Beetle Love Quotes

If love be rough with you, be rough with love; Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down. Give me a case to put my visage in: A visor for a visor! what care I What curious eye doth quote deformities? Here are the beetle brows shall blush for me.

To really touch something, she is learning—the bark of a sycamore tree in the gardens; a pinned stag beetle in the Department of Etymology; the exquisitely polished interior of a scallop shell in Dr. Geffard’s workshop—is to love it.

And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy -- and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.

Paul D did not answer because she didn't expect or want him to, but he did know what she meant. Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight, copper dirt, moon - everything belonged to the men who had the guns. Little men, some of them, big men too, each one of whom he could snap like a twig if he wanted to. Men who knew that their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without fox would laugh at them. And these "men" who made even vixen laugh could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Glass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child, a brother - a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose - not to need permission for desire - well now, THAT was freedom.

As far as I am concerned, all reading is for pleasure.

I wished I could explain it to those I loved, my mother, to Japhy, but there just weren't any words to describe the nothingness and purity of it. "Is there a certain and definite teaching to be given to all living creatures?" was the question probably asked to beetle browed snowy Dipankara, and his answer was the roaring silence of the diamond.

Sometimes with a flutter of agitated worry that felt like a beetle was trapped inside my ribs. p. 90

Like a beetle tied by the leg, I hovered incessantly around the beloved wing; I believe I would have liked to remain there forever... but that was impossible.

A dung beetle couple in love constantly proves that you still can be in love living on shit.

She used to imagine her parents and happy endings she would never have. Now she envisioned torments that were all too real. She pictured one of Cinderella's stepsisters planting her foot on a cutting board - and biting down hard as the cleaver chopped through the bone of her big toe. She imagined a princess used to safety, luxury, throwing the rank hide of a donkey over her shoulders, its boneless face drooping past her forehead like a hideous veil. And she imagined her future self, flat on her back in bed, limbs as heavy as if they'd been chained down. Mice scurried across her body, leaving footprints on her dress. Spiders spun an entire trousseau's worth of silk and draped her in it, so it appeared she wore a gown of the finest lace, adorned with rose petals and ensnared butterflies. Beetles nestled between her fingers like jeweled rings - lovely from a distance, horrific up close.

I feel the need to fall in love with the world, to forge that relationship ever more strongly. But maybe I don’t have to work so hard. I have thought nature indifferent to humans, to one more human, but maybe the reverse is true. Maybe the world is already in love, giving us these gifts all the time—the glimpse of a fox, tracks in the sand, a breeze, a flower--calling out all the time: take this. And this. And this. Don’t turn away.

A habit that forms from this is that I can ask Eric questions when he is asleep. Once I hear the first snore, I say, Why is your trajectory so straight? Why is your family so nice? It seems unfair how easy everything comes to you. In your last life you must have been a dung beetle. Or someone who gave up his life for someone else. Perhaps a pregnant woman crossing the street. Do you remember? Then I part his autumn hair and bring my voice down to a whisper. Please stop, just for a little while, and let me catch up. How do you expect me to marry you if you never let me catch up?

Belle's tears spilled over. "Even if I could get out of this place, I wouldn't know where to go," she sobbed. "Where is it, Lucanos? Where is my home?" The beetle sighed. He touched the tip of one leg to the place over Belle's heart. "It's here, foolish girl," he said. "Home is all the people, all the places, and all the things that you love. You carry it wherever you go. Don't you know that?

There’s no love lost between Hob and high-Lammer. The Hobs work our factories, sail our ships, wash our clothes. They are the beetle-back on which our city is built. And they do not have a gentle love for us.

Technology is about broadening our ideas of what is possible.

Sometimes one beetle recognizes another, and it doesn’t matter if it’s been five minutes or five years.

Aithníonn ciaróg, ciaróg eile," he says. "It's an Irish proverb. Roughly translated, it means, One beetle recognizes another.

...It's pure vanity to presume that love exists only on our terms. A red lead may be the universe for the tortoise beetle or the ladybird. A single touch the ecstasy of a lifetime. (180)

Often the men and women who find or discover the scientific principles that change our world are men and women who are moved—in the same way any writer or artist is moved—by a deep curiosity about the unknown.

So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest starts out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grassblade, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do. A woman, a child, a brother- a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose- not need permission for desire- well now, that was freedom.

It was the hour of prayer. Black-beetles exploded against the walls like crackers. More than a dozen crawled over the tiles with injured wings. It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy — a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all. He knew.

Although he had changed his name, his history came with him, even to his writing. The rhythm of his rain-soaked childhood became a sequence of words. His memories of the understory of the great forest burst into lyrical phrases, as resinous as the sap of a pinecone, as crisp as the shell of a beetle. Sentences grew long, then pulled up short, taking on the tempo of the waves upon the shore, or swayed gently, like the plaintive song of a lone harmonica. His fury became essays that pointed, stabbed, and burned. His convictions played out with the monotonous determination of a printing press. And his affections became poems, as warm and supple as the wool of a well-loved sheep.

There was a time, usually late in August, when summer struck the trees with dazzling power and they were rich with leaves but then became, suddenly one day, strangely still, as if in expectation and at that moment aware. They knew. Everything knew, the beetles, the frogs, the crows solemnly walking across the lawn. The sun was at its zenith and embraced the world, but it was ending, all that one loved was at risk.

