The Naming

You hold a small brown bird in your hand. It is still warm. You caught it this morning in a net strung between two trees in a forest no European has ever entered before, and now you are going to do something that will outlast you by centuries. You are going to name it. Not what the people who live in this forest call it — they have called it something for ten thousand years. You are going to give it a name in Latin, in two parts, in a system invented by a Swede who named so many creatures he named a flower after himself. The name you choose will be printed in a catalogue, and from that moment forward, in every museum and university and field guide on Earth, this bird will officially begin to exist. The bird does not care. It has been flying through that forest since before your country existed. But now it is yours — or rather, it belongs to the system, and you are the system's hand. Thousands of creatures were named this way: after generals, after kings, after the namers themselves. A beetle carries Napoleon's name. A spider carries Hitler's. And somewhere in a drawer in a building you will never visit, pinned to a card with a label in faded ink, is the single original specimen — the one true body — the whole world's definition rests on.