Physician and writer Lewis Thomas leads off his renowned essay "The Lives of a Cell," which appears in a 1974 essay collection of the same name, with these sentences:
We are told that the trouble with Modern Man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature. He sits at the topmost tiers of polymer, glass, and steel, dangling his pulsating legs, surveying at a distance the writhing life of the planet.Thomas immediately sets a stage that we readers know he does not accept. By the next paragraph, he makes clear that "We are the delicate part" of the universe. In this and the other 29 essays in Lives of a Cell, Thomas humbles our egocentric worldview by emphasizing time and again how cells connect humans, animals, plants, and even the planet as a singular entity. He does so in the above two sentences by giving us a false sense of security that we are "pulsating" with life while all else around us is "writhing." In being set us by with this implausible scenario, we are eager to know how we should really be thinking.
