My wife and my (grown) children chuckle at me over the painstaking tactics to which I resort in order to rescue bugs from windowpanes, bathtubs, curtains, and corners. I am not a Hindu. These little creatures are not, in my view, worthies from earlier incarnations. One would hate to be found squashing, say, Ivan the Terrible or Heliogabalus.
But if you pause only for the briefest moment before you swat the interloper or pinch it into a Kleenex, you will find that you are looking at a being so delicate, so fragile, and so exquisitely designed that all desire to extirpate the visitor evaporates.
If this sounds mawkish, my only rejoinder would be, “Try it. Pause just for a moment.” Microchips and the Voyager spacecraft are positively Cro-Magnon next to the complexity and perfection one observes in a mayfly, a daddy longlegs, or a moth—particularly the latter, with its feathered antennae, not to mention the more-than-oriental splendor of the color design on the wings.
My usual strategy is to get a piece of reasonably stiff paper and an empty jam jar, pop it over the offender, slide the paper gingerly under him, then nip out the kitchen door and release him into the green outdoors. I find myself particularly concerned about bumblebees, since they are such earnest workers.
If all of this isn’t mawkish, surely it is maudlin? You lepidopterists and zoologists will be choking with incredulity at this point. Come. A whole column on How Nice I Am to Bugs? Let us get up letters of protest to the editor.
But allow me to say my piece here before you put money into a stamp and add to the editor’s pile of mail. (Now you know that I am so old that I still think of stamps, paper, and envelopes when I think of editorial mail. E-mail exists for me in a category with Star Trek.)
My apologia would run something like this: These small beings are fellow-creatures with me. I do not sentimentalize that. The seraphim are also fellow-creatures with me. They were designed by the sheer Love of the Most High (pace C. Darwin & Co.). There is certainly a hierarchy of beings: We can’t put slime molds in the rank with the seraphim. But one way or another, the entire hierarchy unfurls an immense and mysterious panoply. I have no great interest in ripping the fabric. If the rescue is fairly easily done, and if the creature in question carries no pox or toxin with it, and if I keep my Catholic sanity about me, then I don’t begrudge the piece of paper, the jam jar, and the 30 seconds that it all costs me in the interest of keeping alive my own sense of wonder, not to mention the well-being of the small fellow.
It is difficult not to be a jade in this epoch of the Information Superhighway, and thus to find one’s moral and imaginative nerve endings cauterized. There’s too much going on, we all want to shout. How can you expect me to pay attention to these minuscule individuals?
Well, try rescuing a few of them for a start.
But alas: I must end with a demurral. Readers will already be huffing: Tell us all what you do with houseflies, forsooth, or gnats or hornets or no-see-ums.
I swat them, along with the best of you. But I have, actually, scrutinized even these nettlesome species with great awe as they groom themselves, and my swat brings a pang (be it ever so small). I suppose we must all Sing Hey for the Fall: After all, the whole thing is our fault, not theirs. We blew it in Eden and introduced estrangement, rupture, and death into the system. How Redemption is going to work, especially the restoring of all things (all squashed gnats?) is a piquant question, not to be dismissed with cavalier airs.