Outside, the garden shimmered with heat. She waded through the helleborine, its flowers leaving crimson smears on her dress. The air hummed with insects, the sun catching on the wings of a damselfly. Violet smiled, remembering the words from her mother's letter. Walls painted yellow as tansy flowers. It was as if she was reaching out to her from beyond the grave, guiding her. She found the plant under the sycamore, bobbing with yellow flowers, each one comprised of tiny buds clustered together like a beetle's eggs.

Our relationship is like ten turtles marching along, followed by seven beetles, with each carrying one monosyllabic word on its back. You might call that a haiku, but I call it love.

Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike. Beautiful were the moon and the stars, beautiful was the stream and the banks, the forest and the rocks, the goat and the golden beetle, the flower and the butterfly. It was beautiful and lovely to walk through the world, childlike and awake, open to what is near without distrust.

To really touch something, she is learning—the bark of a sycamore tree in the gardens; a pinned stag beetle in the Department of Entomology; the exquisitely polished interior of a scallop shell in Dr. Geffard’s workshop—is to love it.

intrigues of love are unfolding as they do among the young, and as they do as well among the snails on the lettuce and the shiny green beetles that plague the kale. Murmurings, the shrug of a shoulder, the step forward, the step back. Toby

But now, his liberated eyes stayed on this side, he saw and became aware of the visible, sought to be at home in this world, did not search for the true essence, did not aim at a world beyond. Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike. Beautiful were the moon and the stars, beautiful was the stream and the banks, the forest and the rocks, the goat and the golden beetle, the flower and the butterfly. It was beautiful and lovely to walk through the world, childlike and awake, open to what is near without distrust.

Bugle" Black beetles know where the most recent bones bake in the heat, tendons and meat long gone, bleached white, and if you give them cheap wine -- drizzle a few red drops on a flat stone-- they will lead you to a barren gulch surrounded by sages and nettles, dirt burnt to powdery sand and sharp thorns. Hunch above the skeleton, bow your head, start reciting verses you learned as a child, there, under the sun with rocks and brush, bare locust tree a telling reliquary of dust to dust, all so brutally hot. You must pull ribs from that rotting body, words that matter: love me, love me not.

Beautiful were the moon and the stars, beautiful was the stream and the banks, the forest and the rocks, the goat and the gold-beetle, the flower and the butterfly. Beautiful and lovely it was, thus to walk through the world, thus childlike, thus awoken, thus open to what is near, thus without distrust.

searching, thus simply, thus childlike. Beautiful were the moon and the stars, beautiful was the stream and the banks, the forest and the rocks, the goat and the gold-beetle, the flower and the butterfly. Beautiful and lovely it was, thus to walk through the world, thus childlike, thus awoken, thus open to what is near, thus without distrust

I show you the last human. „What is love? What is creation? What is desire? What is a star?“ – so asks the last human and blinks. The earth has become small by then, and on it hops the last human who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea beetle; the last man lives the longest. „We have invented happiness“ – say the last humans and blink.

BEE QUEEN Be not scared oh beetles of the earth Be at peace for the Queen Bee flaps for the preys. Your safety abide oh Queen of the Bee for your grace is only for the bees. The earth cry for empathy and your smiles brightened her fate When darkness whispers, your glow splashes Your beauty is like a thorn, it penetrates even the hardest feelings Your nest awaits your grace oh Queen mother Poem by Victor Vote for Yetunde Kayode ©️2021 by VVF

He was the one, however, with whom no one wanted his or her picture taken, the one to whom no one wanted to introduce his son or daughter. Louis and Gage knew him; they had met him and faced him down in New England, some time ago. He was waiting to choke you on a marble, to smother you with a dry-cleaning bag, to sizzle you into eternity with a fast and lethal boggie of electricity—Available at Your Nearest Switchplate or Vacant Light Socket Right Now. There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nurdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too—Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who’s out there? you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don’t be afraid, it’s just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leukemia! Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let’s go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night. Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation—in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name’s Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want—hell, we’re old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can’t stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I’ve got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha. And that thin voice is crying, “I love you, Tigger! I love you! I believe in you, Tigger! I will always love you and believe in you, and I will stay young, and the only Oz to ever live in my heart will be that gentle faker from Nebraska! I love you . . .” We cruise . . . my son and I . . . because the essence of it isn’t war or sex but only that sickening, noble, hopeless battle against Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. He and I, in our white van under this bright Florida sky, we cruise. And the red flasher is hooded, but it is there if we need it . . . and none need know but us because the soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can . . . and tends it.

Darwin is associated, in the popular imagination, with bloody zero-sum competition, with Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw”—with the motto “survival of the fittest.” But this wasn’t actually his phrase. It was coined by a philosopher and sociologist named Herbert Spencer and his fellow “social Darwinists,” who were promoters of white and upper-class supremacy. For Darwin, says Keltner, “survival of the kindest” would have been a better moniker. Darwin was a gentle and melancholic soul, a doting husband and adoring father of ten, deeply in love with nature from earliest childhood. His father had wanted him to be a doctor, but when at age sixteen he witnessed his first surgery, performed in those days without anesthesia, he was so horrified that for the rest of his life he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. He retreated to the woodlands and studied beetles instead. Later, he described his encounter with a Brazilian forest as “a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise.

