At Large and At Small (3 page)

In a 1931 story called “The Aurelian”—an archaic term for butterfly collector—Nabokov describes a butterfly shop in Berlin whose windows are full of “eyed wings wide-open in wonder, shimmering
blue satin, black magic.” To the left of the shop there are stores that sell soap, coal, and bread; to the right, a tobacconist, a delicatessen, and a fruit seller. This is how Nabokov viewed butterflies. One may progress through life surrounded on all sides by drabness, but if there are butterflies at the center, there will never be a want of beauty or romance. What more appropriate passion
could a writer have? Lepidopterists, more than naturalists of any other stripe, have long inclined toward the literary, as one can tell from looking at the names they have given the objects of
their study. There are butterflies named after Homer, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Propertius, and Persius; after dozens of characters in Greek and Roman mythology; and even after punctuation marks—the question
mark, the long dash, and the comma. (Nabokov described the comma in a famous passage about listening to his governess read French classics on the veranda of the family estate outside St. Petersburg, while his attention was joyfully diverted by the comma-like markings on a butterfly that had settled on the threshold.)

Nabokov began the sixth chapter of
Speak, Memory
—the greatest essay on butterfly
collecting ever written— by describing the first butterfly he wanted to catch (a swallowtail) and, in the last paragraph, wrote:

[T]he highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes
all that I love.

(My four favorite words in this passage are “and their food plants.” Only a true entomologist, as opposed to a starry-eyed amateur, would include them in such a lyrical effusion and, what’s more, clearly believe they were lyrical themselves.) Many of the themes in Nabokov’s fiction—metamorphosis and flight, deception and mimicry, evasion and capture—are lepidopteran. And to my
ear, his very language is too. The first canto of
Pale Fire
contains, within its four-and-a-half-page compass, the words
torquated
,
stillicide
,
shagbark
,
vermiculated
,
preterist
,
iridule
, and
lemniscate
. Nabokov collected rare words, just as he collected rare butterflies, and when he netted one, especially in the exotic landscape of his second language, his satisfaction is as palpable as if he
had finally captured the brown and white hairstreak that once eluded him when he was a boy. Nabokov’s style is not just poetic; it is taxonomic. He mentions with something close to hatred the village schoolmaster who, taking his charges for a nature walk, used to quash young Vladimir’s hunger for precision by saying, “Oh, just a small bird—no special name.” And what scorn Nabokov bears for
us
, his clueless audience, when he writes, “I had found last spring a dark aberration of Sievers’ Carmelite (just another gray moth to the reader).”

Phase Two of my life as a collector—again, one shared with my older and wiser brother—was an intemperate, catholic, and nonmurderous surrender to the urge to identify the small bird and the gray moth. If catching was the central theme of our childhood,
curating—classifying, labeling, sorting, arranging, displaying—was the central theme of our adolescence. Butterflies were the slender wedge that opened up something much larger: an earnest attempt to stuff the entire natural world, down to the last kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species (I can still rattle these off in the proper sequence, having learned the mnemonic “King Philip,
Come Out For God’s Sake” at age twelve), into our spare bedroom. It never occurred to us that it would not fit.

The spare bedroom, on the southwest corner of the second floor of our house in Los Angeles, to which we had moved when I was eight and Kim was ten, had a sign on the door that read:

The sign was embossed in blue with a Dymo Label-maker,
than which there was no more perfect gift, circa 1963, for a pair of children who were crazy about naming things. I am not quite sure why our parents turned over this room to us, nor why they let us hammer pieces of whale baleen into the striped tan wallpaper, nor why they permitted us to fill the bathroom with dirt in order to accommodate our pet California king snake. All I can say is that
I am profoundly grateful that they did.

In
Our Mutual Friend
, Silas Wegg visits a shop belonging to “Mr. Venus, Preserver of Animals and Birds, Articulator of human bones.” Mr. Wegg is there because—could anyone but Dickens ever come up with this one?—he wishes to retrieve his leg, which Mr. Venus purchased, for potential inclusion in a skeleton, from the hospital in which it was amputated. “I
shouldn’t like,” says Mr. Wegg, “to be what I may call dispersed, a part of me here, and a part of me there, but should wish to collect myself as a genteel person.” (Mr. Wegg may thus be the only collector who has ever collected himself. He does get his leg back, though not until later in the book; it arrives under Mr. Venus’s arm, carefully wrapped, looking
like “a sort of brown paper truncheon.”)
Mr. Venus shows Mr. Wegg around the shop. “Bones, warious,” he explains.

