/hall-note.html
Posted by: ntexas99 | February 25, 2004 7:03 PM
In my fading recollections, I like to think that I gave some answer to your question that went beyond a straight listing of the characteristics described in the Curtis Biology text. I'm pretty sure I gave some sort of spiritual spin to it. "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts" was one of the possibilities that you were trying to get us to see.
I think your course was the first time I'd ever really thought about life as a constant struggle against the 2nd Law of thermodynamics. We just take for granted that we live and breathe and that we are somehow owed these things, when in fact life is essentially a continuous war against equilibrium, the tendency to assume room temperature.
Posted by: Curt | February 26, 2004 5:38 AM
Yeah, Curt. Room temps. Or absolute zero, entropy taken far enough.
I wish I'd kept my responses to this regular little quiz. It would make for an interesting overview of freshman perceptions of LIFE as a property.
Posted by: fredf | February 26, 2004 5:45 AM