Yeah, Sure, Nature. Whatever, by Michael Sims

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Once at a party, while I was holding a martini in my hand, I backed into a large armchair and accidentally did a backflip over the arm of it, landing on my feet-without spilling a drop of the martini. (It's possible that this was not my first martini of the evening.) I stood there blinking. Witnesses report that I then said casually, "And that's how centrifugal force keeps water from flying off our spinning planet."

Perspective. That's what you get from the natural sciences. Perspective.

I find curiosity and a passion for learning glamorous, even sexy. I'm not a scientist; I don't even play one on TV. But I love the knowledge we get from the natural sciences: biology, geology, astronomy, the disciplines devoted to figuring out how the real world works. Their aerial view-above my daily earthbound scurry in the minutiae of paying bills and driving in rush hour-enriches my life and gives me a different perspective.

But I had never really been asked to justify my interest in nature and the natural sciences until this guy walked up to me at a book festival last year-a miniature fellow in a crazy loud houndstooth-of-the-baskervilles blazer. He looked very intense. I thought, Hmm, he can't dislike me already; we haven't even met.

"I read your new book," he said in a tone that somehow managed to sound ominous. He was talking about Apollo's Fire, which I was there to read from and talk about. It's an appreciative little book about the primordial rhythms of daylight and darkness, the progress of that ancient cycle throughout the day, from before dawn until after nightfall. I was afraid that Houndstooth was going to be like the woman in New Zealand who wrote me a letter about my book Adam's Navel and complained that I seem to have a bias against marsupials. I wrote back, "Jeeze, lady, some of my best friends are marsupials," but I didn't mail it. So I was looking at this guy and thinking, Shouldn't I be at home writing?

"I liked it," he suddenly said.

I heard an odd noise and realized I had begun to purr. I like to think I always have time to meet new people of taste and discernment.

"But," and he exhaled one thought and sucked in a new one, "what's with all this-this nature stuff, anyway?"

Nature stuff? It's like saying to Agatha Christie, "Why are your books full of dead people?" I write nature stuff. Surely the cover warned him: sun, sky, stars, that sort of thing.

And then he said, "I mean, well, after all, nature's-nature's pretty much-over."

I just sat there. God had stricken me mute. Granted, I don't watch TV news, but I subscribe to Scientific American and I'm pretty sure they would have mentioned it if nature is over. I manufactured something approaching a smile and felt it freeze and begin to slide off my face as if I were posing for a photograph in 1870.

I've been asked before to defend my skepticism about the claim that the Earth was created just a few thousand years ago and dinosaurs were sobbing at being left behind when the Ark sailed off into a certain tempest. I've been told that my loudmouth complaints about pollution and toxins are unAmerican or Unamerican or however you capitalize that ridiculous word. But I had never been asked why I cared about nature at all.

Then I realized that I was looking right through this guy, past his loud blazer and his bald spot and his gold pinkie ring. (No, I just made up the ring, for some reason.) I was seeing a fellow mammal, a biped, a primate, a fellow inhabitant of a wet ball of rock spinning through space in the middle of the galactic nowheresville, the boondocks of the universe. We stood above thousands of miles of rock, the archives of our evolution, and below millions of years of change recorded in that ephemeral time machine, the light of the stars. He was just another ape along with me, a couple of clueless animals peering up at the sky. And it suddenly occurred to me that, although I don't regard nature as endowed with imagination, I see it as infinitely creative-the root of all our urges to make things, from babies to books.

I answered his question about why I write nature stuff with one word: "Perspective."

"What?"

It was hard to explain.

Michael Sims, The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime, Penguin Classic, Penguin Books