(3)

One week later, and spring has truly come at last.  Tiny daisies spring up in people's yards, followed shortly after by those glorious ragamuffins, the dandelions.  Soon delicate, limpid violets are spreading like a purple mist through the grass.  Cherry blossoms open and fall so quickly that one barely has time to notice them; the forsythia, bursting forth in a riot of yellow, lasts much longer.  I note with disapproval that some people have cut the forsythia bushes growing in their yards into rounded or box-like shapes.  This is always a mistake:  it gives them a battered, mutilated appearance (forsythias should be allowed to show off their spring plumes in wild disarray).  Some of the trees are in bud now – another week and they'll all be haloed with green.  The days are sunny but windy, blowsy; the nights dank with rain.  The air is damp, musky, heavy, dense, fragrant, cool.

At the cemetery, hyacinths – purple, pink, and white – bloom on some of the graves; but though their color and scent are welcome, I've always thought them too stiff and fussy a flower.  Daffodils are friendlier, and can be found this time of year everywhere.  Some are large, some small; some are bright yellow, some white; some are white with yellow cups, some yellow with orange cups.  Daffodils are a pretty rather than a beautiful flower, advertising their sexual readiness with simple, unabashed joy.  I have not, however, seen any bees about yet to help them out with this; they must rely on the wind, or on some other insect besides the bee, to do the job.  There are many tiny, nameless insects zig-zagging through the air; perhaps some of these visit flowers.  I notice too that the first flies have begun to appear.  And again I wonder:  Where do they come from, these earliest of flies?  Do they migrate from someplace else?  But no:  I've never read of such a thing.  Do they pupate underground all through the winter, then?  Or does each new winter comes upon them like a ice-age in miniature, driving them further and further south until, the cold weather receding, new generations can penetrate the northern climes all over again?  I do not know.  There are a great many things I do not know; and yet generally I find (whether through mere laziness or some more deeply rooted disinclination) that when it comes to nature, the mere appearance of things is enough.

Sitting under a tree in the cemetery, a fly lands on my arm and grows very still:

No, I'm not dead yet.  Not dead yet!  Not dead . . .   I stand and start to move across the cemetery at a rapid clip.  "My life," I think – the words flash through my mind as I step over and around the graves – "is the length of my body."  Then I spy a butterfly, the first I have seen this year.  It's a fritillary, spangled with orange and black; but its wings, I notice, are tattered; there's a great rent in one of them.  Surely this must be one that is in the last stages of migration.  At any rate, its time in this world, it would seem, is nearly spent:

You see?  I can be indifferent too.  And that is what the sudden resurgence of life in springtime teaches:  indifference.  That is the knowledge it brings to us.  When I was a boy I often felt this indifference towards nature.  Indifference not in the sense of being uninterested or unmoved – nature always enthralled me; but my enthusiastic observations of its wonders left little impression upon my conscience.  I watched whatever miniature tragedies were happening around me – two neighboring nests of ants battling each other for supremacy; a spider lunging towards some hapless insect caught in its web; the feasting of a praying mantis upon a grasshopper – with a child's guileless fascination.  I felt no personal involvement with what I saw; nature simply happened, that's all.  It wasn't until I undertook the hobby of collecting butterflies that I began to appreciate what burdens conscience might impose with regard to the exploitation of nature for personal gain.  Having fashioned a crude butterfly net out of an old broom handle, a wire coat hanger, and some muslin cloth, I caught a butterfly one fine summer's day and dropped it into a glass jar.  The bottom of the jar was layered with cotton soaked in nail polish remover, the fumes of which were supposed to asphyxiate the butterfly.  I screwed the lid of the jar on tight and stood watching as the trapped insect fluttered and flopped inside its prison.  It did not die, and did not die, and did not die . . .  At last I could stand it no longer:  I opened the jar again and let the butterfly go.  Never again would I repeat this experiment.  I had discovered that I could not maintain my indifference when faced with the knowledge that it was I myself who was causing another living creature to suffer and die.

But nature is indifferent.  It does not care if the fritillary lives or dies.  It does not care if I live or die.  And this is how I like it.  For this, I know, is what it means to be free.

Still, I am a child no longer.  I cannot ignore the many ways in which my existence impacts the world around me.  Even were I to live in a society that existed in complete harmony with nature, impact upon nature by humans would occur.  And so I wonder:  What grand indifference, once espied by the child in nature, is left for the adult to know?

I walk along the path that leads down the side of the gully, and I notice that the myrtle is in bloom again; down by the creek I see that the skunk cabbages, growing fast now, are already nearly a foot high.  But the focus of my attention alters suddenly, purposing something new to my mind, something that has to do not with what I see, but with how I see.  More specifically, I notice something odd about my eyes.  It's happened to me many times these past few weeks, this oddness I've noticed about my eyes.  It occurs so quickly that it has taken many, many repetitions for me to analyze what it is that's happening.  And what's happening is that I've lately grown aware of the fraction of a fraction of a second that it takes for what I see to enter my eyes, travel as nerve impulses to the brain, and there be reassembled and understood as "reality."  For a fraction of a fraction of a second, I am aware that I and the world in which I live are connected by nothing more than the transmission of impulses along the sensory pathway that constitutes "vision."  An infinitesimal crack opens between myself and all that which surrounds me.  And through that crack I glimpse the void.  Also, for that fraction of a fraction of a second that falls between the moment when my eye "sees" and the moment when my brain orders and comprehends what it is that my eye is seeing, there is a lack – not of meaning – but of both meaning and meaninglessness.  This is the void made conscious – or rather, apprehended via biology.

And thus I become aware once again of the fact that this world, this reality, in which I exist, does not adhere to anything but itself, is governed by nothing but its own self-made laws and principles:  it floats in the midst of a void.  It floats in a void as surely as the world upon which I stand floats in the midst of the emptiness of outer space.  There is no up, no down; no top, no bottom; we simply hang, suspended, amidst blank nothingness.  This nothingness, this void, is how the adult human understands the child's intuition of nature's indifference.  This void is what the adult human understands to be God.