He was a goodly spirit—he who fell:         A wanderer by moss-y-mantled well—         A gazer on the lights that shine above—         A dreamer in the moonbeam by his love:         What wonder? for each star is eye-like there,         And looks so sweetly down on Beauty’s hair—         And they, and every mossy spring were holy         To his love-haunted heart and melancholy.         The night had found (to him a night of woe)         Upon a mountain crag, young Angelo—         Beetling it bends athwart the solemn sky,         And scowls on starry worlds that down beneath it lie.         Here

So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, wood-peckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child, a brother - a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. he knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose - not to need permission for desire - well now, that was freedom.

(William) Hamilton recast the central ideas (of the evolutionary theory of aging) in mathematical form. Though this work tells us a good deal about why human lives take the course they do, Hamilton was a biologist whose great love was insects and their relatives, especially insects which make both our lives and an octopus’s life seem rather humdrum. Hamilton found mites in which the females hang suspended in the air with their swollen bodies packed with newly hatched young, and the males in the brood search out and copulate with their sisters there inside the mother. He found tiny beetles in which the males produce “and manhandle sperm cells longer than their whole bodies. Hamilton died in 2000, after catching malaria on a trip to Africa to investigate the origins of HIV. About a decade before his death, he wrote about how he would like his own burial to go. He wanted his body carried to the forests of Brazil and laid out to be eaten from the inside by an enormous winged Coprophanaeus beetle using his body to nurture its young, who would emerge from him and fly off. 'No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra [wing covers] which we will all hold over our “backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.

What is this?” he went on now, spearing an unfortunate object on a fork and raising it to eye level. “This . . . this . . . thing?” “A parsnip?” Jem suggested. “A parsnip planted in Satan’s own garden,” said Will. He glanced about. “I don’t suppose there’s a dog I could feed it to.” “There don’t seem to be any pets about,” Jem—who loved all animals, even the inglorious and ill-tempered Church—observed. “Probably all poisoned by parsnips,” said Will. “Oh, dear,” Tessa said sadly, laying her fork down. “And I was so hungry too.” “There’s always the dinner rolls,” said Will, pointing to a covered basket. “Though I warn you, they’re as hard as stones. You could use them to kill black beetles, if any beetles bother you in the middle of the night.

Vincent was the victim of his own fanatic heart. “There’s something in the way he talks that makes people either love him or hate him,” he tried to explain. “He spares nothing and no one.” Long after others had put away the breathless manias of youth, Vincent still lived by their unsparing rules. Titanic, unappeasable passions swept through his life. “I am a fanatic!” Vincent declared in 1881. “I feel a power within me … a fire that I may not quench, but must keep ablaze.” Whether catching beetles on the Zundert creekbank, collecting and cataloguing prints, preaching the Christian gospel, consuming Shakespeare or Balzac in great fevers of reading, or mastering the interactions of color, he did everything with the urgent, blinding single-mindedness of a child.

I walked through the cemetery holding a bouquet of yellow and red flowers with brown combat boots, feeling grateful and bitter the sun was shining so brightly. I felt an urge to run, as well as a magnet to reach the group of people surrounding you. I wanted to be wearing white. I wanted to be walking down an isle with flowers and for this to be a different ceremony. I wanted to curl up beside the earth that held you, the pink and yellow petals, strings of ground hanging loosely in the wind and be beside you. I was angry you were buried, I resented the earth falling upon you. Each scoop felt heavy and indefinite. I'm not ready to know this is definite. I watched your chest, in a white linen shirt last night wishing for your chest to rise. But when I kissed your forehead it was cold. And when I held your hands it wasn't you. It was a shell. It was a vessel. It was empty. The first time I heard your new music it was by accident and your voice drove me from your home into hysterics. But when I entered your home and it played with your casket it was welcome. I read your letter with your mom and dad out loud beside you, and halfway through "spelunking in your soul" started to play. That was a gift, thank you. Today walking back from the funeral a green and black beetle landed in my hair and crawled onto my finger. I just had a bad moment with a woman in your life and I felt you in the little beetle. I'm writing something to be read at your celebration of life. It's not going to be read by me. I have a wedding in Joshua tree. But I will celebrate you in the desert there. I wanted to read the poem "sex and wine for breakfast" I wrote about you but figured I would go less steamy. I love you.

SHE TOLD ME THE EARTH LOVES US by Anne Haven McDonnell She said it softly, without a need For conviction or romance. After everything? I asked, ashamed. That’s not the kind of love she meant. She walked through a field of gray Beetle-bored pine, snags branching Like polished bone. I forget sometimes How trees look at me with the generosity Of water. I forget all the other Breath I’m breathing in. Today I learned that trees can’t sleep With our lights on. That they knit A forest in their language, their feelings. This is not a metaphor. Like seeing faces across the crowd, We are learning al the old things, Newly shined and numbered. I’m always looking For a place to lie down And cry. Green, mossed, shaded. Or rock-quiet, empty. Somewhere To hush and start over I put on my antlers in the sun. I walk through the dark gates of the trees. Grief waters my footsteps, leaving A trail that glistens.

He imagines snapping his fingers, making all the people in the diner stand, at once, and become their better selves. The woman with the cragged oak-bark face throws off her hood and shakes her hair and her age drops off of her like bandages. The man with a monk's tonsure, muttering to himself, leaps onto a table and strikes music from the air. Out of the bowels of the kitchen the weary cooks, small brown people, cartwheel and break-dance, spinning like upended beetles on the ground and their faces crack into glee and they are suddenly lovely to look at, and the dozen customers start up all at once into loud song, voices broken and beautiful. The song rises and infiltrates the city and wakes the inhabitants, one by one, from their own dark dreams, and all across the island, people sit up in bed and listen to it lap around them, an ocean of kindness, filling them, making them forget all the evil leaching out of the world for a very long moment, making them forget everything but the song.

