The Charm of Nature—Fabre and His Souvenirs Entomologiques

The Charm of Nature—Fabre and His Souvenirs Entomologiques

I can no longer remember how long it has been since I last came into close contact with nature. When I was young, reading Lu Xun’s From the Baicao Garden to the Sanwei Studio, I could vaguely feel a deep resonance with it. Although I had no idea what plants like raspberries, jiao tian zi, or heshouwu actually were, the joy brought by cicadas and ants was exactly the same. And the feeling of walking from the Baicao Garden into the Sanwei Studio was probably much the same as well. From then on, my distance from nature grew greater day by day, as I moved step by step from the countryside into the city. And the city itself changed beyond recognition. The wheat and rice fields I passed on my way to school in middle school have now long been replaced by rows of towering buildings, merging into a jungle of steel and concrete from which there seems to be no escape. As for those little creatures that once occupied such an important place in my life, I had all but forgotten them.

It was not until I followed Souvenirs Entomologiques into Fabre’s Harmas—the wilderness garden—and watched him observe the world of insects with the innocence of a child and the wisdom of an elder, that I suddenly seemed to recall this important part missing from my life. Victor Hugo once said, “Souvenirs Entomologiques truly deserves to be called the ‘epic of insects,’ and Fabre the ‘Homer of insects.’” After reading the book, one feels this praise is no exaggeration. Through patient, meticulous, and keen observation, Fabre brings the worlds of these tiny creatures vividly to life, and from time to time draws from them reflections on life and nature. The small beings in his writing—from mantises and butterflies to dung beetles—become as vivid as characters in an epic.

In one passage he writes, “In order to observe the hatching of cicada eggs, I worked very diligently. For two consecutive years, using different tools—boxes, test tubes, glass bottles—I collected branches from hundreds of different kinds of plants...” Such dedication alone is enough to inspire admiration. And only when I read the biographical note at the end of the book did I learn that Fabre carried out this research not in comfort, but in severe poverty, which made me admire him all the more. Work like his was driven above all by genuine interest, and only such true interest can endure.

During the course of his observations, the author also constantly draws insights about life from insects. These reflections may be lightly sketched, but they leave a deep impression. Again, in the section on cicadas, he writes in the final paragraph: “On average, a cicada spends only four or five weeks in the trees. Happiness is so brief, yet they still sing loudly.” In that instant, the ordinary cicada seems to take on the brief yet brilliant radiance of an epic hero.

The author patiently describes one living creature after another, in exquisite detail, yet never in a way that feels long-winded, tedious, or dull. Part of this, of course, is due to the strength of his prose. But on the other hand, it is precisely this meticulous labor that makes us feel curious once again about the land beneath our feet, which we think we know so well. He writes that fireflies feed on snails, and that the giant peacock moth has only a few days of life left after becoming a butterfly. Although most insects ignore their offspring after laying eggs, there are also species like the Sisyphus dung beetle, in which both parents tirelessly raise the next generation, creating scenes of harmonious family life... All of this was unfamiliar to me—and probably to most people. I had never imagined that insects concealed so many moving and thought-provoking secrets.

After telling the stories of insects, Fabre concludes the book by telling his own story. Broadly speaking, it resembles the movement from Baicao Garden to Sanwei Studio in Lu Xun’s writing, though his account is much fuller and more delicate. As in the other chapters, he writes with care about his own life: how he later studied at a teacher’s college simply because it provided free meals, and how he once set his sights on mathematics simply because teaching mathematics required no extra equipment, while the natural sciences he truly loved had not yet taken shape as a viable field. At the end of his own story, he writes: “Before fate, we are but helpless blades of wheat, swaying wherever the wind blows. Mathematics, to which I devoted myself completely in my youth, is now of almost no value to me, while the animals I once deliberately pushed aside have become the consolation of my old age.” So many reflections on life are contained in these words.

Yet after finishing Souvenirs Entomologiques, beyond praising Fabre’s careful observations of the insect world and marveling at its dazzling wonders, I could not help feeling a quiet unease. The world of insects in Fabre’s writing is delicate, beautiful, and fragile. Every link seems as if it had been carefully arranged by the hand of God. Only in this way can nature maintain its balance. But human beings are arrogantly destroying all of these finely tuned balances. In a sense, humanity foolishly believes it can replace the Creator. In reality, however, what we call the progress of civilization cannot even sustain the most basic balance—human-made “civilization” is rapidly being choked by garbage it cannot process, while the natural world can complete a closed-loop cycle of balance through its tireless, natural decomposers.

If human beings cannot recognize the damage they are doing to the environment, if they do not treat the maintenance of the environmental balance on which they depend as their highest priority, but instead continue to indulge themselves in finance, politics, and war—matters that do nothing to benefit nature—then one day humanity as a whole will pay the price. And if that day comes, when the delicate balance once designed for this world by the Creator no longer exists, and most of the creatures that once formed part of nature’s chain have already gone extinct, then I fear there truly will be no turning back.