On summer mornings in the mid-nineteen-sixties, I would follow the path behind our house through a growth of poplars and sassafras to the place where the white oaks and tulip trees took over. The path ended at the top of the hill where we went sledding in winter. Most mornings in that small clearing, weather permitting, I would find a Mourning Cloak, the most beautiful of butterflies, warming itself in what Nabokov in Ada calls a “dapple of drifting sunlight.” I was then collecting butterflies, which meant killing one with a pinch to the thorax, a practice that shames me today. Yet, as an adolescent, I fancied a fraternal bond with that Mourning Cloak. It was always the same individual in my imagination, not a generic “specimen.”  In England, the Mourning Cloak (Nymphalis antiopa) is called the Camberwell Beauty, and Nigel Andrew recalls his first encounter:   “As a boy, I used to dream of seeing a Camberwell Beauty (from time to time I still do), but I had to wait until many years later, when, on a visit to Canada, I had my own ‘grand surprise’ [a folk name for the butterfly in England]. . . . The beautiful creature was understandably torpid, and very nearly—wonder of wonders—walked onto my outstretched finger: four feet were on before it changed its mind and, summoning it energy, flew off.”   Anyone ever enchanted by the sight of a butterfly, whether a lepidopterist or casual amateur, is likely to have such memories. The insect’s beauty is intensified by its gratuitousness. Nige offers all the solid evolutionary evidence for their aesthetic excess but remains true to the title of his new book, The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment (Saraband). Nige is a veteran of the Golden Age of Blogging, and a rare blogger who can write. His book combines memoir, field guide and philosophical meditation. He even argues that observing butterflies is good for you, a goad to mindfulness. His subtitle is intended literally. More than any other animals, even birds, butterflies inspire wonder. Nige reviews the history of butterfly/human relations in England, which started with indifference, turned into a popular hobby, proceeded to obsessive collecting that vastly reduced the populations of some species, and finally evolved into serious science coupled with delight. He writes:   “Even in this time of rapid scientific advance, enlightenment could not be wholly disentangled from enchantment. If pure scientific curiosity drove the specialists’ activities, the allure of butterflies for most people was more emotionally grounded and more strongly aesthetic."     As a gifted reader, Nige laces his text with allusions to, among others, John Clare, Kingsley Amis, Darwin, Sigfried Sassoon, Simone Weil (!), Sir Thomas Browne, Kay Ryan, Walt Whitman and, most often, the lepidopterist/novelist Nabokov. His most surprising find is a passage by Joseph Conrad from the preface to The Shadow-Line (1916), used as an epigraph to the book:   “The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is; marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state.” Reading The Butterfly is pure pleasure. You need not be a biologist or nature mystic to enjoy it. “To get involved in watching butterflies,” he writes in a late chapter, “The Mindful Present: Seeing and Being,” “is to enter a new world, one that is rich, vibrant, abundant with life and color and energy—and in which we figure only as marginal, fleeting presences, potential threats but on no other interest. This parallel world goes o, with or without us.”   Nige’s first book, another paean to England and its traditions, was The Mother of Beauty (Thorntree Press, 2019), devoted to the country’s church monuments.

That we will never know what it is like to be another — another person, another creature — is one of the most exasperating things in life, but also one of the most humbling, the most catalytic to our creative energies: the great calibrator of our certainties, the ultimate corrective for our self-righteousness, the reason we invented language and science and art. If there weren’t such an abyss between us and all that is not us, we never would have tried to bridge it with our microscopes and telescopes and equations seeking to know the vaster realities of nature beyond… read article

My newly graduated youngest son is visiting Thailand with friends from his alma mater, Rice University. Most of the photos he has sent document meals eaten and temples visited, but among them is this one, my favorite image:  The smiling head of the Buddha sunk among the tangled roots of a banyan tree. The place is Wat Mahathat in Ayutthaya, former capital of Siam and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991. Founded in 1350, the city was destroyed by the Burmese in 1767 and today is known as Thailand’s Angkor Wat. It was abandoned until the 1950s.   I had seen the banyan/Buddha image once before, in black and white, accompanying a series of poems by the late Kenneth Fields, collectively titled “One Love,” a sort of travelogue documenting a visit to Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. Fields was a student of Yvor Winters at Stanford University, and co-edited with him a poetry collection, Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English (1969). Fields doesn’t mention the Buddha head explicitly:   “Sacred figures draped in yellow Bas-reliefs crumbling away Wat overgrown returning to earth”   Fields’ memories rhyme with my own:   “Rolling through these jungles News footage in my head I don’t have to spell it out”   And this:   “I feared seeing it as a boy Then thought I never would Mekong The wake of empires Spreading out”   Fields reanimates the Imagist impulse:   “Magnificent ruins, Forest and culture In symbiotic rush”   Fields visited Cambodia in 2009, during the trial of former Khmer Rouge prison camp commander Kang Kek Iew, known as “Comrade Duch”:   “Duch is on trial today. Head of Tuol Sleng, S-21. Old Party pols are trembling He’s not the only one”   From the beautiful landscape and temples, Fields move on to recent history and genocide:   “Decimated An entire country Many times over Some for wearing glasses”   Fields concludes the poem:   “The world is dark With us. Even Electricity darkens. Only a few— Honored in crumbling ruins Built by darkeners darkened In their turn— Only a wild heedlessness A spare carefulness for those we love Suffice”

Laura Spinney on the spread of Proto-Indo-European The post Lingua Obscura appeared first on The American Scholar.

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