An Insect View Of Its Plain

During the nineteenth century, insects became a very fashionable subject of study, and the writing of the day reflected this popularity. However, despite an increased contemporary interest in ecocriticism and cultural entomology, scholars have largely ignored the presence of insects in nineteenth-century literature. This volume addresses that critical gap by exploring the cultural and literary position of insects in the work of Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and John Muir. It examines the beliefs these authors share about the nature of our connection to insects and what insects have to teach about creation and our place in it. An important contribution to both ecocriticism and literary entomology, this work contributes much to the understanding of Thoreau, Dickinson, and Muir as nature writers, natural scientists, entomologists, and botanists, and their intimate and highly spiritual relationships with nature.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature. If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us. It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself. It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.