Fecundity
- We're starting the dark half of the book here, a.k.a. the via negativa, so get ready to see just how messed-up Tinker Creek really is.
- We begin with a nightmare: Dillard dreams she's watching luna moths mate, the female moth lays eggs all over her bed, the eggs hatch… and fish come out.
- You'd probably wake up screaming, too, if you dreamed your bed was full of fish.
- The nightmare makes Dillard reassess her overly idealistic conception of nature. It is, in fact, dark and sinister.
- Because, seriously, what's with all the death?
- There are a bunch of species that cast a bajillion eggs into the world on the off chance that one or two will survive.
- Even plants can be creepy, what with their ability to grow really big, really fast. There's a form of Chinese torture that harnesses the ability of bamboo to grow three feet overnight.
- Basically, the torturers sharpen the ends of live bamboo plants and place them beneath a person suspended by his wrists and ankles. As the bamboo grows, which takes about 24 hours, the person slowly gets impaled.
- Still, the fecundity (a.k.a. prolific reproduction) of animals is way more disturbing than that of plants. What's more upsetting, Dillard asks—acres of rats, or acres of tulips?
- She thinks about how each of those rats—or barnacles, or worms, or starlings—is an individual being, no less worthy of consideration than an equal number of human babies.
- Human parents generally don't eat their young, though. Among the creatures who do: lacewing bugs and big cats. Sometimes the cats get carried away licking away the umbilical cords of their newborns and just… well, chow down.
- Here's her big question: If you're creating species, and you want a certain number of individuals to survive, why not just create the number you want and make them hardier, rather than throwing out a billion eggs and hoping a few live?
- The fact that more individuals die than live makes her wonder if nature is "dealing in life, or in death."
- She compares the way nature works with the way engineers work, just to highlight the inefficiency of it all.
- Her example: Some engineers want a railroad with three trains, so they build nine thousand trains and set them hurtling down the track toward each other, until only three are left.
- Evolution, she decides, "loves death more than it loves you or me."
- Dillard's gotten pretty isolated from humanity during her time on Tinker Creek, but the brutality of nature is starting to mess with her head. She doesn't feel at home among humans, but this mantis thing is really screwed up.
- There are two options for what's going on here, she decides: Either we're the moral beings in an amoral universe, or morality is irrelevant and it's human emotion that causes us to perceive nature as brutal.
- Her assessment: The world is, in fact, amoral, but that doesn't mean it's a brutal monster; it just exists, and she needs to go to sit by the creek and chill out.
- All this squeamishness over the excessive reproduction of unpleasant creatures is just that: squeamishness. It's not for her to judge how they go about being creatures.
- Fecundity, she decides, is just another form of intricacy, the same intricacy she found beautiful back in Chapter 8.
- So stuff dies. So what? It's all interconnected, with dead things providing fertilizer for new, living things, and therefore "death […] is spinning the globe."