Chaos is not a temporary obstacle but the default state of everything

Miller opens with an almost cosmic premise borrowed from physics: entropy is winning, always. Order, meaning, categories, and even living organisms are temporary local exceptions carved out against a universal tendency toward disorder. Her personal despair earlier in life stemmed partly from taking this literally — if collapse is the rule, why build anything that will inevitably fall apart?

David Starr Jordan's life becomes her test case: an earthquake shattered thousands of glass jars holding his painstakingly labeled fish specimens, mixing them into a single unlabeled pile on the floor. His response — sewing labels directly onto the fish themselves so chaos could never again erase his work — reads initially as a triumphant answer to her question.

Miller uses this literal disaster as a metaphor she returns to throughout: every classification system, every sense of stable meaning, is a jar that can shatter, and the real question isn't how to prevent the shattering but how to respond when it happens.

Takeaway: order is a labor you perform against entropy, not a state you achieve once and keep.