Muhammad once was talking to a crowd of chieftains, princes with great influence, when a poor blind man interrupted him. Muhammad frowned and said to the man, "Let me attend to these visitors. This is a rare chance, whereas you are already my friend. We'll have ample time." Then somebody nearby said, "That blind man may be worth a hundred kings. Remember the proverb, Human beings are mines." World-power means nothing. Only the unsayable, jeweled inner life matters. Muhammad replied, "Do not think that I'm concerned with being acknowledged by these authorities. If a beetle moves toward rosewater, it proves that the solution is diluted. Beetles love dung, not rose essence. If a coin is eager to be tested by the touchstone, that coin itself may be a touchstone. A thief loves the night. I am day. I reveal essences. A calf thinks God is a cow. A donkey's theology changes when someone new pets it and gives it what it wants. I am not a cow, or thistles for camels to browse on. People who insult me are only polishing the mirror

Love has made him surprise himself. He would never have believed it possible, but it's turned out that he is a man who can walk up to a closed door on a murky November day, wearing his one good suit, and knock without hesitation, waiting while the rain comes down around him, even though he's not wanted. He can do this and not think twice, just the way he can spend hours watching a wounded cedar beetle and weep over its rare beauty, as well as its agony. Richard is certain that other species fall in love - primates, of course, and canines - but he has wondered about his beetles. There are people who would surely get a chuckle out of the mere suggestion, but in Richard's opinion it's pure vanity to presume that love exists only on our terms. A red leaf may be the universe for the tortoise beetle or the ladybird. A single touch the ecstasy of a lifetime. And so, here he is, in love despite everything. It is he, stupider than any beetle, and far more obstinate, who has traveled three thousand miles, even though he fully expects to be turned away.

Wittgenstein uses this beetle analogy to suggest that the felt states and sensations that occur in a person’s mind; things like smell, pain, love, happiness, sadness, and so on are things that no one can communicate sufficiently enough to share and reveal their experiences to others. I can never see your beetle, and you can never see mine. When we attempt to think and communicate about the beetle, though, the word has to be a word that everyone understands and can be taught for the word to have any meaning. According to Wittgenstein and many others, language is entirely social. This theory is known as the Private Language Argument, which proposes that no language can be understandable if it is solely to one individual. Rather, language is only formed through shared use amongst a community of others. Thus, the sensation of something might exist exclusively to one’s self, but it can never be understood in terms of language exclusively to one’s self. Meaning, we can never know if anyone experiences anything the same way we experience it, even if everyone talks about it in the same words. We can only assume. Arguably, trying to rationalize, communicate, and comprehend the mental experience of a sensation as it actually is, becomes inconceivable after a certain point. For example, one could say that fresh cut grass smells good, but when asked what it smells like, they would have to go on to say things like it smells natural or like the season of spring. If then asked, what that smells like, perhaps if one tried hard enough, they could come with a few other smells to compare it to, but they would eventually and inevitably reach the limits of language. There would be a final question of what it smells like that would have no answer. A sensation beyond words that no one besides the smeller could know for sure what is like. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Wittgenstein writes when referring to the notion of subjective experience and that which exceeds language and logical understanding. Beyond the suggestions of language and shared meaning, arguably what is most thought-provoking about all of this is the notion that we can never know what it feels like to be anyone else other than our self. We can never know what the world might look, taste, smell, sound, and feel like from outside our own heads. We can never verify what anyone else’s color blue looks like, or what anyone else’s punch in the arm feels like, or what anyone else’s sense of love or happiness is like. We are all locked inside our minds, yelling out to each other in an attempt to find out, but never capable of entering anyone else’s to find out for sure. Even if the framework, structure, and wiring of each of our brains are mostly identical, the unknowable conscious psychological layer on top of it all transmutes the experience of neurological occurrences into something abstract, distanced enough from the measurable and communicable to ever know exactly what any of it is, where it comes from, and how it might change in different heads. Ultimately, no matter the philosophical stance or scientific theory, it is fair to argue that at a minimum no one can or will ever know what it means to have navigated and experienced this universe in the way that you have and will. Each moment that you experience, a particular sense or image of the world with your particular conditions of consciousness, is forever yours exclusively, withholding the mystery of what it means to actually be you for all of eternity. Perhaps we all feel and experience in nearly identical ways, or perhaps we all feel and experience in very dissimilar ways. Your version of blue, your sensation of pain, your experience of love, could perhaps be its only version of blue, its only version of pain, and its only version of love to ever exist in the entire universe. The point is, we don’t know because each of us holds the answer that no one can ever access.

You only need one or two, if the area’s small, but Fairuz never did anything small if she could help it; the tattoo was all over and so were the beetles. They skittered back and forth over her skin, a shirt of rosy sequins, and across their bodies the projected constellations flickered in and out of sight.

They basked in the sweet-scented breeze, and felt the sunshine warming their bare heads. Petals drifted from the gnarled apple and cherry trees, creating a pretty storm, like confetti. They lay together in the grass, watching a beetle trundling through the blades, its clumsy movements reminiscent of the soldiers' giant transport trucks. Birdsong filled the air, horse buses clopped through the street, and somewhere along the city docks, a ship's whistle blew. When it was time to go home, they packed everything into the basket and walked together, their clasped hands swinging between them. Annalise loved these perfect days with her mother, when the air was warm and the tulips and daffodils were coming up.

