What does it mean to be "Thomasonian?"
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Lewis Thomas (1913-1993) was a physician, essayist, educator and researcher. His brilliant and philosophical essays translated the mysteries of biology into writing that was accessible.
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At Thomasonian, we want to continue the craft of sharing nature-based observations, studies, passions, and knowledge to a wide audience, and with crafted language.
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Here are some examples of his work:
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"I had never bargained on descent from single cells without nuclei. I could even make my peace with that, if it were all, but there is the additional humiliation that I have not, in a real sense, descended at all. I have brought them all along with me, or perhaps they have brought me.
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It is no good standing on dignity in a situation like this, and better not to try. It is a mystery. There they are, moving about in my cytoplasm, breathing for my own flesh, but strangers. They are much less closely related to me than to each other and to the free-living bacteria out under the hill. They feel like strangers, but the thought comes that the same creatures, precisely the same, are out there in the cells of sea gulls, and whales, and dune grass, and seaweed, and hermit crabs, and further inland in the leaves of the beech in my backyard, and in the family of skunks beneath the back fence, and even in that fly on the window. Through them, I am connected; I have close relatives, once removed, all over the place. This is a new kind of information, for me, and I regret somewhat that I cannot be in closer touch with my mitochondria. If I concentrate, I can imagine that I feel them; they do not quite squirm, but there is, from time to time, a kind of tingle. I cannot help thinking that if only I knew more about them, and how they maintain our synchrony, I would have a new way to explain music to myself."
From "The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher" (1974)
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"I wish that poets were able to give straight answers to straight questions, but that is like asking astrophysicists to make their calculations on their fingers, where we can watch the process. What I would like to know is: how should I feel about the earth, these days? Where has all the old nature gone? What became of the wild, writhing, unapproachable mass of the life of the world, and what happened to our old, panicky excitement about it? Just in fifty years, since I was a small boy in a suburban town, the world has become a structure of steel and plastic, intelligible and diminished. Mine was a puzzling maple grove of a village on the outskirts of New York City, and it vanished entirely, trees and all."
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From "The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher" (1979)
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