[One Thousand Characters a Day] Such an Intellectual Walk <3> - Delicate and Alluring Bugs

Editor's NoteThere are various types of vision. Like the profession of a doctor, there is vision honed through education, and there is also vision finely tuned by hobbies and personal passions, such as searching for insects or studying handwriting. Additionally, there is a unique vision stemming from the very nature of existence, such as that of young children, visually impaired people, and dogs. Dr. Horowitz repeatedly asks what and how they see, and why most of us cannot see the same things as they do. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin referred to people who observe with their eyes and think with their heads as "strollers." The author, too, discovers new insights behind everyday scenes with the help of others. Word count: 1023 characters.

Observing insects closely is like fast-forwarding a video of the life cycle from birth to violent killing and death. There are hardly any humanitarian insects, and herbivorous insects cause considerable damage by devouring leaves, buds, grass, and stems. However, what Eiseman and I were looking for was not the insects themselves but the traces they left behind. We felt like forensic investigators tracking clues left by insects at a crime scene. Insects have messy eating habits. They consume everything at a newly arrived location. Except for the polite larvae that eat their own egg sacs, they never clean up after eating. Insects shed their skins, excrete indiscriminately, plunder, and then leave. The hurriedly discarded clothes, broken bottles, and trash left behind are no different from the mess after a party is over. They are very uncultured creatures.

I wanted to look at the spider webs a bit more, but Eiseman was already moving on. In fact, our walking path was far from straight. Eiseman stayed by my side, suddenly headed toward a street tree, approached facilities like fire hydrants or street lamps to check for bugs on their surfaces. Although we eventually left the parking lot, the distance we walked in the next two and a half hours barely exceeded one kilometer. Calculating it, that was 0.4 kilometers per hour, an astonishing speed that most of the creatures we observed, even the larvae, could have caught up with.

(Omitted)

We spent time in the most ordinary neighborhood of the city and found almost all the insect signs mentioned in his book. We saw a house spider’s egg sac left on a brick wall. As an example of "exuviae," the shed skins of insects, we saw the exuviae of a mayfly circling a street lamp, and as a living example of parasitism, we saw mold-infested creepy black flies. We also saw earthworm castings, which make up a large part of what we call "soil," and the droppings of jumping spiders, which are white circles sprinkled with black spots. As Eiseman put it, spider webs "cover every surface" without exaggeration.

－Alexandra Horowitz, Being a Dog, translated by Park Dasom, Lion Books, 18,800 KRW