Don Fabrizio remembered a conversation with Father Pirrone some months before in the sunlit observatory. What the Jesuit had predicted had come to pass. But wasn’t it perhaps good tactics to insert himself into the new movement, make at least part use of it for a few members of his own class? The worry of his imminent interview with Don Calogero lessened. “But the rest of his family, Don Ciccio, what are they really like?” “Excellency, no one has laid eyes on Don Calogero’s wife for years, except me. She only leaves the house to go to early Mass, the five o’clock one, when it’s empty. There’s no organ-playing at that hour; but once I got up early just to see her. Donna Bastiana came in with her maid, and as I was hiding behind a confessional I could not see very much; but at the end of Mass the heat was too great for the poor woman and she took off her black veil. Word of honour, Excellency, she was lovely as the sun, one can’t blame Don Calogero, who’s a beetle of a man, for wanting to keep her away from others. But even in the best kept houses secrets come out; servants talk; and it seems Donna Bastiana is a kind of animal: she can’t read or write or tell the time by a clock, can scarcely talk; just a beautiful mare, voluptuous and uncouth; she’s incapable even of affection for her own daughter! Good for bed and that’s all.” Don Ciccio, who, as protégé of queens and follower of princes, considered his own simple manners to be perfect, smiled with pleasure. He had found a way of getting some of his own back on the suppressor of his personality. “Anyway,” he went on, “one couldn’t expect much else. You know whose daughter Donna Bastiana is, Excellency?” He turned, rose on tiptoe, pointed to a distant group of huts which looked as if they were slithering off the edge of the hill, nailed there just by a wretched-looking bell-tower: a crucified hamlet. “She’s the daughter of one of your peasants from Runci, Peppe Giunta he was called, so filthy and so crude that everyone called him Peppe “Mmerda” . . . excuse the word, Excellency.” Satisfied, he twisted one of Teresina’s ears round a finger. “Two years after Don Calogero had eloped with Bastiana they found him dead on the path to Rampinzeri, with twelve bullets in his back. Always lucky, is Don Calogero, for the old man was getting above himself and demanding, they say.” Much of this was known to Don Fabrizio and had already been balanced up in his mind; but the nickname of Angelica’s grandfather was new to him; it opened a profound historical perspective, and made him glimpse other abysses compared to which Don Calogero himself seemed a garden flowerbed. The Prince began to feel the ground giving way under his feet; how ever could Tancredi swallow this? And what about himself? He found himself trying to work out the relationship between the Prince of Salina, uncle of the bridegroom, and the grandfather of the bride; he found none, there wasn’t any. Angelica was just Angelica, a flower of a girl, a rose merely fertilised by her grandfather’s nickname. Non olet, he repeated, non olet; in fact optime foeminam ac contuberninum olet.

Orpheus, Gathering the Trees" The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Book X, Lines 86-110. When love died the second time, he sang at dawn in the empty field and the bees came to listen. A little song for the tag alder, the rue cherry the withe-willow— the simple-hearted ones that come quickly to loneliness. Then he sang for the mulberry with its purple fruit, for the cedar and the tamarack. He sang, bel canto. for the quaking aspen and the stave oak; something lovely for the white pine, the fever tree, the black ash. From the air, he called the sparrows and the varieties of wrens. Then he sang for a bit of pestilence— for the green caterpillars, for the leaf worms and bark beetles. Food to suit the flickers and the crows. So that, in the wood lot, there would always be empty places. So he would still know loss.

Most of the Science Crapp was still packed in the crates, barrels, bundles, and bales in which it had been carted hither. Each of these containers was an impediment to the casual investigator. Daniel spied a crate, not far below the rafters, with its lid slightly askew. The only thing atop it was a glass bell jar covering a dessicated owl. Daniel set the bird to one side, drew out the crate, and pulled off the lid. It was the old Archbishop of York’s beetle collection, lovingly packed in straw. This, and the owl, told all. It was as he had feared. Birds and bugs, top to bottom, front to back. All salvaged, not because they had innate value, but because they’d been given to the Royal Society by important people. They’d been kept here just as a young couple keeps the ugly wedding present from the rich aunt.

In Egyptian art, the Beetle represents the Neter, Khepri, the cosmic law of becoming, the evolution of all living things. When you see a Beetle is inside a RA disc, especially when the disc is touching the third eye. This disc touching the third eye means something is coming into existence that has never been created before via Instant manifestation through Sound.

Despite all this, writing really is a good thing; I am now calmer than I was 2 hours ago outside on the balcony with your letter. While I was lying there a beetle had fallen on its back one step away and was desperately trying to right itself; I would have gladly helped—it was so easy, so obvious, all that was required was a step and a small shove—but I forgot about it because of your letter; I was just as incapable of getting up. Only a lizard again made me aware of the life around me, its path led over the beetle, which was already so completely still that I said to myself, this was not an accident but death throes, the rarely witnessed drama of an animal’s natural death; but when the lizard slid off the beetle, the beetle was righted although it did lie there a little longer as if dead, but then ran up the wall of the house as if nothing had happened. Somehow this probably gave me, too, a little courage; I got up, drank some milk and wrote to you.

