Metamorphosis, page 8
Vladimir Nabokov collecting butterflies toward the end of his life, in Switzerland (1970), photograph by Horst Tappel.
Thanks to Redi and Malpighi and Swammerdam, insects were no longer considered natural symbols of Christ, nor thought to sprout miraculously from mud or fire. Maria had been born into a world from which, to this degree, the supernatural had been expunged. Yet she and they were still God-fearing people, who believed in the orderliness of His creation and who thought this order would be laid bare step by step, one discovery at a time. They had no idea how the paths of scientific knowledge could twist and turn.
During her own lifetime, a stark shift in perspective occurred when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a well-to-do draper and autodidact, made love to his wife one day in the autumn of 1677 in Delft. Less than “six beats of a pulse” after ejaculating, he scooped up his semen, sucked it into a capillary tube, put the tube under the microscope, and pressed his eye to the lens. Leeuwenhoek’s lenses could magnify objects up to five hundred times larger to view objects as small as one thousandth of a millimeter—much greater resolution than anyone before him had ever achieved. And on that autumn day, as he described it, there suddenly appeared “vast numbers of living animalcules” under the microscope, that “moved forward with a snakelike motion of the tail, as eels do when swimming in water.” Eager to share his discovery with the world, but also keen to make the whole affair seem less obscene, he had his crude Dutch translated into high Latin before sending his letter to the Royal Society, begging that “it be regarded as private.” Having found such swimmers in codfish, cats, frogs, and even fleas—a million, he calculated, in a volume equivalent to a coarse grain of sand—Leeuwenhoek was now certain: Harvey and Steno and de Graaf and Swammerdam had all been mistaken. It wasn’t the female egg that gave life, but male semen instead. In humans and other mammals, they swim up the fallopian tubes, attach to veins and feed on them, shed their tails, and merge into a ball. That was the supposed “egg” that everyone claimed to have found—not any part of a female, but a little animal from the male with a living soul.i
So began a war between “spermists” and “ovists” that lasted nearly two centuries. From our modern perspective it seems strange that female and male wouldn’t have been recognized as two complementary components. But when it came to the question of where life comes from, one side held firmly that sperm just awakens the egg, whereas the other claimed that eggs are mere nourishment for sperm. Perhaps, as the historian Matthew Cobb has suggested, in an age when mechanical clocks were used as analogies for living creatures, it was hard to see how two clocks could be dismantled to make a third. Today we think in terms of genes, and of traits inherited from both parents, but the problem then was that no one yet understood heredity, and many remained unconvinced that there was anything of the kind. The word “heredity” with its modern biological meaning was only invented in English in 1863; before that, the Latin hereditatem referred mainly to inheritance of status and money.
The drawing of a homunculus in a sperm head in Nicholaas Hartsoeker’s “Essay on Dioptrics” from 1694.
Maria Sibylla Merian wrote that she would leave such conundrums to “gentlemen scholars.” In fact, none of the “gentlemen” of the seventeenth century who worked on generation were genteel eighteenth-century amateurs, much less modern “scientists,” a word coined in 1840. They were friends, enemies, artisans, egomaniacs, pioneers to the last. And whether they were “ovists” or “spermists,” they all held to a doctrine later called the “doctrine of preformation.” Most chuckled at the idea that, with enough magnification, one could find a tiny human crouching inside the head of a sperm, as drawn in 1694 by the microscope maker Nicholaas Hartsoeker. But they did believe that, in some sense, the adult was already there inside the sperm or the egg, whether in miniature or in potential, waiting to unfurl.
Their advances had been dramatic. In particular, they had established the fixity of species. And they’d learned that animals come from eggs laid by females and inseminated by a male of the same kind. No more dragon teeth sown in the ground turning into a ferocious army of warriors. No more bookworms from winds, or barnacle geese from goose barnacles. “Like breeds like” had become the new wisdom of the early moderns. This was the bedrock on which, in the eighteenth century, Linnaeus could create a new taxonomy, one based strictly on family resemblances.ii And yet how development worked remained as mysterious as it was to the ancients. The fertilized egg was as featureless as a fog.