Skulls, warious. Preserved Indian baby. African ditto. Bottled preparations, warious. Everything within reach of your hand, in good preservation. The mouldy ones a-top. What’s in those hampers over them again, I don’t quite remember. Say, human warious. Cats. Articulated English baby. Dogs. Ducks. Glass eyes, warious. Mummied
bird. Dried cuticle, warious. Oh, dear me! That’s the general panoramic view.

The general panoramic view of the Serendipity Museum of Nature was similarly warious. It bore a far closer resemblance to Mr. Venus’s shop, or to a seventeenth-century
Wunderkammer
crammed from top to bottom with miscellaneous natural curiosities, than it did to any museum we had actually seen.

We displayed not only
things that had once been alive but things that had once contained life: the discarded skin of a garter snake, the exoskeleton of a cicada, the speckled egg of a scrub jay, the pendant nest of a Baltimore oriole. Blowfish dangled from the ceiling on strands of dental floss. In the southeast corner, pinned to the wall, were scraps of fur—leopard, tiger, polar bear, rabbit, otter, nutria, mink—left
over from coats tailored by a local furrier. Next to them was a man-size piece of Styrofoam into which we had stuck hundreds of feathers. On the west wall we had nailed a desiccated sand shark, which looked like a crucified demon. Shelves and card tables held, among other things, a stuffed mouse, a stuffed
bat, the skeleton of a pit viper, a hornet’s nest, a mounted ostrich egg, a hunk of petrified
wood, the fossils of ammonites and foraminifers, several dried salamanders, a dead tarantula, three dead scorpions, a sperm-whale tooth, a box of our own baby teeth, the foot of an egret, a pickled squid, a pickled baby octopus, and a pickled human tapeworm, about which I am said to have exclaimed, when I received it on my tenth birthday, “Just what I always wanted!” There were also about a
dozen bird and mammal skulls that we had retrieved from road kills and cleaned with bleach. (Pending their Clorox baths, our mother permitted us to wrap the corpses in aluminum foil and store them in the freezer, as long as we labeled them clearly enough to prevent her from confusing them with dinner.)

Our old Riker mounts hung on the south wall, but the black and yellow stripes of the tiger
swallowtails were fading. Our new passion was shells, which we housed in a huge metal cabinet, typing the genera on little slips of paper and gluing them to the drawer fronts. In conchology, as a mid-nineteenth-century British magazine observed, “there is no cruelty in the pursuit, the subjects are so ornamental to a boudoir.” It is true that on the Florida island where we spent our spring vacations,
we did occasionally collect live king’s crown conchs, boil them, extract the animals, and clean the shells with muriatic acid. (Being trusted with dangerous substances was a continuing theme throughout our childhood.) But it was more sporting, and more fun, to walk along the beach and, among the jetsam of broken cockles and
clams, to spot a banded tulip, an alphabet cone, an apple murex, or (great
find of my youth!) an angulate wentletrap.

Last week I was reminiscing about our museum with my brother. Kim said, “When you collect nature, there are two moments of discovery. The first comes when you find the thing. The second comes when you find the name.” Few pleasures can equal those of the long summer afternoons we spent sitting on the floor in a patch of sunlight, our shell guides spread
out before us, trying to identify a particular species of limpet or marginella— and finally, with a whoop of delight, succeeding. Without classification, a collection is just a hodgepodge. Taxonomy, after all—and I think we unconsciously realized this, even as teenagers—is a form of imperialism. During the nineteenth century, when British naval surveys were flooding London with specimens to be
classified, inserting them into their proper niches in the Linnaean hierarchy had undeniable political overtones. Take a bird or a lizard or a flower from Patagonia or the South Seas, perhaps one that has had a local name for centuries, rechristen it with a Latin binomial, and presto! It has become a tiny British colony. That’s how Kim and I felt, too. To name was to assert dominion.

