`Out of Disorder They Evolve Order'

We lost count of spiders and webs. The first of the morning – web, that is – wrapped across my face as I carried out the trash. We limboed under another slung between my car and a shrub. Dewy and struck by shafts of low morning sun they glistened in trees twenty feet off the ground and among the power lines. In a fat azalea next to my second-grader’s bus stop we logged dozens, waiting motionless at the centers of their concentric webs.

Orb-weavers assembling new webs are as reliable a herald of autumn as wooly bears and honking geese. Even arachnophobes ought to be impressed by the elegance of the architecture. The great Fabre writes in “A Builder of Webs” (The Insect World of J. Henri Fabre, 1949):

“Now which of us would undertake, off-hand, without much preliminary experiment and without measuring instruments, to divide a circle into a given quantity of equal width? [Orb-weavers]…though tottering on threads shaken by the wind, effect the delicate division without stopping to think. They achieve it by a method which seems mad according to our notions of geometry. Out of disorder they evolve order.”

There is madness or at least a furious rationality in the fall. Spring is tame and incremental in comparison. Spiders must feed to spawn another generation of their kind. They will die soon. Already the mornings are cool and damp and the spiders appear torpid until the next meal arrives. They live furiously in preparation for death, and they’re not alone. Think of the final stanzas of Adam Kirsch’s “Arcadia (Autumn)” (The Thousand Wells, 2002):

“Nothing this morning more incredible
Than the one fact in which we must believe,
That everything human and celestial
Moves only in a limited reprieve

“From the common sentence; as the stars above
Totter in turn and fall, so here below
This pageantry of nature and of love
Lives in its dying. May its death be slow.”