TOW #15 - The Lives of a Cell (Written)

The essay The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas is about how around the world, there are no tangible connections between organisms, yet they still work together as one cell. He uses the extended metaphor of a cell within our own body as an example of how he is beginning to conceptualize the entire planet working together symbiotically. In a scientific manner, he splits his essay up into three "items". The first is that we, as humans, are made up of strange parts that don't really belong to us. We are not ourselves, we are the sum of completely unrelated parts working together. The second item is that the most surprising thing about Earth is not its diversity, but its uniformity. We are all similar to each other -- except for viruses, which he looks at as an evolutionary accident, a piece of DNA that was "dropped". His third item is that the earth shouldn't be looked at as an organism. It's too unconnected. It should be looked at as a cell, whose own parts are very disconnected and foreign yet still cooperate.

I believe Thomas's main point in writing this essay is to ask the reader to look inside themselves, not at the world, as he does in the beginning. By considering the world, and comparing it to a cell, we can look at ourselves and see how we are made up of the people in our lives, the things we use, the films we watch, the strangers who bump into us on the street. He says in the beginning, "it is illusion to think that there is anything fragile about the life of the earth; surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe", and I believe he says this to encourage the reader to see themselves as something tough, something made up of many things yet resilient to many others. Just because you allow strange people or things you aren't familiar with into your life doesn't mean you are weak. Those things can build you up and make you even stronger. Stronger against the viruses of the world, which are accidents, things that were dropped, things that don't share the same goal as everyone else. Our world shares not one goal, but many abstract, unknowable goals, and we all work together in our vast yet small cell-like environment to protect ourselves, not just as humans but as organisms, the planet united.