'The Conception of Life As an Enchanted State'

On summer mornings in the mid-nineteen-sixties, I would follow the path behind our house through a growth of poplars and sassafras to the place where the white oaks and tulip trees took over. The path ended at the top of the hill where we went sledding in winter. Most mornings in that small clearing, weather permitting, I would find a Mourning Cloak, the most beautiful of butterflies, warming itself in what Nabokov in Ada calls a “dapple of drifting sunlight.” I was then collecting butterflies, which meant killing them with a pinch to the thorax, a practice that shames me today. Yet, as an adolescent, I fancied a fraternal bond with that Mourning Cloak. It was always the same individual in my imagination, not a generic “specimen.” 

In England, the Mourning Cloak (Nymphalis antiopa) is called the Camberwell Beauty, and Nigel Andrew recalls his first encounter:

 

“As a boy, I used to dream of seeing a Camberwell Beauty (from time to time I still do), but I had to wait until many years later, when, on a visit to Canada, I had my own ‘grand surprise’ [a folk name for the butterfly in England]. . . . The beautiful creature was understandably torpid, and very nearly—wonder of wonders—walked onto my outstretched finger: four feet were on before it changed its mind and, summoning its energy, flew off.”

 

Anyone ever enchanted by the sight of a butterfly, whether a lepidopterist or casual amateur, is likely to have such memories. The insect’s beauty is intensified by its gratuitousness. Nige offers all the solid evolutionary evidence for their aesthetic excess but remains true to the title of his new book, The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment (Saraband). Nige is a veteran of the Golden Age of Blogging, and a rare blogger who can write. His book combines memoir, field guide and philosophical meditation. He even argues that observing butterflies is good for you, a goad to mindfulness. His subtitle is intended literally. More than any other animals, even birds, butterflies inspire wonder.

Nige reviews the history of butterfly/human relations in England, which started with indifference, turned into a popular hobby, proceeded to obsessive collecting that vastly reduced the populations of some species, and finally evolved into serious science coupled with delight. He writes:

 

“Even in this time of rapid scientific advance, enlightenment could not be wholly disentangled from enchantment. If pure scientific curiosity drove the specialists’ activities, the allure of butterflies for most people was more emotionally grounded and more strongly aesthetic."  

 

As a gifted reader, Nige laces his text with allusions to, among others, John Clare, Kingsley Amis, Darwin, Sigfried Sassoon, Simone Weil (!), Sir Thomas Browne, Kay Ryan, Walt Whitman and, most often, the lepidopterist/novelist Nabokov. His most surprising find is a passage by Joseph Conrad from the preface to The Shadow-Line (1916), used as an epigraph to the book:

 

“The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is; marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state.”

Reading The Butterfly is pure pleasure. You need not be a biologist or nature mystic to enjoy it. “To get involved in watching butterflies,” he writes in a late chapter, “The Mindful Present: Seeing and Being,” “is to enter a new world, one that is rich, vibrant, abundant with life and color and energy—and in which we figure only as marginal, fleeting presences, potential threats but of no other interest. This parallel world goes on, with or without us.”

 

Nige’s first book, another paean to England and its traditions, was The Mother of Beauty (Thorntree Press, 2019), devoted to the country’s church monuments.