Weeks passed, and then came a long letter, written in Hassi Messaoud, a remote hole in eastern Algeria where my friend was stationed for the moment in order to assess an especially promising oil field.
Because he lived and worked in French-speaking countries for many years, he began by lamenting Malaise’s unfortunate name (which can refer to everything from nausea to economic difficulties) but quickly moved on to some informal reflections on the various theories about the earth’s history. Very true, he wrote, Wegener’s good old continental drift should be considered axiomatic. Everyone buys it. The theory now explains everything in geology—lock, stock and barrel. We can even measure the speed of the drift. My friend wrote that Europe and North America are gliding apart about as rapidly as fingernails grow. That is to say, about two centimetres a year. Although on the other hand, he added, it is impossible to determine whether these measurements are accurate.
The same is true of the theory as a whole. It’s not possible to say definitively that it describes reality, only that it fits well enough with what we can observe. But to dismiss it as false is even less plausible. “With its help we find oil again and again, but despite that, we probably can’t exclude the possibility that it contains defects, or that one day it won’t have to be discarded.”
Who knows? When everything is said and done, the days of really revolutionary breakthroughs are perhaps not over. Maybe, sooner or later, someone will sweep Wegener right out of the door. Let’s keep our fingers crossed, for the sake of René, my friend.
Chapter 15
The Legible Landscape
They say you can’t be a really good geologist without an exceptional feeling for time. A feeling, not knowledge. Empirical knowledge is different; it’s a thing you can acquire with hard work and patient effort. But a feeling for time is inborn, an aptitude, like musicality, that can only rarely be developed from scratch, and it is said to be the secret behind the very best geologists. I don’t know if this is true. But it makes sense.
For what is ten thousand years, actually? Or three million? In relation to a billion? The rest of us have no idea. We can understand the figures, like lines on a scale, and it may be that we can to some extent grasp the metaphor in which the history of the earth is represented as an hour, while humanity’s time on its surface is reckoned only in seconds. But our feeling for temporal space is absent.
My own grasp of temporal spaces so great that they border on eternity is always dependent on that kind of mental prosthesis—clumsy synthetic rulers as a substitute for the deeper understanding I lack. Even the time stretching out beyond the lives of people now living can be hard to get a grip on except as numbers and anecdotes. An inborn feeling for time is presumably the same gift that makes a really good evolutionary biologist or any other kind of historian. I sometimes wish I were one of them, and I have tried, but my downfall is always precisely that sense of time. A couple of hundred years, fine, but then the exhaustion of insufficiency comes creeping in.
That’s why I go collecting with my net in the here and now and read my landscape in the present tense. Believe me, even that narrative is rich and full of surprises, however nearsighted you happen to be.
When you get right down to it, my whole history with hoverflies is also a question of comprehension—we might call it language-oriented. Why flies? I realize that I haven’t been entirely honest in describing my motives. I’ve answered the question badly. I was so full of my determination not to lie about some hypothetical benefit that I presented my proclivity for catching flies as a matter of cheap anaesthesia and the simple pleasures of the hunt, an outlet for the vanity of a poor man and the eternal longing to be best. And that may be true, but there is something else too, maybe not greater but anyway prettier. More honourable. It shouldn’t be so—an ambitious person’s path to the perfection of God-knows-what should be worthy of all honour, if only because a world full of highly personal mastery without petty rivalry would be a nice place to live.
In any case, learning a language is never wrong.
So for a moment let us consider the ability to read the landscape as if it were a language, how to understand nature almost as if it were literature, experience it in the same way that we experience art or music. It’s all a question of landscape literacy. Now you may object that all of us, regardless of education and custom, can appreciate beauty in various works of art and pieces of music. That’s true. But it’s equally true that the untrained sensibility is easily captivated by what is sweetly charming and romantic, which can of course be good but which is nevertheless only a first impression and does not lead very far. Art has a language to be learned; music too has hidden subtleties.
The necessary conditions are more distinct in literature. If you can’t read, you can’t read. And when I say that the landscape can provide a kind of literary experience at different depths I mean just exactly that—to begin with, you have to know the language. In a vocabulary of nothing but animals and plants, the flies can thus be seen as glosses, telling stories of every kind within the framework of the grammatical laws set down by evolution and ecology.
To recognize a Chrysotoxum vernale when you see it, to know why it’s flying in just this place and at just this moment, is a source of satisfaction not all that easy to account for. I’m afraid that our path to what is beautiful must first pass through what is meaningful. Which is the more important will remain a matter of taste.
Chrysotoxum vernale is very handsome and, in the manner of hoverflies, it looks like a wasp. Anyone who can see the difference can already read, but it gets really exciting only when you can distinguish it from Chrysotoxum arcuatum. And by my soul, that’s not easy. In years of training, you have to catch both of the twins and examine them on pins, because what is decisive in identifying the species is primarily the colour of the inner quarter of the front legs.
