Butterfly Minds

by Theodore Dalrymple (August 2013)

We were promised, the following week, a report from the land of the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, though I do not remember whether the correspondent was to be resuscitated like Sherlock Holmes after the events at the Reichenbach Falls.

The dinosaur broadcast was well-timed, for I was then going through the dinosaur stage that all boys seem to go through (few girls share the fascination, for reasons which a brain scanner will no doubt one day reveal, at least to the satisfaction of neuroscientists). This is interesting, because of course dinosaurs were really only discovered or made popular in the 1840s and first entered imaginative literature in the opening pages of Bleak House. Has human boyhood, then, changed since 1840, or was there an equivalent stage before dinosaurs?

When it comes to nature, it is not that I have lacunae in my knowledge, but rather knowledge (and very little of it) in my grand Lacuna.

Still, I wish I had pursued nature study (as it was then called) with more concentration, application and determination than I did. Then perhaps I would be able to answer questions with ease such as the following, that came to me quite unbidden recently: where do the butterflies that flutter all day around the lavender bushes outside my window go at night? They disappear some time before sundown as if in response to an order. Do butterflies sleep? Do they have enough mental activity for their rest to be called sleep? Do they go to their rest as individuals or collectively, and if collectively do they roost according to their various species? How do they avoid night predation? Surely lepidopterists must know the habits of the creatures they catch and collect: they are not just, well, butterfly-collectors, who merely hope for a full set issued by Nature as philatelists hope for full sets as issued by the Post Offices of countries long ago and far away (lepidopterists of my acquaintance are obsessional). How would one go about discovering the nocturnal habits of butterflies, or would one have to rely on chance observation? Could one follow butterflies to their lairs at close of day?

Margaret, are you grieving
And ends:

It is the blight man was born for,
Why, when I had spent many hours happily (though idly, from the point of view of cost-benefit analysis) looking at the butterflies on my lavender bushes, did the question of where they went after dark never occur to me before? It is not that I had not noticed that they disappeared within a short space of time more or less together, like unionised workers walking off the job when a strike is called.

The reason is that I simply took the way things were for granted, without thinking why they were as they were. Of course we have to do this for most of our lives: we cannot be paralysed by curiosity. And yet the opposite extreme, the habit of taking everything for granted, never wondering about anything, is one of the worst fates that can befall a man (if taking everything for granted can be called a fate rather than a decision). To walk in a world devoid of mystery is to embark on a voyage that is as tedious as it will appear long.

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