The Amateur Entomologist

There was once an old man whose hobby was collecting butterflies. He was an amateur entomologist. This was his one hobby in his retirement and the death and estrangement of his remaining relatives. The old man had a grey jacket and still had a thick shock of hair, and a thick pair of glasses.

To occupy his time he began to catch insects, and keep them in a jar for a while while he studied them, photographed and sketched them. He always followed scrupulously the advice in the entomology books on how to catch specimens, and was quite serious in his endeavours with his net. He had even, by closely following the advice in an entomologist's manual, fashioned a home-made device for sucking up small insects without damaging them, consisting of an old jar connected to a piece of flexbile hose.

He began to purchase at auction specimens of mounted insects that took his fancy, and his study soon became full of them. He particularly liked some of the more colourful butterflies, and he had several species framed on the walls. Being old and lonely, this soon became his one ruling passion, to which he dedicated an amount of time some might describe as excessive.

He discovered a strange symbiotic relationship between the insects and himself; when he captured one, he saw in its mute agitations and stirrings some obscure analogy to his own struggles in life, as though he had captured the essence of life, of youth, of happiness, as though in some obscure way this loathsome, minuscule thing was the repository of all that he had wanted and lost.

In sketching the tiny monsters, too, he could not help but feel a strange but deep admiration for their beauty, expressed in their perfect symmetry, and how their parts followed the same standard pattern with careful minor variations, all arranged compactly along a centre line, like a tiny immaculate machine. Even the tiniest fly or lowliest louse struck him like this. Even things found under rocks and in cracks impressed him with their blind persistence, their slow strivings, and he felt clearly that even in such small persistence of life there was something noble, something heroic.

His greatest joy when capturing live specimens, and the highlight of every day, came when the specimen must be released. His technique was to slowly creep up on say, a painted lady resting on a buddleia flower,  and gently but firmly force the net down over it, clutching the end. Back at his study he would trap the butterfly under a glass and put it for ten minutes or so in the fridge, as he had read to do in the entomology guides. The cold ceases the agitations of the butterfly and lulls it into insensibility, allowing it to be studied more easily, for cold to a butterfly is a signal to rest. Often he would take the glass and gaze at the butterfly trapped in it for long spaces of time, and imagine all the residues of negativity and bitterness he still felt flowing out of himself and into the insect, as though this thing alone could act as a repository for a lifetime of sorrows while it rested, and bear the load of all the man's hatred, bad thoughts, anger, and sorrow, absorbing it into its lovely compact symmetry, and remaining pristine, as though it were a tiny microchip onto which everything bad in his soul could be downloaded.

The old man always experienced thereafter a kind of small climax of triumph, a childish elation and joy, when he took the butterfly out to the garden and released it, watching it warm and stir, and finally take off to flutter erratically where it would, perhaps even swooping up over the rooftops in the mild afternoon, or be half-blown by a wind across the street and, for all he knew, to the other side of the world. He loved to watch them soar upwards after such a dull captivity.

When the old man died and his few remaining relatives, obscure nephews and cousins, came to take stock of his belongings, they noticed a curious phenomenon occurring in the garden. It was late September, but the garden was full of butterflies, some erratically taking wing, as though confused, others resting gracefully on buddleia flowers, all of them seemingly engaged in some mysterious conference, as though they had chosen this day to gather together and celebrate their freedom and life. In their flutterings and dancing there was now expressed a new meaning, it seemed, as though the ballet of their swoopings, their feints and counter-feints, was a tribute to the man's departed soul. In the westering sun, the colours on the wings of  the red admirals, painted ladies, monarchs and peacocks were muted and soft, for the birds had already begun to sing. It was as though the specimen collection in the old man's study had at the last escaped from their frames and smashed their glass, and flowed out into the garden beyond , finally free.