Therefore I have collected several specimens over the years. In fact, I have fussed with the Chrysotoxum to such an extent that I believe I can tell them apart in the field without even having to catch them in my net. And so I know that arcuatum is common, while vernale is a rarity. And why is that the case? The question is as open as a half-read novel.
My collection contains six vernale from the island, collected in different years between 27 May and 19 June. Clearly their fly time is that brief. That’s interesting. Even more interesting is the fact that aside from these six flies, this species is known in modern central Sweden from a single specimen—from another island a few minutes of latitude south of mine. The fly is abundant on the islands of Öland and Gotland and in Skåne as well, but it is otherwise absent from the mainland. In the nineteenth century it was collected in Blekinge and Småland, Östergötland and Västergötland, but no longer. Why?
Our knowledge is never adequate, but we know enough to formulate at least a respectably supportable hypothesis. Nothing is more useful than a hypothesis. Particularly because now and then the collector is forced to endure conversations with uncultured individuals who think they know that anyone who would hurt a fly must be immoral and a brute. They’re of the ecological persuasion, if I may be pardoned the expression—gentle flagellants who hunker down beside their ill-smelling compost piles and rest easy in the certainty that much of life on earth has run its course. They are severely tormented by nightmares of extermination. You can see it in their eyes.
And so a hypothesis can cheer them up. And Chrysotoxum vernale is a good candidate.
With all the rhetorical cunning I can muster, I would like to turn off onto a byway and say something partly irrelevant about how Linnaeus was gripped by such wonder and awe in the face of nature’s riches when he saw our most beautiful butterfly that he christened it Parnassius apollo. Everyone recognizes an Apollo butterfly. In a picture, I mean, because in the real world there are fewer and fewer people granted the gift of watching its fumbling flight across marshy meadows and bare granite. On the mainland, the Apollo has disappeared from most of the provinces where it onc
e flew, and now in these ultimate days it is common only here and along the southeast coast. Something has happened over the last half century. We don’t know what, but scientists are investigating and thinking more and more audibly that the land itself is sick where the Apollo used to fly. Increased acidity is thought to leach out elements in the soil that get into the plants and then wind up…well, they don’t really know, but they guess there’s a connection.
That the Apollo butterfly still exists here on the island is said to depend on the fact that the bedrock is limestone, which gives the soil the capacity to withstand the poisons and pollution of our industrial society. This is in any case one hypothesis, and it can be transferred word for word to the hoverfly Chrysotoxum vernale.
The sceptic feels a bit better at once, partly because he always glows slightly in the cosy darkness of approaching apocalypse, partly because he believes he’s speaking to an idealist, a barefoot scientist who has dedicated his life to the heroic task of mapping the evil of the age by searching for flies that will soon be extinct. Suddenly my hunt is pleasing in the eyes of God, almost a praiseworthy testimonial, and that is not a bad description, but to present this empirically cool, scientific usefulness as my primary motive would be simply ridiculous and the height of hypocrisy. That reading is only self-important.
No one learns to tell the song of the woodlark from that of the skylark in order to make it easier to detect approaching catastrophe. All of that comes later. The flies are just smaller and more numerous. The motive is the same, and the reward. Dare I mention beauty?
When the woodlark comes from the south in March, something happens to those who recognize its song. Something happens to everyone else too, of course, for birdsong is always birdsong, but soon the whole forest is full of robins, hedge warblers, song thrushes, greenfinches, tree creepers and wrens, all of them singing for all they’re worth, and that does dilute that delicate joy. It’s only when you can tell them apart and know their names that you can read on and finally understand. The more glosses you know, the richer the experience becomes. Like reading a book. It’s rarely the important books that give the greatest reading pleasure.
Television has taught us to see nature like a film, as something immediately comprehensible and available, but that is only an illusion. The narrative voice-over is missing when you go outdoors. What seems great art and sweet music on the surface becomes, for the uninitiated, an impenetrable body of text in a foreign language. So the best answer to the question of why I collect hoverflies is, ultimately, that I want to understand the fine print in the only language that’s been mine for as long as I can remember.
In high summer, in July, when all the summer people are lying like seals on the outermost skerries, I often retreat to a remote place on the southern part of the island to read the landscape. On a gentle slope at the edge of a wood, between a hayfield and an avenue of high-voltage towers, there is a large stand of broad-leaved sermountain growing among the oaks and hazels, which, when the sun is at its zenith, attracts fantastic hordes of insects to its large, white umbels. I usually see the noble chafer there, Gnorimus nobilis, and out on the hayfield, without a care in the world, are Burnet moths, to whose odd colour only Harry Martinson gives full justice: “The prime colour of the wing is a dark, inky, blue-green blue; carmine-red spots shimmer against that background.”
On that slope, every summer, I also see the puzzling bee fly Villa paniscus, a darting tuft of wool that no one knows anything about and that was thought to be extinct until last year, mostly because few if any people could tell it from Villa hottentotta (yes, that’s really its name). Bee flies are really for extra credit, but there’s something about that slope that attracts me for the sake of reading something other than hoverflies. Anthrax leucogaster is also found there, another relatively unknown bee fly, and my latest find was the gold wasp Chrysis hirsuta, which is of no interest to anyone, but I wanted to mention it all the same. Partly because there’s no risk involved, I mean, no one can suspect me of using my knowledge of some expert’s unknown opus to make myself look good, partly because my whole point is that reading nature is a bottomless activity.
