A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, Read in Waiting Room Chairs

Full disclosure, this one I finished in a single overnight, which almost never happens, it’s short enough to fit in the gaps between two admissions and a discharge. Von Uexkull is writing about umwelt, the idea that a tick or a jellyfish or whatever isn’t living in our world, it’s living in its own stripped down version of it, built out of whatever signals actually matter to that animal. For the tick apparently that’s about three things total. I kept thinking about triage while I read it, which is probably not what he intended, but you narrow the world down to what’s actionable too, when you’ve got six minutes and a full board.

It’s a quirky little book, genuinely, that’s the word that keeps surfacing when people talk about it, and it reads that way, full of musical metaphors that felt more decorative than useful to me, softer than the argument underneath them needed. Somebody, and this stuck with me, put it next to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and Hans Jonas as a piece of a bigger conversation about interiority, about mechanistic explanations of life leaving something out. I’m not equipped to referee that argument. I can say the terminology is looser than the idea deserves, and that the idea itself is worth having.

I want to be straight that the corpus here is thin, two reviews is what there is, so take this as a small honest read of a small honest book rather than anything comprehensive. Worth the ninety minutes.