Philosophy and the Insect

By Stephen O’Connor

 As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.      –Shakespeare

My father was a religious man, a devout Catholic who got down on his knees every night to pray. Though he regarded Catholic theology as the true doctrine, he was curious about other religions and respected people of all faiths. I remember him telling me once that he had spoken with a Hindu, who told him that it was bad karma to kill an insect. “Bad karma,” as we understood it at the time, was something like a sin. I’m sure we both thought this idea was odd. Though one had to admire that sort of commitment to nonviolence, a solicitousness about the fate of a bug struck us both as bordering on silly.

I don’t know what it is about aging, or maybe it’s maturing, or the fact of the deaths of family and old friends, but my feelings on this point seem to have evolved over the years. When Woody Allen was asked by a French reporter a few years ago how he felt about death now that he had reached an advanced age, he responded, “Death? I’m against it.” When you are truly against death, you must hesitate to kill anything, it seems.

Robert Frost once saw an infinitesimal insect crawling across the white sheet on which he was writing. He poised his pen above the tiny creature and paused. He considered how the “considerable speck” appeared to realize it was in danger and was moving as quickly as it could in quite a panic. “It didn’t want to die,” he says, and finally, he allowed the insect to live, concluding:

I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise
No one can know how glad I am to find
On any sheet the least display of mind.

Shakespeare’s Lear lamented,

And my poor fool is hanged. No, no, no life?
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.

Why shouldn’t the dog, the horse, the rat, even the lowly insect have life whether the king’s beloved fool lives or not? In the workings of the universe, there is no hierarchy of living things. No creatures “want to die,” and all will follow their natures and use guile, fang or claw to stay alive. Universe does contain the prefix “uni,” and I see now that the Hindu was right in thinking that we are all part of one thing. The molecules that make us up derive from plants, from other animals and from stardust. I once heard someone say, “We are the eyes of the earth looking at itself.”

The result of all of these ruminations, for me, has been this. I sometimes see a bee trapped against the glass on the back porch. Bees are good. We need bees. I’ll put a glass over the bee, slide a piece of cardboard under the glass and release the bee to go about its business. Other harmless insects get the same treatment.

I’m unable to be so dispassionate and humane in the case of all insects, and for that I may suffer some bad karma. Anything that might do me or other humans or my dog harm must die. Mosquitoes and ticks top this list. Occasionally, a centipede makes an appearance in the basement and a few have even been known to make it up to the kitchen. I believe that there is something that humans instinctively find repulsive in a centipede. Too many legs. Which means they run fast. I will kill a centipede before the slightest trace of Hindu philosophy or universal benevolence can ignite a spark in my brain. I will slam my fist down on the “cowerin’ timorous beastie” with such violence that I am in danger of breaking my hand. The only grace I can grant them is sudden death. They are too ugly for us to tolerate. That is the unphilosophic truth. But who would kill a Ladybug?

Yesterday, after returning from the woods with my dog, I washed my hands at the kitchen sink and saw in the corner of the sink, a very tiny black insect. I was sort of hoping it was a tick I had just washed off, which would spare me any philosophizing as I carried out the immediate death sentence. I put on my glasses and studied the unfortunate insect, who was desperately trying and quite unable to climb up the stainless steel sides of the sink. Well, there was no doubt about it. It was not a tick. It was a very tiny black spider. The philosophizing began. I imagined myself on a raft in the Pacific while some Supreme Being considered whether I deserved a gentle landward breeze or a hurricane. I would need all the good karma I could store up, because like Shakespeare’s “wanton boys,” I have killed flies for sport.

Duly chastened by these thoughts, I got a shot glass, covered the wee insect, slid the paper underneath and brought it outside. I hung the shot glass upside down near the front steps and watched as it lowered itself to the ground on a gossamer thread. “You amazing little creature,” I couldn’t help thinking.

Something very strange happened then. I had signed up to receive notices and articles from National Geographic in my email. Shortly after delivering this spider from my sink, I received an email from the aforesaid source. I wouldn’t lie to you about this; it would be bad karma. The title of the article was “Small Spiders have Big Brains That Spill Into Their Legs.” Apparently building webs requires a big brain. Here’s the kicker. The spider in the photo at the top of the article bore a striking resemblance to the one I had just released. Somewhere, Robert Frost was smiling.