The first headnote, clearly, puns on the prefix “bi” in the title. The “by” in “Touch of Grey” is linked to survival—we will get by, as the Grateful Dead repeat, and add, as an almost redundant coda, we will survive. In Mrs Dalloway the freefloating narrator links survival—but after death, not in life—to trees. It is through our tree-like linkage—our branching out—to other people that we survive. Trees are, or can be, a lattice, a network. Woolf here suggests that our survival is dependent on this kind of network. It is not just through a one-on-one, binary connection, that we continue on after death, but rather through a mesh of multiple connections. And the Grateful Dead acknowledge this multiple dimension of survival too. The refrain beginning “We will get by” is repeated throughout the song as “I will get by”; the first-person pronoun changes to “we” only in the very last line of the song.

This notion of survival through a complex system is an integral part of Darwinism. Darwin's emphasis on an “inextricable web of affinities” (Darwin 415) is highlighted now by many scientists who hope to suggest the complexities of evolution through the use of the term “coevolution.” Coevolution is conceived of in multiple ways, but for the sake of this essay I will define it as the way “two interacting species or groups of species change in response to each other” (Vermeij 219). Coevolutionary approaches, as the sociologist Myra Hird writes, “consider selective pressures as more involved with each other, more enmeshed” (740).