Living in the present
Living in the present is like “descending a hill, rounding a corner, stepping into the street with a companion” who urges you on, while you try to “look back” over your shoulder “at the sight which recedes, vanishes.” The present of the protagonist’s “consciousness” is itself a mystery which is also “always just rounding a bend like a floating branch borne by a flood.” “Where I am?” The irony of the situation is that no matter whether you try to live in the moment or don’t even think about that, you will wonder where the time has gone.
Looking for a reason
Fish “gotta swim” and bird “gotta fly.” However, insects, “it seems,” “gotta do one horrible things after another.” The protagonist never ask why of “a vulture or shark,” but she asks “why” of “almost every insect” she sees. More than one insect – “the possibility of fertile reproduction” – is “an assault on all human value, all hope of a reasonable god.” Even “that devout Frenchman, J. Henry Fabre,” who “devoted his entire life to the study of insects,” cannon restrain “a feeling of unholy revulsion.” The irony is that it would be a bit reckless of us to pin our hopes of a reasonable god on unsuspecting insects.
Puzzle
When the protagonist was quite young, she “fondly imagined” that “all foreign languages” were “codes for English.” She thought that “hat,” say, was “the real actual name of the thing,” but that people in other countries, “who obstinately persisted in speaking the code of their forefathers,” might use the word “ibu,” “to designate not merely the concept hat,” but the English word “hat.” The irony was that the protagonist wasn’t entirely wrong. Indeed, any language is a code, not for English, of course, but for a certain culture.
