My obsession with metamorphosis began after my wife and I discovered that we're going to have our third child. I started having nightly dreams about the butterflies I kept in a dry aquarium when I was a kid, waking up in the middle of the night with a flashlight strapped to my forehead, waiting to see them emerge from their chrysalis. A pregnancy somehow feels like our human version of emergence: few experiences are as life-changing as becoming a parent, and fewer wonders more exhilarating than the natural magic of metamorphosis. Both mark beginnings but are in fact continuations. Both, in different ways, are also forms of endings. Both make us wonder about the riddles of our world.
In this classic, Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, famously wakes up one morning to discover that he is a gigantic vermin.
Interpretations of the book range from Kafka trying to say that modern life reduces us all to being bugs, to the idea that Kafka was really writing about art, and how, since the artist cannot ever be understood, he might as well be an insect.
I read it as Kafka's attempt to reconcile two philosophies - that of Nietzsche, who claimed that the human will is a force that leads to happiness, and that of Schopenhauer, who claimed that the will is just about survival.
In Kafka's hands, metamorphosis is both life-affirming and life-denying.
“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”
With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century…
Maria Sibylla Merian was a 17th-century painter and naturalist who traveled with her daughter at the age of 52, in the year 1699, to observe and paint the life-cycle of butterflies and other insects in the Suriname jungles.
She was an extraordinary woman, often referred to as "the Mother of Ecology", and this is a beautiful book telling her story.
As it happens, Maria played an important role in cracking the mystery of metamorphosis, going back to the philosophers and naturalists of ancient Greece.
Before Darwin, before Audubon, before Gilbert White, there was Merian. An artist turned naturalist, known for her botanical illustrations, Maria Sybilla Merian was born in Germany just sixteen years after Galileo proclaimed that the earth orbited the sun. But at the age of fifty she sailed from Europe to the New World on a solo scientific expedition to study insect metamorphosis - an unheard-of journey for any naturalist at that time, much less an unaccompanied woman. When she returned she produced a book that secured her reputation, only to have it savaged in the nineteenth century by scientists who disdained…
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the dead—letters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.
This nineteenth-century classic, by one of the great naturalists to ever turn his talents to the enigma of metamorphosis, is simply a delight to read.
Fabre was a recluse Frenchman from Serignan, known to aficionados as "the Homer of Insects." Fabre pricked a chrysalis with a knife and discovered a syrupy goo gushing slowly like lava from a volcano, which led him to believe that a caterpillar literally melts before rebuilding itself into a butterfly.
Today we know that's not really true: metamorphosis is a carefully constructed symphony of cell destruction and growth - and we can watch it all happen in real time with special cameras!
But the quaintness and beauty of Fabre's tales remain unsurpassed.
The Life of the Caterpillar by Jean-Henri Fabre is a classic natural history book that delves into the fascinating world of one of nature's most intriguing creatures. Fabre, a renowned French naturalist, provides an in-depth look at the life cycle, behavior, and adaptation of caterpillars through his meticulous observations and engaging storytelling. Readers will be captivated by Fabre's vivid descriptions of how caterpillars transform into butterflies, their various forms of camouflage, and the ingenious ways they defend themselves against predators. With his profound knowledge and insightful prose, Fabre not only educates the reader about the biology of caterpillars but also…
This classic is one of the main sources for Greek and Roman mythology, giving us the tales, among others, of the daughter of the river god, the nymph Daphne, turning into a laurel tree to escape the suffocating love of Apollo; the son of Neptune, Cygnus, beaten in battle by Achilles and turned by his father into a swan to escape terrible death; the King of Cyprus, Pygmalion, falling in love with his own sculpture, only to have her turn into a real woman.
When Ovid completed his great work, he stated: “Evening has overtaken me, and the sun has dipped below the horizon of the Ocean, yet I have not had time to tell you of all the things that have evolved into new forms”.
'Still remarkably vivid. It is easier to read this for pure pleasure than just about any other ancient text' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
Ovid's sensuous and witty poem begins with the creation of the world and brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation - often as a result of love or lust - where men and women find themselves magically changed into extraordinary new beings. Including the well-known stories of Daedalus and Icarus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Pygmalion, Perseus and Andromeda, and the fall of Troy, the Metamorphoses has influenced writers and artists from…
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the dead—letters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.
This book is about a young couple who fall in love in a city gripped by war, and step through a magic door which transports them to a different life.
It is a careful study of how their relationship slowly changes, their love morphing into something else.
Hamid is a master stylist, and while this book is not ostensibly about metamorphosis, it spoke directly to the three main questions I ask in my own book: Where did we come from? Where are we going? And what is the self?
To emerge a butterfly, a caterpillar dissolves inside its chrysalis and builds a brand new brain, wings, and legs. But butterflies aren’t alone. A stunning three-quarters of all animal species undergo dramatic metamorphoses. Why must creatures go through massive destruction and remodeling to become who they are?
In the first panoramic treatment of the subject ever written, Metamorphosis explores this central mystery. Along the way, we meet poets, artists, philosophers, and scientists as colorful as the animals themselves: whether Aristotle determining cucumbers had souls, Sigmund Freud searching in vain for eel testicles, or a Japanese geneticist singing karaoke to a baby jellyfish. Combining history, science, and art, the book illuminates how metamorphosis is not only a biological puzzle but a metaphor for identity, reinvention, and survival.
