The Flight of the Iguana Read Free Page B

don’t know. I don’t know why a spider has eight eyes.
    I only know that, when I make eye contact with one, I feel a deep physical shudder of revulsion, and of fear, and of fascination; and I am reminded that the human style of face is only one accidental pattern among many, some of the others being quite drastically different. I remember that we aren’t alone. I remember that we are the norm of goodness and comeliness only to ourselves. I wonder about how ugly I look to the spider.
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    The hundred baby black widows on my desk were too tiny for eye contact. They were too numerous, it seemed, to be gathered one by one into a pickle jar and carried to freedom in the backyard. I killed them all with a can of Raid. I confess to that slaughter with more resignation than shame, the jostling struggle for life and space being what it is. I can’t swear I would do differently today. But there is this lingering suspicion that I squandered an opportunity for some sort of moral growth.
    I still keep their dead and dried mother, and their vacated egg sac, in a plastic vial on an office shelf. It is supposed to remind me of something or other.
    And the question continues to puzzle me: How should a human behave toward the members of other living species?
    Last week I tried to make eye contact with a tarantula. This was a huge specimen, all hairy and handsomely colored, with a body as big as a hamster and legs the size of Bic pens. I ogled it through a sheet of plate glass. I smiled and winked. But the animal hid its face in distrust.

THINKING ABOUT EARTHWORMS

    An Unpopular Meditation on Darwin’s Silent Choir
    Somewhere between the ages of thirty and forty each of us comes to the shocking realization that a lifetime is not infinite. The world is big and rich, options are many, but time is limited. Once that dire truth has revealed itself, everything afterward becomes a matter of highly consequential choices. Every hour of cello practice is an hour that might have been spent rereading Dostoyevski, but wasn’t; every day of honest work is a day of lost skiing, and vice versa; every inclusion is also an exclusion, every embracement is also a casting aside, every do is also a didn’t Then presto: Time is up, and each didn’t goes down on the scroll as a never did. Yikes, why is he punishing us with this platitudinous drivel? you may ask. It’s because I’ve just spent the entire first week of my thirty-ninth year thinking about earthworms.
    Now I ask you to give the subject ten minutes. That figure includes a small margin, I hope, for divagations concerning television, the Super Bowl, the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin, the late space shuttle Challenger, and other closely related matters, not least of which is the far-ranging curiosity of Charles Darwin.
    Darwin spent forty-four years of his life, off and on, thinking about earthworms. This fact isn’t something they bother to tell you in freshman biology. Even Darwin himself seems to have harbored some ambivalence over the investment of time and attention. In an addendum to his autobiography, written not long before he died, he confided: “This is a subject of but small importance; and I know not whether it will interest any readers, but it has interested me.” The interest had begun back in 1837, when he was just home from his voyage on the Beagle, and it endured until very near the end of his life. He performed worm-related experiments that stretched across decades. Finally in 1881 he wrote a book about earthworms, a book in which the words “evolution” and “natural selection” are not (unless I blinked and missed them) even mentioned. That book is titled The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, With Observations of Their Habits. By “vegetable mould” he meant what today would be called humus, or simply topsoil. It was his last published