Fragments From Floyd

In a galaxy far, far away, back when I was teaching, on the first day of Biology 101, I would give 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?

Sample Answers: Life is living. Things that are alive. (Well, yes, use the question as the answer. Nice try.) Living things breathe and move; Something that is alive eats and reproduces; Life is something that when its not there, its dead. And so on.

The answers I read on that sweaty sheet of paper told me what living things do: extract energy from their environment, grow, reproduce, respond to stimuli and so on-all true statements. But this is not a satisfying or complete answer. The truth is, we don't really have a definition or an equation for what life IS. We can detect it in matter by the processes we observe; we can take it away from creatures that possess it, but we cannot define it. Humility and respect for this mystery seemed a good and healthy way to begin our exploration of biology, the study of life.

If I were taking my own pop quiz, I might answer with this response, also a partial answer: Life is what keeps things from being reduced to mold and ash prematurely. From rotting; decomposing; returning to dust. From premature fatal infection, infestation and microbial ingestion. This also is true, without being a full explanation, and is another thing "life" does for matter that has it.

The nature of living things is such that there are attempts to take us apart bit by bit from inside and out as soon as we-worm or mouse or leaf-are conceived. The checks and balances of the nature of life somehow equip us life-bearers to thwart most of these attempts. The ones that succeed, we call disease, infection, mycosis and such. It's a wonder we seldom consider: that life is a property of matter, a self-sustaining order against the onslaught of disorder, that keeps us more or less unconsumed from birth to death.

The instant of death is like the opening doors at the back-to-school sale at WallyWorld. Our lifeless corpse and former corpus is swarmed, permeated, and encorporated by other corpuscles-fungi and bacteria, mostly. They pick us up by the armload and carry our material frames away. Our deconstruction begins, the recycling of all that matter that "lived" and was us. The same fate waits for the million million leaves that swirl over the top of my roof this moment, passing from tree to air to soil to mold.

An autumn-inspired passage from Slow Road Home: a Blue Ridge Book of Days