Lewis Thomas The Medusa And The Snail

Reading some of the essays in “The Medusa and the Snail”, were really hard to understand what Lewis Thomas was trying to say. The book as a whole talked about a variety of topics that included Thomas’ view on connectedness, death, health, the healthcare system, the advancement of science and more. There were essays that I understood well as it opened my mind about life and those around me. These essays are, “The Deacon’s Masterpiece”, “On Committees”, and “Notes on Punctuation”. To begin, “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” main focus was to share with the reader that no matter how much you try to avoid death by fixing everything that is “broken”, dying is inevitable as it is a part of nature. The reason why I love this piece so much because it is so relevant to how us humans think. We want to avoid death as most Americans fear it; however, it is impossible to do so because everything dies. The way Thomas’ used an example from another author about the carriage eventually dying 100 years later really helped me understand what his message was. The big take away that I got from this essay was that instead of worrying about living long and fixing everything that is wrong with you, just live. You will die when you die and there is nothing you can do to change that, you cannot cheat death. The thing …show more content…
This is a very important piece to me because I feel like in our everyday lives we face problems that would be best solved by working with others. Consequently, that is not the case as we are rely on ourselves which can be sometimes detrimental to our success in solving our problem at hand; therefore, we may possibly create bigger problems. The message that I got was that coming together and being connected as one, like animals, will allow us to successfully tackle challenges head