Microblogger Ent_evo wrote this in 2016.
“In 1954, biologist F.A. Brown dredged a batch of oysters (Ostrea virginica) from the shores of Conneticut and put them in an aquarium in a basement in Chicago, a thousand miles away.
He is a biorhythmic researcher and knows that oysters rise and fall with the tide.
For the first two weeks in the new home, nothing changed.
The oysters continued to live their normal lives: sometimes they retreated, sometimes they opened their shells, catching plankton in the water, feeding themselves, and following the tides off the distant shores of Kon-Tighe.
But over the next two weeks, something inexplicable happened.
They still ebbed and flowed like the tide, but their high-tide behavior no longer coincided with the tides of the Kon-natigas. Not Florida, not California, not Dover, not any of the tide tables known to science.
After much calculation, Brown realized one thing: This is Chicago’s high tide time.
But Chicago doesn’t have an ocean.
These oysters live in reinforced concrete basements, in glass boxes of artificial seawater. But they knew the sea existed, and their ancestors had lived by the sea for hundreds of millions of years; they could leave the sea, but the sea wouldn’t leave them.
Brown speculates that perhaps the oysters are aware of the changes in air pressure, from which they derive their own rhythms, the times when the tides should come.
None of the oysters are doing this consciously-but in some deep sense, they are imagining a sea, a sea that does not exist anywhere on earth, where there are tides and ebbs and they open and close to the rhythms of the sea.
Chicago doesn’t have the sea, but oysters bring the sea.
This is the story of the oyster.
Some of us realize that this is a God-forsaken planet and begin to wonder about the meaning of existence, some with clarity, some with a spiral of meaninglessness.
Others have never thought about the meaning of being alive in the first place.
Like the oyster that swallows transparent water in an aquarium, part of them thinks they are in the sea, and part of them realizes that this is not the sea.
So they imagine the sea.
You, too, can try to imagine or create your own meaning when you feel that the world has no meaning.
The meaning that I create is that I hope to finish a good book or watch a wonderful movie before I die.
So every time I am about to finish a book, I always start the next one seamlessly, because even if it is a great book, there are so many of them, so many that I could accompany me for the rest of my life.
Give things your own meaning instead of being pushed around by big, empty meanings.
Keep imagining and don’t underestimate yourself.
Even with such an inflation of the imagination, there are many romances that can be fulfilled by the imagination.
The world is broken, but the tide is in the oyster’s heart.
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