Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
“I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars,” the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska wrote in her stunning poem “Possibilities.” And why shouldn’t we? We are, after all, creatures pinned to scales of space and time far closer to those of the insects than to those of the stars.
I was reminded of Szymborska’s strange and beautiful line upon discovering a French natural history encyclopedia of beetles from 1884 — an era when astronomical art was of supreme enchantment. In its nearly 500 pages, the book synthesizes “the observations of the ancients and including all the modern discoveries up to the present day,” promising “a complete treatise on this science from the works of the most eminent naturalists of all countries and ages.”
These populist creatures of the order Coleoptera, which has inhabited Earth for more than 250 million years — the largest of all orders, numbering some 400,000 species and comprising a quarter of all known animal life-forms — seem to occupy a special yet ambivalent place in the human imagination: scorned and sacred, poisoned as pests and cherished as pets, collected as prized jewels and protected as vital linchpins of biodiversity, played as musical instruments by the Onabasulu of Papua New Guinea and used as inspiration for naming England’s greatest rock band….
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