I could probably spend a whole life down there (winter doesn’t count) without ever getting the feeling that I’ve now read everything. The hoverflies alone, my personal footnotes, would keep me adequately occupied. For example, the broad-leaved sermountain flowers are often visited by both of the imposing species in the genus Spilomyia—not every day, of course, for these are legendary creatures with the power to make environment bureaucrats jump up and down with excitement, that’s how rare they are. And the story they tell with their very presence is rich in old, rotting, protection-worthy trees. My heart raced the first time, so great was my eagerness to capture, own, learn and boast with a Spilomyia, and nowadays the feeling is somehow even greater, now when I see them again—and read. Like the woodlark in March. Might I call it joy?
There are other stories that you have to write yourself. Like the one about Eumerus grandis.
It takes place one storey down, closer to the ground. Hoverflies of the genus Eumerus develop precisely the same way as the closely related narcissus fly, in various kinds of plant roots, but for some reason they’ve never been big on visiting flowers. In fact it was several years before I discovered them, because I was so concentrated on studying what was going on in the sermountain’s blossoms. There were actually several different species flying around down there in the undergrowth, and one of them turned out to be grandis. Host plant unknown. So said the literature. I was in no hurry.
It’s important to the story that Eumerus grandis is one of those mysterious flies that are found all across Europe but that are common nowhere, at least not so far as we know. Maybe it occurs in numbers here and there where no one sees it. So long as the host plant is unknown, we don’t know where to look. Or to be exact, so long as the host plant was unknown. It is no longer. It is known to me. One day as I sat there in the grass, I caught sight of a female acting suspiciously down near the base of a withered sermountain in a crack in the rock. She was running around in circles on the ground, more or less like a chicken with its head cut off. She kept it up for half an hour before she flew away, whereupon I examined the leaves she’d been running on through my loupe—and found eggs so small they were almost invisible.
This was the forefront of scientific research in ultra-fine print. A discovery! I began reading the landscape more avidly and have since found the fly in other places where broad-leaved sermountain grows. I know this creature, perhaps better than anyone else in the whole world. I ought to write a scientific paper about it in some specialized journal, but that hasn’t happened. Still, rumours spread pretty fast anyway, among the experts.
Chapter 16
Doctor Orlík and I
To be on the safe side, I have got myself a guardian angel. Doctor Orlík. Since he’s immortal, and only a peripheral figure, I figure he has time to watch over my destiny if anyone does. He knows what it’s about.
“Dragonflies?” Orlík frowned. “I have not interest. I have only interest for Musca domestica.”
“The common house-fly?”
“That is what it is.”
“Answer me,” Utz interrupted again. “On which day did God create the fly? Day Five? Or Day Six?”
“How many times will I tell you?” Orlík clamoured. “We have one hundred ninety million years of flies. But you will always speak of days!”
“Hard words,” said Utz, philosophically.
Yes, it’s there we find him, in Bruce Chatwin’s short novel Utz, his best book and the last one he wrote before death took him in January 1989. The first-person narrator recalls a trip to Prague in the summer of 1967, the year before the Russian tanks, when a magazine editor assigned him to write an article about Rudolf II’s attempt to cure his depression by collecting exotic objects. His idea at the time was that the article would be included in a larger work about the psychopathology of the manic colle
ctor, but as a result of linguistic confusion and laziness, he says, the Czech expedition was a failure, not much more than a pleasant holiday at someone else’s expense.
Only when his life is almost over, more than twenty years later, does it bear fruit.
But back to Prague.
The narrator has a good friend who is a specialist on the lands behind the Iron Curtain, and this man advises him to look up Kaspar Utz, an eccentric gentleman who, when he was still a child, found his calling as a collector of Meissen porcelain. Utz is a genuine oddball who now owns more than a thousand figurines, worth a fortune, and has cleverly squired them unscathed through the world war as well as Stalin’s persecutions. They meet at the Restaurant Pstruh, where it turns out that Utz has eaten lunch with his good friend Doctor Orlík every Thursday since 1946. Now they sit waiting for the doctor to arrive, and Utz tells him that Orlík is a famous scientist, a specialist in the parasites of the woolly mammoth but also a well-known expert on flies.
We did not have long to wait before a gaunt, bearded figure in a shiny double-breasted suit pushed its way through the revolving doors.
This unforgettable meal in the heart of Prague threatens constantly to go off the rails because of the unpredictable Doctor Orlík. It begins with the three men at the table all deciding to order carp, which, incidentally, is the only thing the restaurant has to offer that day. In the process, the narrator discovers that a mistake has been made in translating the multi-language menu. The English word “carp” has been confused with “crap,” which he is thoughtless enough to point out.
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