He was a self-righteous know-it-all who had the breath of a dung beetle, a gray ponytail he barely pulled together from the bozo ring of hair clinging to his balding, freckled dome, and loved to drink, of all things, tea. Usually it was some sickly sweet-smelling herbal crap that was made in the hippie wasteland of Boulder, Colorado. The box was festooned with the image of a happy, dancing bear in a field of multicolored flowers and the tea had some idiotic name like Tai Chai. After work one evening, I snatched the box of tea bags from the break room and changed the recipe. I wasn't really worried that any other employees would use one of the tea bags because NO ONE DRINKS FUCKING TEA AT WORK, especially not the totally useless, noncaffeinated fairy tears reserved for old maids to sip while they watch Murder, She Wrote in bed with their legion of cats.

The Australian jewel beetle has sex with beer bottles. The beetles are a light chocolate color with dimples all down their back and dark black legs and heads that peek out from underneath their carapeces. Their bodies are big and long instead of round, and they resemble cicadas more than they do ladybugs. The male Australian jewel beetle is hardwired to like certain aspects about the female jewel beetle. They like females to be big, brown, and shiny. The bottles they make love to are bigger, browner, and shinier than any female could ever hope to be. In Australia, a certain type of bottle called stubbies overstimulates male jewel beetles. In a trash heap filled with bottles, you will often see every single stubby covered in male jewel beetles trying to get it on. The stubbies are what evolutionary psychologists call supernormal releasers. They are superstimuli, better than the real thing. The beetles will mate with these bottles even while being devoured by ants.

One day, Billy sat home after work and prayed, 'Why oh why did you create me this way? The lion looked at Billy and answered, 'first, you must love yourself. Be proud of yourself and jnow you are just as perfect as me.' 'Do not climb over others to reach your height. The more gentle you are, the more others will lift you up.' Billy like this answer and thanked the giraffe. 'You are as big and as strong as me. Your job in the dungs is not easy. You have your own unique skills. Be in service and help others.' Billy liked this answer and thanked the elephant.

You are that beetle on the streets of New York. The universe doesn't hate you, but it doesn't love you, either. You're just an atom in its infinite workings. The universe doesn't care if you live, die, suffer, or thrive. Only YOU care.

Each dungeon held one inmate, one can of water, and one bucket for human excrement. That was all. There was no sink or toilet, no bed, mattress, or blanket, no other furniture. Prisoners slept on the floor and, after using the buckets, covered them with their shirts to combat the stink and the scarab beetles, which loved to eat from the buckets. The only air and light entered through the iron-bar ceilings, twelve feet over the prisoners’ heads. A nauseating odor permeated the entire area. It floated up from the buckets, which were emptied only once every twenty-four hours.

She slides between these walls one foot, two feet, a hand and two this is the space in which she lives breathes, empties all that she is   she knows, where the eye seeks to spy through circles drilled into the walls the hidden, they watch, scratching idly starving for love, the thing she lost   the ones she forgot were left behind they hide now like ghosts in the leaves rustling they leap upon the breeze echoes of the past haunting mirrors   the scribe knows, he laughs sometimes knowing all the things he does it only makes him fail, too self-absorbed to comprehend what she really is   the ghosts they circle inside these walls pushing their fingers through the paper seeking to caress the curls of her hair twisting, she knows they linger   inside, watching where the beetle runs trailing all his miniscule unlived lives between the pages of a book unseen she lived it, breathed it, all that ripples   thus she dances here alone, casting rainbow dust upon the bleakest grey the steel that rusts in crusts of red rosebud offerings to the elements   laughter so raw covers an ache so deep like a monster it yearns to spring inside, where the waiting ends inside, where the spiral grows   there’s a twist in the passage that eels a malevolent darkness screams opening the chasm that yawns awake stealing tomorrow for its own sake   it twists, but nothing can touch her, lost as she is in the echoes of her past

Love's upsetting!—in

Norm Zuckerman was approaching seventy and as CEO of Zoom, a megasize sports manufacturing conglomerate, he had more money than Trump. He looked, however, like a beatnik trapped in a bad acid trip. Retro, Norm had explained earlier, was cresting, and he was catching the wave by wearing a psychedelic poncho, fatigue pants, love beads, and an earring with a dangling peace sign. Groovy, man. His black-to-gray beard was unruly enough to nest beetle larvae, his hair newly curled like something out of a bad production of Godspell. Che

The only destiny with which we are born is the destiny of ritual. I have been calling "mask" a lie, and it isn't: it is the essential mask of solemnity. We would have to put on ritual masks to love each other. Beetles are born with the mask with which they will fulfill themselves. Through original sin we have lost our mask.

In a hole, in a hole.” Skodi piped, “. . . in the ground, in a hole, where the wet-nosed mole sings a song of cold stone, and of mud and gray bone, a quiet, small song all the chill, dark night long as he digs in the deep, where the white worms creep, and the dead all sleep, with their eyes full of earth where the beetles give birth, laying little white eggs, and their brittle black legs go scrape, scrape, scrape, and the dark, like a cape, covers all just the same, darkness hiding their shame as it covered their names, the names of the dead, all gone, all fled, empty winds, empty heads, Above grass grows on stone, fields lie fallow, unsown all is gone that they’ve known so they wail in the deep, crying out in their sleep, without eyes, still they weep, calling out for what’s lost, in the darkness they toss, under pitweed and moss in the deeps of the grave, neither master or slave, has now feature or fame, needs knowledge or name, but they long to come back, and they stare through the cracks at the dim sun above, and they curse cruel love, and the peace lost in life, think of worry and strife, ruined child or wife, all the troubles that burned, dreadful lessons unlearned, still they long to return, to return, to return, they long to return. Return! In a hole, in the ground, under old barrow-mound, where skin, bone, and blood turn to jelly-soft mud, and the rotting world sings . . .