“You’re
like a miser,” Miranda says to her captor in
The Collector
. “You hoard up all the beauty in these drawers.… I hate people who collect things, and classify things and give them names.” That’s the popular notion, all right. Even my husband finds it a wee bit pathological when he finds me taking the shells
he
has collected and
arranging them in rows, by species. But I believe it is no accident that
the three greatest biological theorists of the nineteenth century—Alfred Russel Wallace; Henry Walter Bates, who developed the theory of mimicry; and Charles Darwin—were all, at their cores, collectors. Wallace, who collected plants as a boy, returned from the Malay Archipelago with 125,660 “specimens of natural history,” mostly insects. Bates, who collected bugs as a boy, returned from the Amazon
with 14,712 different
species
, again mostly insects, of which eight thousand were previously undiscovered. When he was a boy, Darwin collected coins, postal franks, pebbles, minerals, shells, birds’ eggs, and, above all, in the days when “to beetle” was an infinitive, hundreds of specimens of the order Coleoptera. His zeal was such that once, with a rare beetle in each hand, he spied a third species,
and popped the beetle in his right hand into his mouth. (Unfortunately, it ejected a foul-tasting liquid and he had to spit it out.) He later sent home from South America box after box of specimens—birds, mammals, reptiles, insects, fish—that he had skinned and stuffed and pickled while fighting terrible seasickness in the
Beagle
’s poop cabin. It was not enough just to
see
the Galápagos finches;
he had to
collect
them, and get help classifying them, and compare their beaks back home in England, before he was able to develop the theory of the origin of species.

All nature collectors share a particular set of tastes and skills: pattern recognition; the ability to distinguish anomaly from norm; the compulsion to order experience.
A few of them also have brilliant imaginations, as well as
what Darwin called the capacity for “grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.”
Collections
of facts. Those of us who lack the latter two abilities will never change the course of science, but when we invite a new shell or butterfly into our lives, we are doing a part of what Darwin did. And lest the primacy of the collecting instinct be underestimated, let us reflect that Darwin
was never able to remember for more than a few days a single date or a line of poetry, but at age sixty-seven, looking back on the beetles of his youth, he wrote, “I can remember the exact appearance of certain posts, old trees and banks where I made a good capture.”

We sold the Serendipity Museum of Nature. My brother and I were off to college, our parents were moving to a smaller house, we
thought it was time to grow up, and… well, we just did it. We put an ad in the
Los Angeles Times
, and over the course of a weekend, a stream of strange people walked underneath the blow fish and took away the field guides and the fossil ammonites and the desiccated sand shark and the pickled human tapeworm. The things we prized most, because we had found them ourselves, were worthless. I remember
jamming dozens of birds’ nests into plastic garbage bags. I was almost seventeen; it was the last day of my childhood.

Thank heavens, we kept the shells, because they were
small and easily stored. Today they rest inside a glass-fronted cabinet in the home of our elderly parents, who surprised us a few years ago by moving to the Florida island where we had collected the shells in the first place.
When I visit, I still cannot resist picking up the odd murex or limpet when I walk along the beach. They do not have the same meaning they once did, but, as Swann said in
Remembrance of Things Past
, “even when one is no longer attached to things, it’s still something to have been attached to them.”

Three years ago, I found a 1951 edition of
A Field Guide to the Butterflies of North America, East
of the Great Plains
, by Alexander B. Klots, in a secondhand store in upstate New York. There was a stamp on the school library bookplate that said discarded. Discard
Klots
? How could anyone do that? I suppose for the same reason that I once discarded Klots myself: because there wasn’t room. When I was younger, I didn’t know what I wanted from life, so I wanted everything—new experiences, tiger
swallowtails, egrets’ feet. Now that I have collected a family, a home, a vocation, and a few thousand books, my New York City apartment and my life are full. Before my husband’s last birthday, I sent for a copy of the Carolina Biological Supply Company catalog so I could buy him a flower press. I felt the old thirst when I read about the tarantula spiderling kit, $49.95; the owl pellets, “fumigated
and individually wrapped,” $3.20; the live salamander larvae, $11.45 a dozen; the slime mold box, “preferred by professional slime mold collectors” (a lovely phrase; I had never thought of it as a profession),
$5.80. I knew, however, that I would never order these things. There isn’t room.