Surely we have something to learn from the people in whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy-swarms of tender and delicate fancies. We may boast of being their masters in the mechanical,--their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties of ugliness; --but in the knowledge of the natural,--in the feeling of the joy and beauty of earth,--they exceed us like the Greeks of old. Yet perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has wasted and sterilised their paradise,-- substituting everywhere for beauty the utilitarian, the conventional, the vulgar, the utterly hideous, that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to comprehend the charm of that which we destroyed.
I’ve been reading Insect Literature by Lafcadio Hearn, an author who lived in Japan and wrote a number of books in the late 1800’s about Japanese culture and folklore. I’ve read several of his books, but somehow, this book, all about insects in Japanese culture, I had missed. I’ve found it fascinating so far, reading about cicadas, dragonflies and even mosquitoes. This quote, found in the chapter on musical insects, was quite interesting to me as he really seems to have had quite incredible foresight into the future.
I was also struck by how much his comparison of insects to fairies reminded me of the poem ‘Insects’ by John Clare, who also compared insects to fairies.
