It is not easy to recognize moths as pleasant creatures. Often, they are perceived as not as aesthetically pleasing as butterflies; rather, they are dark, somber, and dull. They irritate people by clinging to lights and leaving their carcasses inside the lamp, tainting the pure surface of the glass with dark gray stains of their carcasses. Due to their nature of being attracted to lights, moths are regarded as noxious and bothersome. Unpleasant, somber, and inconducive were on my mind when I read the essays by Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard.
Virginia Woolf starts with her thoughts on moths that fly by day—that these unlikely creatures are a hybrid: neither gay like butterflies nor somber like those that fly by night. The essay then turns to a personal anecdote, about her watching the moth fluttering, full of life. Woolf often slides into her stream of consciousness, but her eyes are fixed on the moth until death comes to him. Then she says, O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am. On the other hand, Annie Dillard does not start with a moth, instead, she starts her essay with two cats living with her. Then she moves on to the spider that dwells in her bathroom, then to the corpses the spider had tossed to the floor: mostly sow bugs, wingless moth bodies, earwigs, and other spider carcasses. The headless moths take her back to two summers ago, to the tent in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where a moth was caught in the fire of her candle and burned for two hours. She goes back to her room, ending the essay by contemplating being alone.
The difference between Virginia Woolf’s and Annie Dillard’s essays lies in the question of whether the work is completely devoted to moth or not. Woolf’s essay is all about the moth and the thought that the moth evoked in her mind: about death and the true nature of life. Woolf herself appears as a mere witness of the dances, intentionally separating herself from the scene. On the other hand, Dillard’s essay is much more personal and reveals more about herself. The death of the moth makes up a huge part of her essay, but it is not completely about the moth; it is also about her house, the creatures she lives with, the reading, the writing self, and loneliness. But both come to the same conclusion: as they watch the death of the moth, they are deeply struck by the dying. They were the witnesses of those moths’ final hours as the light in their bodies blew out in the candlelight.
I once nurtured a moth into its full being. In sixth grade, I took the train down to the countryside, where my grandmother lived, to help out with garlic stem harvesting. I strolled up the mountain one day and found little green worms on the mulberry leaves. Their puffy toes busying through the veins, the dotted bodies swaying with their own purposes, not to the wind. All things aside, it was their cupped hands that made me want to take them with me. Six hands all obediently bound together that reminded me of a toddler’s shout of gimme gimme. So, I laid down layers of mulberry leaves in my cupped hands with about ten silkworms on top. My mother put them in a paper box for the night, and the day after, we went to get more mulberry leaves. On our train back to the city, I slept clutching the paper box on my lap with a heap of mulberry leaves packed tightly in a burlap bag next to my legs.
Every day, I came home to my precious silkworms, opened the box to replenish the mulberry leaves, and watched the tiny feet crawling on the bed of green. Sometimes, the lying creatures stood up, with the dots I mistook for eyes facing toward my face as if to greet me. Then, I compensated with eyes sparkling with amazement and a little touch on the head. They mistook my bony finger for a mulberry twig and climbed, advancing on my fingers to find new fresh leaves. The touch of their little toes was soft, careful, and miniscule. All my concentration went to my fingers to feel their footsteps on my skin.
I spent every hour with my treasure box for thirty days, breathing with the most interesting creature I had ever seen in my life. Despite my effort of spraying water from time to time to keep the leaves moist, the mulberry started to dry out. Amid my anxiety, the adorable crawlers also started to change shape. One by one, they had started to imprison themselves in a tan fluffy cocoon. The box, which once resembled green patches of my grandmother’s mountains, was now graffitied with white webs everywhere. My mother told me this is how you make silk—to cut open the cocoon and boil them for a nutritious treat I adored. She also said, We don’t have to do that and see what happens.
The box now resembled something akin to those capsule hotels in Japan. In the dimly lit hallway, the double-stacked pods lined up in rows with their round openings waiting to be filled by tired travelers. I’m fond of that one time I slept in one for an experience—the crawling into the small mouth, the low ceiling that felt like a duvet of its own, the little privacy amid togetherness, imagining the other bodies lying next to me, each in their own pods.
Sometimes I would open the cover of the box to see the still-sleeping babies and couldn’t help but mull over the month of joy and connection I thought I had with them. The box still sat in my room, somewhat discarded next to the pile of the modern Korean fiction series I was forced to read at school. The moisture of the mulberry leaves contorted the box, barring it from staying flat on my floor. I stopped looking into the box because I just didn’t want to face any more disappointment; they had probably died. That time of our lives had passed, and my prepubescent mind wasn’t ready to accept such a cold-hearted fate. It wasn’t until I heard a soft thump that I was prompted to open the box again and saw they had torn out of their cells. They had become moths.
But they weren’t any kind of moth I was familiar with. The moths I was accustomed to, like Woolf’s and Dillard’s, were as big as the tip of my nails, slender, and more like a speck of dirt against a white wall. But these moths were plump, furry, and had six rather prominent hairy legs that could latch onto anything. Their wings were pale white, and the dots that I’d adored so much had spread into a form of veins on their wings. The most horrifying thing was that they could not spread their wings and fly. They flapped against the box, hitting the corners and falling again and again. In a state of horror, I shut the box and wrapped it in a newspaper. My last glimpse was their bulging pitch-dark eyes staring at me.
Per the perk of being a child, I don’t know what happened next. They probably had died of asphyxiation and my mother had discarded them in a black plastic bag, then in a trashcan. My 60 days with what I once found the most endearing creature was easily discarded as a quirky childhood obsession. Until I read those moths dying in front of the writers, their agonizing pain written in the most eloquent way that changed their lives.
Dillard asks, which of you want to give your lives and be writers? I often think about how the Korean word for silkworms, 누에, stems from a lying bug and my silkworm moths waddling with their wide wings; how their Latin name, Bombyx mori, comes to us with the haunting aura of impermanence—Memento Mori, remember you must die. Then I think of what it used to be called, 잠 蠶, and how that is a homonym for sleep in my language. And how I used to like to think of them just sleeping in their tiny capsule hotels in Tokyo, the travelers laying their tired bodies in their own pods.
