Recently Jonathan Lethem (author of Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude) came up with a list of his top 10 trippiest reads for our October 2007 books page. As he describes it, the list is composed of those books that either make you feel in an altered state or are excellent companions to one you might mix up on your own (no recipes for this are provided). Had he known about Microcosmos: Discovering the World Through Microscopic Images from 20 X to over 22 Million X Magnification, just out from Firefly Press, I’m sure he would have accommodated it. Here are close-ups given us by a scanning electron microscope (SEM) of a germinating seed, tarantula eyes, a gecko foot, tungsten crystals, a human tongue and chromosome and much more.

Three-dimensional and often but not always digitally colored (to better delineate the structure of the object photographed), these images look like the stuff of graphic sci-fi, your last trip (to the rainbow connection), or, say, the work of contemporary painter Alex Ross (not the comic book guy but the one who makes his 2-D oil paintings of green cellular structures look 3-D and alive) or multi-media artist Susan Jennings (she can turn an orange rind into a moonscape), or of another more vivid planet altogether.  The butterfly scales, captured in a range of blues and fuchsias at 420 X, are psychedelic and achingly delicate, and the dust mite suckers, plump and pink at 2200 X, are strangely vaginal.

Most startling to me is the chapter devoted to the human body. The intricate and even scary beauty of nerve cell growth, stem cells, mitosis and mitochondria call to mind Lewis Thomas and his Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, perhaps the finest example science writing available and of writing generally really, the sort that can’t be taught. Thomas’s book, much like the images in Microcosmos, excites wonder and even some worry; it challenges one’s sense of what nature is and reminds us of the riotous and otherworldly forms of nature existing in us, you, right now. Here’s what I mean (from p. 2 of the Bantam edition):

"A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours. They turn out to be separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves and their ways, replicating in their own fashion, privately, with their own DNA and RNA quite different from ours. Without them, we would not move a muscle, drum a finger, think a thought.

"Mitochondria are stable and responsible lodgers, and I choose to trust them. But what of the other little animals, similarly established in my cells, sorting and balancing me, clustering me together? My centrioles, basal bodies, and probably a good many other more obscure tiny beings at work inside my cells, each with its own special genome, are as foreign, and as essential, as aphids in anthills… I like to think that they work in my interest, that each breath they draw is for me, but perhaps it is they who walk through the local park in the early morning, sensing my senses, listening to my music, thinking my thoughts."  

Now that gives you pause (evidently self-possession is merely a state of mind, at least at the cellular level); Jonathan Lethem should have considered The Lives of a Cell for his list, too; yes, it celebrates life’s itty-bittiest members, cells, insects and germs, in an understated, affectionate manner, but its effects are grand—deranging and uplifting—while also being entirely legal and cost-effective.