Edited by Dava Sobel There was a way of beholding nature that was like a form of prayer. When she painted a caterpillar, she limned the whole bracing saga of its life from birth, instars, and metamorphosis to the plants it gorged on and the predators who stalked, ambushed and gobbled it. Balancing the mingled dramas on one toothy page of vellum, she by the bye bore witness to feats of nature both outlandish and ordinary, such as maggots hatching freely from eggs like many living things, not from dead flesh or dust, without cause or coupling, in a mysterious brew of spontaneous generation. She chose to reveal the smallest, most despised creatures on earth as divine works of nature, and without cant or vanity tag them not in Latin, the scholar’s language and lingua franca of elite circles, but colloquially, in the colorful cant of street talk, inviting men, women, experts and workaday people alike to join her in putting aside the mask of habit, the hostile omens of superstition, any disgust they might harbor about vermin, or fable that bugs toil as Satan’s minions, and peer in wonder at the visible but unseen life all around them, dining, sparring, molting, mating, in a mad frenzy of war and survival— worlds unseen because unnoticed, not because, as piety taught, God purposely hid them from view. Here is a caterpillar’s eye, her paintings said, look how cleverly it’s designed! Here is a spider’s toe with tiny hairs. Can you imagine how they tread? Here is time elapsing inside a chrysalis, where caterpillar becomes butterfly, shape-shifting with infinite gradualness from one unlikely form to another, its behavior and purpose radically changed. Come closer, I will show you.
There was a way of beholding nature that was like a form of prayer. When she painted a caterpillar, she limned the whole bracing saga of its life from birth, instars, and metamorphosis to the plants it gorged on and the predators who stalked, ambushed and gobbled it.
Balancing the mingled dramas on one toothy page of vellum, she by the bye bore witness to feats of nature both outlandish and ordinary, such as maggots hatching freely from eggs like many living things, not from dead flesh or dust, without cause or coupling, in a mysterious brew of spontaneous generation.
She chose to reveal the smallest, most despised creatures on earth as divine works of nature, and without cant or vanity tag them not in Latin, the scholar’s language and lingua franca of elite circles, but colloquially, in the colorful cant of street talk, inviting men, women, experts and workaday people alike to join her in putting aside the mask of habit, the hostile omens of superstition, any disgust they might harbor about vermin, or fable that bugs toil as Satan’s minions, and peer in wonder at the visible but unseen life all around them, dining, sparring, molting, mating, in a mad frenzy of war and survival— worlds unseen because unnoticed, not because, as piety taught, God purposely hid them from view. Here is a caterpillar’s eye, her paintings said, look how cleverly it’s designed! Here is a spider’s toe with tiny hairs. Can you imagine how they tread? Here is time elapsing inside a chrysalis, where caterpillar becomes butterfly, shape-shifting with infinite gradualness from one unlikely form to another, its behavior and purpose radically changed. Come closer, I will show you.
