Anyone who loves moths and has read Virginia Woolf’s TheDeath of the Moth1 may be familiar with how to spot the signs of death for such a shy coy creature. The final release of life from the body of a moth was described by Woolf, who wrote:
After perhaps a seventh attempt he slipped from the wooden ledge and fell, fluttering his wing, on his back on the windowsill [...]The legs agitated themselves once more [...]The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant create now knew death. [...] The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed.
As a moth traverses ominously close to death, its wings flutter rapidly. Yet how are we humans to distinguish between the flutter of wings approaching death, the flutter of wings wishing to escape, and the flutter of wings startled by bright lights?
The onset of a moths path to death is not always so easily perceivable. Indeed Virginia Woolf, hints at this at the beginning of her essay when she wrote:
After a time, tired by his dancing apparently, he settled on the window ledge in the sun, and, the queer spectacle being at end, I forgot about him
I found myself in similar situation a few days ago, but unlike Virginia, I did not look back to witness the final moments of life leave the body of the moth.
Seeing a moth flying randomly at a large mirror, I picked it up in my hands. It softly wandered over my finger tips and palm, and having exhausted its exploration flew only my grey cotton shirt seeking a dark fold to hide out in. I scoped the creature back into my hand where it perched on the tip of my finger and allowed me the pleasure of coming eye to eye with it. It was not scared. After some time, I encourage the beautiful gentle thing to walk onto the side of a my bedroom door. Whereupon I wandered off to have dinner. I completely forgot about the creature until early the next morning while opening my bedroom door, there on the floor with wings closed in upon each other lay the moth. Then of course the realisation came. The moth had been in its final moments of life when I had held it. I had been the last living creature to interact with it before it died.
Then questions softly tumbled forward from my consciousness. Had the moth been trying to find a place to land and die? Had I displaced it, and its attempts to find a final resting place? Perhaps if I’d known I could have held it longer, or placed it somewhere to die. Then came a profound question which stilled my mind, and brought my spirit to a place of rest. ‘Where do moths prefer to die?’
Such a question brings sharply into the focus the lived and spiritual dimensions of moths. It makes us see moths, not just as annoying creatures which invade our outdoor lights in the summer – as some people will often characterise them; but as living spiritual being which encompasses the same life force as us, and for which we have a responsibility to ensure that, even in their final moments of life, we are able to care for them.
The common lifeforce which humans share with insects, is something which Virginia recognised and elegently articulated when she wrote:
Yet, because he was so small, and so simple a form of the energy that was rolling in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain and in those of other human beings, there was something marvelous as well as pathetic about him. It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.
As Virginia articulates here, we all share the same life force. This commonality bonds humans and insects. The only difference between humans and insects are the bodies we inhabit. The only difference between insects and humans is the place in which our souls and spirits, but for a short time, inhabit.
We therefore have a responsibility to care for insects as we would ourselves. The responsibility we have to care for insects, even in their dying moment is something which Virginia appears to understand, at least a little. Upon seeing the moth struggle, Virginia thinks to assist it with her pencil only to decide that there was nothing she could do but allow death to come to the moth. As she wrote:
But, as I stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to right himself, it came over me that the failure and awkardness were the approach of death. I laid the pencil down again.
Most moths I’ve ever witnessed dying have been close to windows. And many moths who have already entered the stage of death, I find on windowsills. Are windowsills the preferred final resting place of moths?
Perhaps I should have placed the dying moth?
With no idea what to do, and feeling the same pity which Virginia felt upon seeing the moth die, I picked up the moth and placed it upon a windowsill.
1 Woolf, Virginia (1942) ‘The Death of the Moth’, In The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, Harcourt. Inc
