`A Symbol and a Sign'

In Houston, for several weeks late in the summer, swarms of butterflies share air space with hummingbirds. When the sun is high and clouds are sparse, the backyard is dense with color and motion. The woman from whom we bought the house three years ago had lived in it since 1955, when it was built, and was a serious, systematic gardener. At least one plant is always flowering in our yard, and she may have planted with hummingbirds in mind. They are attracted most to salvia, trumpet honeysuckle, firebush, butterfly weed and cardinal flower, and to the red glass feeder I hang from the eve.

Texas is tied with Arizona for the most hummingbird species – 16. Each county is home to at least two species, and Houston officially is visited by seven, though I can’t distinguish one species from another. The birds are so small and move so rapidly I mistake them for moths, wasps or acid flashbacks. They are lessons in applied epistemology: Am I real? If so, what am I?

I thought about our surfeit of beauty while reading Primo Levi’s Other People’s Trades, a collection of essays originally published in La Stampa, the newspaper in his native Turin, mostly in the 1980s. Levi makes few concessions to journalism or its readers. The essays are informal and engagingly discursive, but also deeply thoughtful and learned. One is devoted to his love of Rabelais, and he casually alludes to Kant, Borges, J.B.S. Haldane, Leopardi and Paul Celan. In “Butterflies,” Levi writes:

“Why are they beautiful? Certainly not for the pleasure of man, as Darwin’s opponents claimed: butterflies existed at least one hundred million years before the first man. I believe that our very concept of beauty, necessarily relative and cultural, has over the centuries patterned itself on them, as on the stars, the mountains, and the sea. We have proof of this if we consider what happens when we examine the head of a butterfly under the microscope; for the greater number of observers, admiration is replaced by horror or revulsion. Not being culturally accustomed to it, we find this new object disconcerting; the enormous eyes without pupils, the horn-like antennae, the monstrous, juglike mouth, look to us like a diabolical mask, a distorted parody of a human face.”

What struck me was Levi’s idea that our aesthetic sense has its origin in our responses to the natural world, which implies that natural selection hardwired us to appreciate the beautiful. Consider the disproportionate beauty of the paintings of animals in the caves at Lascaux, which date from 15,000 to 17,000 years ago. Often I’ve asked biologists if they thought the capacity to create and appreciate beauty might lend an evolutionary advantage to a given species. Most thought so, but agreed the hypothesis could not be proven. Levi deepens the mystery. He describes butterflies as “beautiful by definition, indeed our yardstick for beauty,” and writes:

“But the butterflies' attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motive contribute to it. We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of an incompletely decoded message, a symbol and a sign.”

That final phrase, coincidentally, brings us to the poet of Lepidoptera, Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote a sad story titled “Signs and Symbols.” I think Levi is on to something. The beauty of butterflies is heightened by our knowledge of their evanescence, by the way “the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis” emphasizes their mortality, their vulnerability to time. There’s a lovely passage at the end of Chapter Six in Speak, Memory, when Nabokov describes a butterfly hunt in a Russian, around 1910, when he was 11 years old. In this pre-Revolutionary Eden, he lovingly identifies the species and notes “a paradise of lupines, columbines, and pentstemons,” before entering the metaphysical stratosphere:

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness -- in a landscape selected at random -- is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern -- to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”