What is Life?
By Ingira Reimer
“Life is cats” said Mr. Burgess jokingly, as an example of what not to write for a grade 12 biology assignment. However for some, life really is cats. The piano teacher that I take lessons from whenever I go to New York City (while accompanying my dad on his business trips) has owned various cats during her life, and when I talked to her on the phone the other day I learned that one of her current cats has had lymphoma for the past two years ... instead of putting the cat to sleep, she has spent thousands of dollars on chemotherapy, radiation, and the best possible vet care in the city. She said, “Well, as soon as Shayan shows any sign of suffering, I will put her down straight away. And you know, after a mourning period, I'll get more cats anyway – oops, I shouldn't have said that, because Shayan's in the room now, listening.” For my New York City piano teacher, life really is cats.
Most would agree that living things almost always physically move, even if it isn't visible to the human eye. In a book about quantum mechanics, Gary Zukav raises an interesting point about this statement: “By watching time-lapse photography, we know that plants often respond to stimulae with human-like reactions. They retreat from pain, advance toward pleasure, and even languish in the absence of affection. The only difference is that they do it at a much slower rate than we do. So much slower, in fact, that it appears to the ordinary perception that they do not react at all. If this is so, then how can we say with certainty that rocks, and even mountain ranges, do not react also as living organisms, but with a reaction time so slow that to catch it with time-lapse photography would require millennia between exposures!” (Zukav, 1979). |
So, maybe life is just anything that is physically present. But what about everything that is subjective? God, angels, and even stories are a big part of some people's lives, but they are not tangible or objective. In J.B.S. Haldane's essay, “What is Life?,” he writes that an author still has life even after his death, because his mind is still present through his literary works: “...books which clearly show their author's mind, and go on influencing readers long after he is dead,” (Haldane, 1949). The same concept, I believe, can be applied to composers: their music can timelessly be played by an orchestra, hummed in the school hallways, or listened to on an iPod, and by playing or listening to any composition, one is keeping the composer alive by trying to understand their thoughts and feelings. The life of a composer can influence people eternally.
In grade 11 biology, we learned that living beings are able to maintain homeostasis, organization, metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, and reproduction. In a way, it is nice to hear this definition because it is something concrete: a definitive answer. Cats, rocks, novels, homeostasis ... these words all conjure up images of life, living, being alive. Maybe the better question to ask would be: what is not life? |
Bibliography
Haldane, J.B.S. What is Life? London: Alcuin Press, 1949. Print.
Zukav, Gary. The Dancing Wu Li Masters. New York: HarperCollins, 1979. Print.
Haldane, J.B.S. What is Life? London: Alcuin Press, 1949. Print.
Zukav, Gary. The Dancing Wu Li Masters. New York: HarperCollins, 1979. Print.