“The Death of a Moth” by Annie Dillard
I live on northern Puget Sound, in Washington State, alone. I have a gold cat , who sleeps on my legs, named Small. In the morning, I joke to her blank face, Do you remember last night? Do you remember? I throw her out before breakfast, so I can eat. sut
There is a spider, too, in the bathroom, with whom I keep a certain company. Her little outfit always reminds of a certain moth I helped to kill. The spider herlf is of uncertain lineage, bulbous at the abdomen and drab. Her six-inch mess of web works, works somehow, works miraculously, to keep her alive and me amazed. The web itlf is in a corner behind the toilet, connecting tile wall to tile wall and floor, in a place where there is, I would have thought, scant traffic. Yet under the web are sixteen or so corps she has tosd to the floor.
The corps appear to be mostly sow bugs, tho little armadillo creatures who live to travel flat out in hous, and die round. There is also a new shred of earwig, three old spider skins crinkled and clenched, and two moth bodies, wingless and huge and empty, m
oth bodies I dropped to my knees to e.
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wealthToday the earwig shines darkly and gleams, what there is of him: a dorsal curve of thorax and abdomen, and a smooth pair of cerci by which I knew his name. Next week, if the other bodies are any indication, he will be shrunken and gray, webbed to the floor with dust. The sow bugs beside him are hollow and empty of color, fragile, a breath away from brittle fluff. The spider skins lie on their sides, translucent and ragged, their legs drying in knots. And the moths, the empty moths, stagger against each other, headless, in a confusion of arcing strips of chitin like peeling varnish, like a jumble of buttress for cathedral vaults, like nothing rembling moths, so that I would hesitate to call them moths, except that I have had some experience with the figure Moth reduced to a nub. lute>prostitution
Two summers ago, I was camping alone in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I had hauled mylf and gear up there to read, among other things, James Ullman’s The Day on Fire, a novel about Rimbaud that had made me want to be a writer when I was sixteen; I was hoping it would do it again. So I read, lost, every day sitting by my tent, whil
e warblers swung in the leaves overhead and bristle worms trailed their inches over the twiggy dirt at my feet; and I read every night by candlelight, while barred owls called in the forest and pale moths masd round masd round my head in the clearing, where my light made a ring.
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Moths kept flying into the candle. They would hiss and recoil, lost upside down in the shadows among my cook pans. Or they would singe their wings and fall, and their hot wings, as if melted, would stick to the first thing they touched — a pan, a lid, a spoon — so that the snagged moths could flutter only in tiny arcs, unable to struggle free. The I could realize by a quick flip with a stick; in the morning I would find my cooking stuff gilded with torn flecks of moth wings, triangles of shiny dust here and there on the aluminum. So I read, and boiled water, and replenished candles, and read on.
One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when the shadow crosd my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspread, flapped go for it
amityinto the fire, dropped abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a cond. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth's wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time, her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and cead, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noi; her antennae crisped and burnt away and her heaving mouthparts cracked like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax — a fraying, partially collapd gold tube jammed upright in the candle's round pool.
And then this moth-esnce, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax ro in the moth's body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into a flame, a saffron-yellow flame t
hat robed her to the ground like an immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical light, side by side. The moth's head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.
She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning — only glowing within, like a building fire glimpd through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brain in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.
