Books, Naturally
An Obsession
with Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair with a Singular
Insect
Sharman Apt Russell. 2003. Perseus Publishing,
Cambridge, Massachusetts. 238 pp., hardbound. $24.
A Few Short
Notes on Tropical Butterflies
John Murray. 2003. HarperCollins
Publishers Inc., New York. 274 pp., hardbound. $24.95.
Many years ago, I invited National Zoo scientists to share a personal experience of the rainforest with ZooGoer readers. The vignette contributed by David Challinor, now a Smithsonian Senior Scientist Emeritus, was my favorite. David recalled that the nuns who taught him as a small boy likened his soul to a sheet of clean white paper.
This evoked in young David an image of his soul as a small, very thin, very white card that floated lightly above his head. Forty years later, David saw for the first time a white Morpho butterfly in the Honduran rainforest. “Out of the corner of my eye,” he wrote, “I saw a pure white shape, about 3” x 5”, come out of the forest and drift across the opening….It barely flapped its wings, and as I breathlessly watched it my mind flashed back to the nuns’ description of my soul…. Never again have I encountered an experience comparable to watching my soul glide silently across a tropical forest glade.”
In An Obsession with Butterflies, Sharman Apt Russell writes, “The butterfly is a human soul. What could be more obvious?” The Greeks used the word psyche for both, and a law in 17th-century Ireland banned the killing of white butterflies because they were children’s souls.
In this lovely little book, itself only a bit larger than a Morpho butterfly, Russell explores the world of butterflies through the eyes of people obsessed with these winged insects. With the zeal of missionaries out to save human souls, naturalists and scientists have gone to the ends of the Earth to collect and study butterflies, and while butterflies can be admired simply for their beauty, understanding their biology makes them still more fascinating.
Russell is not a science writer in the conventional sense. Instead, she paints lyrical pictures to reveal what is known about butterflies. How they develop through a series of transformations from eggs to adults is sketched with scientific accuracy and summarized in poetry: “A bag of goo crawls on a leaf, obsessed with eating. It hangs upside down. It becomes something else. A butterfly is born, a bit of blue heaven, a jazzy design.”
Russell does the same to explain the diversity of colors butterflies come in a chapter called “Butterfly Matisse.” Mating, mothering, migrating, mimicry, and moths are the themes of other chapters. Of the occasional mass migrations of Snout butterflies in the southwest U.S. she writes, “…millions of Snouts filled the sky….They clogged car radiators. They ruined laundry. They passed overhead like a muddy, aerial river.”
Of the people obsessed with butterflies, Russell writes about Henry Bates, an heroic 19th-century collector of butterflies in the Amazon, about writer and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov, and others, including a British scientist whose life’s work is the 18-volume Moths of Borneo, and a former L.A. gang member saved from a life of crime when he discovered El Segundo Blue butterflies. From each of these men and women, Russell has captured delightful admissions of their obsession. Here she quotes an Australian biologist: “‘There was a time in my life,” Bert confesses, “when butterflies supplied for me all that I might otherwise have sought in art, literature, religion, and romantic love.”’
The men and women John Murray brings to life in the eight exquisitely written stories that comprise A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies are obsessed too. Obsessed with butterflies, beetles, cholera bacteria, hardware. Like that of Russell’s Australian biologist, the obsessions of some are substitutes for a fuller life; others lose their lives to them. These characters are mostly scientists, physicians, collectors, and explorers, and their behavior exposes the utter selfishness of people who live only to satisfy their need to possess and order the unruly world around them.
The grandfather of the unnamed protagonist of the title story was a fictional correspondent with Henry Bates (one of many coincidental connections between these books). He pursued his obsessive desire to capture a Queen Alexandria’s Birdwing, the world’s largest butterfly, in New Guinea. With ruthless single-mindedness he succeeded, but he left his ailing friend behind to be killed by hostile locals, and he himself became, in the words of the protagonist’s wife, “the only man I have ever known to be killed by a butterfly.” He resorted to cannibalism on his adventure, and years later lost his mind and his life to kuru, a disease that slowly eats away the brain. But, his grandson says, “Somehow, when I look at the marvelous splashes of life and color that these butterflies still provide, I feel certain that he believed that it had all been worthwhile.”
Butterflies as a metaphor for the soul, and the ephemeral nature of life, appear often in these richly textured tales. But butterflies are also symbols of redemption, of life begun anew when a butterfly struggles to free itself from its cocoon. This is the central lepidopteran metaphor of this collection. Murray’s characters reach crises during which they break free of their pasts and emerge, for better or worse, transformed—and, sometimes, less egocentrically lonesome.
These two books, so different in substance and style—one fiction, one factual—form mutually illuminating companions. I read them together—a story from one, a chapter from the other. I recommend this. In my mind, fiction and fact, art and science, resonating metaphors and allusions flitted between the two, like butterflies who, fluttering between flowers, light up our life.
—Susan Lumpkin
ZooGoer 32(5) 2003. Copyright
2003 Friends of the National Zoo.
All rights reserved.