The First Water is the Body (excerpt) The Colorado River is the most endangered river in the United States—also, it is a part of my body. I carry a river. It is who I am: ‘Aha Makav. This is not metaphor. When a Mojave says, Inyech ‘Aha Makavch ithuum, we are saying our name. We are telling a story of our existence. The river runs through the middle of my body. --- What threatens white people is often dismissed as myth. I have never been true in America. America is my myth. --- When Mojaves say the word for tears, we return to our word for river, as if our river were flowing from our eyes. A great weeping is how you might translate it. Or a river of grief. --- I mean river as a verb. A happening. It is moving within me right now. --- The body is beyond six senses. Is sensual. An ecstatic state of energy, always on the verge of praying, or entering any river of movement. Energy is a moving river moving my moving body. In Mojave thinking, body and land are the same. The words are separated only by the letters ‘ii and ‘a: ‘iimat for body, ‘amat for land. In conversation, we often use a shortened form for each: mat-. Unless you know the context of a conversation, you might not know if we are speaking about our body or our land. You might not know which has been injured, which is remembering, which is alive, which was dreamed, which needs care. You might not know we mean both. --- What is this third point, this place that breaks a surface, if not the deep-cut and crooked bone bed where the Colorado River runs—a one-thousand-four-hundred-and-fifty-mile thirst—into and through a body? Berger called it the pre-verbal. Pre-verbal as in the body when the body was more than body. Before it could name itself body and be limited, bordered by the space body indicated. Pre-verbal is the place where the body was yet a green-blue energy greening, greened and bluing the stone, red and floodwater, the razorback fish, the beetle, and the cottonwoods’ and willows’ shaded shadows. Pre-verbal was when the body was more than a body and possible. One of its possibilities was to hold a river within it. --- If I was created to hold the Colorado River, to carry its rushing inside me, if the very shape of my throat, of my thighs is for wetness, how can I say who I am if the river is gone? --- Where I come from we cleanse ourselves in the river. I mean: The water makes us strong and able to move forward into what is set before us to do with good energy. We cannot live good, we cannot live at all, without water. If your builder could place a small red bird in your chest to beat as your heart, is it so hard for you to picture the blue river hurtling inside the slow muscled curves of my long body? Is it too difficult to believe it is as sacred as a breath or a star or a sidewinder or your own mother or your beloveds? If I could convince you, would our brown bodies and our blue rivers be more loved and less ruined? The Whanganui River in New Zealand now has the same legal rights of a human being. In India, the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers now have the same legal status of a human being. Slovenia’s constitution now declares access to clean drinking water to be a national human right. While in the United States, we are teargassing and rubber-bulleting and kenneling Natives trying to protect their water from pollution and contamination at Standing Rock in North Dakota. We have yet to discover what the effects of lead-contaminated water will be on the children of Flint, Michigan, who have been drinking it for years. America is a land of bad math and science. The Right believes Rapture will save them from the violence they are delivering upon the earth and water; the Left believes technology, the same technology wrecking the earth and water, will save them from the wreckage or help them build a new world on Mars. ---

If life must go on, then so must death, and, like life, it would be a continuing story.

We see the mortal form of the immortal healer climbing along the jutting cornice of some cliff, in search for the simples of life; and as the zephyrs waft his long ashen locks around his furrowed brow, his trembling hand clutches some rugged crag, more perhaps from joy than fear. And so, as we now open the works of Aleister Crowley, we are filled with an exhilarating chain of pangs; mortal-like we are never sated, and as our lips taste the nectar of true poetry we tremblingly clutch the crags of Parnassus in search for the Asphodel of Love, Wisdom, and Beauty. Here, as we turn some beetling height, the dying rays of the Swinburnian sun sink, those rays that ruffled the vestal purity of the clouds to the rosy blush of a lover’s kiss, and in the departing light we again find the mystic Trinity midst the hellebore and thistles of existence, enthroned, eternal. The sun sinks, and the last notes of the nightingale die into the stillness of falling night. The emerald sky like the robe of some car-borne Astarté, slashed with an infinite orange and red, fades into the sombre garment of night; and above silently breaks a primal sea gemmed with all the colours of the opal, deepening into a limitless amethyst, darkens, and the sun goes out. The spangled pall of Night is drawn, and the lull of death is o’er us; but no, hark! the distant boom of a beetle is carried across the still glowing welkin, it is the signal drum announcing the marriage of Night and Day. The crescent moon rises, diaphanous and fair, and the world wakes to a chant.

It was my father's car, he bought the car the same time he bought this house, the house was my mothers and father's summer house, soon after that my father had a heart attack in the garden and died while my mother was doing the dishes, my father loved gardening he was working on the same spot you are digging in the garden, I was at the beach with the new beetle car that my father bought for me for my birthday when I returned home I saw the ambulance outside, my mother tried frantically to resuscitate him but to no avail twenty years later my mother died, and here I am alone and waiting to die myself

What do you want to talk about?" "Everything and nothing. What you did today, what I did today, what we'll do tomorrow. About God and how He's working in our lives. About my work, about your work, about life, about love, about what's for dinner and how the roses are doing - do they have black spot or beetles . . .

