A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was watching orbweavers, just as some people watch birds.
The poet Mary Oliver also watched spiders. Her essay “Swoon” is about a hatch of spiders. It’s also about how watching a hatch — paying attention to something most people ignore — changes you in some way. Here she is:
This is the moment in the essay when the news culminates and, subtly or bluntly, the moral appears. It is a music to be played with the lightest fingers. All the questions that the spider’s curious life made me ask, I know I can find answered in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus. The world is not what I thought, but different, and more! I have seen it with my own eyes!
If the title of the essay seems odd, have you ever seen a live spider, hanging from a thread of web, curled up as if sleeping? Is it in a swoon?
• Sources and notes: Mary Oliver, Upstream; New York: Penguin Press, 2016, p. 125. For my own embarrassingly belated interest in a fascinating subject, see “Orbweavers in the woods and at home,” Aug. 16, 2023.
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