Insects and moths freak me out. I know I'm not the only one when I say this, but I've always been deathly afraid of spiders, moths and other kinds of bugs. It's not particularly anything about the bug that inspires my particularly intense disgust. And yet I've always been the one to call my dad into my room, shrieking and crying, to kill the cockroach on the floor. It might sound morbid but up until this week it hadn't really registered in my brain that moths (and by extension bugs) were still living breathing beings.
While reading the death of a moth by Virgina Woolf this week in Lang I remember feeling empathy for the moth, who struggled with all its might to escape the windowpane, something I'd forgotten to do for the insects that I found in my own home who were also likely just trying to escape. Through Woolf's writing about her experience with the moth, I was able to draw my own similarities with it.
The description of the moth played a huge part in its anthropomorphism with Woolf describing him as " little or nothing but life". By reiterating the "diminutive fiber of his life" Woolf shows us that no matter how insignificant, everyone's life contains the same richness and zeal as their own. We all contain life and by acknowledging the moth as a living being the moth changes from an it to a he. And even though the moth plays such a small part in our everyday lives, its life and eventually its death are still marked by the same spectacular nature as our own. It dances around the windowpane trying to escape its death just as humans dance around hospital beds trying to extend our lifespans. "One is apt to forget all about life, seeing it humped and bossed and garnished and cumbered so that it has to move with the greatest circumspection and dignity." Here, Woolf redirects our own opinions of life's value and meaning beyond material circumstances. The moth, despite all of its struggles as a small "ugly" insect is still content with its life and does not worry itself like the author does about "the thought of all that life might have been had he been born in any other shape". More than that however, mortality is a shared experience. Despite the author watching the moth’s death from almost a godlike vantage point. The author will ultimately also succumb to the same fate. None of us are exceptions to mortality so therefore all of us face the same fate and have equal experiences. The material circumstances any one animal or person is born into do not exempt them from this fate despite the many efforts they may make to prolong it.
Wolfe’s piece in my opinion is a piece on empathy that reminds us that even the smallest animals/people are alive. Even the smallest moth feels the fibre of life and even the largest animal will feel the pain of death.
