from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History collection.

I, Esteban, am a corpse myself, so this picture hits especially close to home.  Look at that diversity millions of years of evolution has produced, and how neatly we have it - in drawers! You can read about the collection on the Smithsonian website.  No doubt it is a great treasure.  Part of me is very grateful, and indeed even awed, that so much effort goes into the study of life and the organization of our knowledge.  And we can all certainly appreciate, support, and perhaps take some good old pride in the uniquely human activity that is science and all its fields of study.  But once in a while these abstract fields, these concepts and schemes of experimentation, manifest themselves in a concrete way and fall a little cold on our senses — like “capitalism” understood in those photos of a thronged trading floor, everyone in suits and shouting.  It’s not what it is, but it is one way to get closer to some meaning. 

For me, this picture is one such time. It is a powerful and clear representation of the infinite abyss between human beings and every other creature on earth.  As people from Saint Francis to Annie Dillard have shown, this is a relationship meant to be wonderful and take us into a deeper understanding of the world.  Yet it can be mistreated, and in this case it seems pallid and serves to injure whatever mystery life is, as Wendell Berry says:

A chickadee is not constructed to exemplify the principles of its anatomy or the laws of aerodynamics or the life history of its species, and it has not been explained when these things have been extracted —or subtracted— from it.

[…]

What can be explained? Experiments, ideas, patterns, cause-effect relationships and connections within defined limits, anything that can be calculated, graphed, diagrammed.  And yet explanation changes whatever is explained into something explainable.  Explanation is reductive, not comprehensive; most of the time when you have explained something, you discover leftovers.  An explanation is a bucket not a well.

What can’t be explained? I don’t think creatures can be explained. I don’t think lives can be explained.  What we know about creatures and lives must be pictured or told or sung or danced.  And I don’t think pictures or stories or songs or dances can be explained.  The arts are indispensable because they are so nearly antithetical to explanation.

-Wendell Berry