She knew she missed her mother, and she knew she loved her, but missing her mother seemed to be in one place and Margery seemed to be in another, with nothing to join them up.

Mrs Merryweather drove James, Carla, Snugs, and the two moose in a Volkswagon Beetle - it was silver and had an engine that purred.

The quality of a life is defined not by its length, but by its depth, its actions, and achievements. It is defined by our ability to love.

The next time you see a wee chickadee, calling contentedly and happily while the air makes you shiver from head to foot, think of the hard-shelled frozen insects passing down his throat, the icy air entering lungs and air-sacs, and ponder a moment on the wondrous little laboratory concealed in his mite of a body; which his wings bear up with so little effort, which his tiny legs support, now hopping along a branch, now suspended from some wormy twig. Can we do aught but silently marvel at this alchemy? A little bundle of muscle and blood, which in this freezing weather can transmute frozen beetles and zero air into a happy, cheery little Black-capped Chickadee, as he names himself, whose bravery shames us, whose trustfulness warms our hearts! And the next time you raise your gun to needlessly take a feathered life, think of the marvellous little engine which your lead will stifle forever; lower your weapon and look into the clear bright eyes of the bird whose body equals yours in physical perfection, and whose tiny brain can generate a sympathy, a love for its mate, which in sincerity and unselfishness suffers little when compared with human affection.

Human life as a cluster of mussels clinging to rocks in the sea, human beings as beetles and vermin, man as a shoal of writhing fish brought gasping to the surface in nets. If, however, we stand up close to each individual, so close as to hear each name as it is whispered, to look into each pair of eyes, where the soul of every human is revealed, unique and in alienable, and listen attentively to every story of a day in the life of each and every one of them, a day in the company of loved ones, family and friends, an ordinary day in an ordinary place, with all its joy and delicacy, envy and curiosity, routines and spontaneity, imagination and boredom, hate and love, then the opposite becomes apparent, the one, not as I, but as the I’s necessary. Which is you.

It is satisfying, of course, to build up a supply of winter warmth, free except for the labor. But there is also something heady about becoming a part of the forest process. It sounds straightforward enough to say that when I cut firewood I cull and thin my woods, but that puts me in the business of deciding which trees should be encouraged and which should be taken. I like my great tall black walnut, so I have cut the trees around it to give it the space and light it needs to grow generously. Dogwoods don’t care. They frost the woods with white blossoms in the spring, and grow extravagantly in close company. If I clear a patch, within a year or two pine seedlings move in, grow up exuberantly, compete and thin themselves to tolerable spacing. If I don’t cut a diseased tree, its neighbors may sicken and die. If I cut away one half of a forked white oak, the remaining trunk will grow straight and sturdy. Sap gone, a standing dead tree like the one I cut today will make good firewood, and so invites cutting. But if I leave it, it will make a home for woodpeckers, and later for flying squirrels and screech owls. Where I leave a brush pile of top branches, rabbits make a home. If I leave a fallen tree, others will benefit: ants, spiders, beetles and wood roaches will use it for shelter and food, and lovely delicate fungi will grow out of it before it mixes with leaf mold to become a part of a new layer of soil. One person with a chain saw makes a difference in the woods, and by making a difference becomes part of the woodland cycle, a part of the abstraction that is the forest community.

Being a damp sort of place, weeds of all kinds flourished: all those plants which love water crowded round; giant dock, appearing not unlike the riverside plants of a tropical stream, with huge hairy columns for stalks as thick round as trees, with curious beetles and flies crawling about on the undersides of their green umbrella-like leaves, Fool’s Parsley, Bog Myrtle, Water Betony, Marsh Marigold, and huge buttercups.

Practice" To weep unbidden, to wake at night in order to weep, to wait for the whisker on the face of the clock to twitch again, moving the dumb day forward— is this merely practice? Some believe in heaven, some in rest. We’ll float, you said. Afterward we’ll float between two worlds— five bronze beetles stacked like spoons in one peony blossom, drugged by lust: if I came back as a bird I’d remember that— until everyone we love is safe is what you said.

I adored your fluttering touches and effervescent kisses nestled among great roots. The sunlight dappling your shoulders. Vines curling in your hair. Our cheeks burning. Wandering through hidden places. A secret love skirting the shadows. The water and wind sang for us. The trees danced with us. The beetles whispered their blessings. We ate the plump wild-berries. I soon found my mouth bitter and stained. Your petal-soft love turned to thorns. The mist faded in the bright morning but left me cold and damp. The mossy ground charred. My lips starved and bleeding.

For some reason, I think of Naukeag Lake. Movie night at Naukeag Lake with Ma before it became members-only. We used to sit there on a blanket on the hard sand watching some Gene Wilder vehicle with the other locals. I was maybe six or seven, my sisters not yet on the scene. We both loved that stupid lake. It had terrible circulation and was riddled with nuisance algae even back in the ’70s. Dragonflies buzzed around the duckweed, laying their eggs, their bodies brighter green than beetles, brighter green than June itself. I remember Ma’s delighted face in the projector light. Happiness—rare as it is, fragile as it is, its sightings achieve a kind of private fame. Look, here I am, still talking about it.

meaningless people, this defaced countryside? She felt like a beetle toiling in the dust. She was filled with repulsion.