One reason for this was because the proper tools needed to look inside a developing egg had not been perfected or invented yet: Microscopes would get much better, and soon early embryologists would begin using dyes. Another was that, despite the coining of the term, no one knew yet that both egg and sperm were actually cells. What would be called “cell theory” would turn biology into a new kind of science, more similar to chemistry than to natural history, as it had been practiced in Merian’s day. In the coming centuries, a new outlook on life would gradually take hold: Cells are where we all come from. And cell division and death are the forces that sculpt a growing organism.
Over the next one hundred and fifty years, the idea of the fixity of species would gradually give way to a new picture of life. If it had been necessary for the ordering of nature by Linnaeus, it was also necessary for the idea of evolution. For how could species evolve if they were not distinct and separate in the first place? How would they transform from anything if they didn’t first breed true? This was a lesson that would have perked the ears of Aristotle: Change could only come about if it rested first on what was stable.
Though not as pious as Swammerdam, Goedaert, or Steno, when she died Maria Sibylla Merian still most assuredly believed that God was master of all creation. Every creation, big or small, occupied a fixed rung on the divine ladder. Despite a life devoted to observing caterpillars dramatically morphing into “summer birds,” the notion that a species could itself evolve into a different species would have struck her not only as blasphemous, but absurd. Funnily enough, two and a half centuries later, Nabokov, the man inspired by her, would also question evolution by natural selection. And like Merian he’d fall captive to metamorphosis.
In his short story “The Aurelian,” Nabokov introduces Paul Pilgram, a “churlish, heavy man, who fed mainly on Erbswurst and boiled potatoes, placidly believing in his newspapers and quite ignorant of the world.” Pilgram is a butterfly dealer who has never left his native Berlin, where he owns a little shop “permeated with the pungent odor of a strong disinfectant.” He walks with a limp, and his legs seem too thin for his body. His business is failing, his marriage is childless and cold. But Pilgram is a first-class entomologist after whom a rare moth has been named (Agrotis pilgrami). And he’s a special breed of dreamer, an “Aurelian,” whom Nabokov tells us are people who love to find chrysalids, “those jewels of Nature… hanging on fences above the dusty nettles of country lanes.” Pilgram dreams bigger, of exotic butterflies in Dalmatia and Lapland, even across the oceans, as far away as Tibet. And so he cheats an old widow, selling her late husband’s butterfly collection for twenty times what he paid her, and prepares to skip town. He will make his dream a reality, allowing it “to break at last from its crinkly cocoon.” Just as he’s sneaking out the shop door, perceiving “something almost appalling in the richness of the huge happiness that was leaning towards him like a mountain,” he suffers a fatal stroke.
Yes, Pilgram had gone far, very far. Most probably he visited Granada and Murcia and Albarracin, and then traveled farther still, to Surinam or Taprobane; and one can hardly doubt that he saw all the glorious bugs he had longed to see—velvety black butterflies soaring over the jungle, and a tiny moth in Tasmania, and that Chinese “Skipper” said to smell of crushed roses when alive, and the short-clubbed beauty that Mr. Baron had just discovered in Mexico. So, in a certain sense, it is quite irrelevant that some time later, upon wandering into the shop, [his wife] Eleanor saw the checkered suitcase, and then her husband, sprawling on the floor with his back to the counter, among scattered coins, his livid face knocked out of shape by death.
Maria Sibylla Merian died from a stroke while she was working on a new book, leaving behind unfinished watercolors, engraving pens, sketchbooks, and boxes filled with butterflies. Like Pilgram, she is a pilgrim who never reaches her destination. Nabokov helps us see that the journey of the artist-scientist can never be completed, and may exact a moral price.
But like metamorphosis, it can also bring transcendence.
Footnotes
i No one actually saw an egg until the nineteenth century. As for Leeuwenhoek, he had to explain what the ovaries were and so adapted Aristotle’s (and Harvey’s) old view that they were equivalent to male nipples: functionless structures that only existed in females because their equivalent (the testes) was crucial in males. And in creatures like birds, lizards, and insects, the egg of the female was nothing but sperm’s food.
ii Previous taxonomies had been based on all kinds of categories: what creatures ate, what ate them, their color, whether they had blood or not, where they lived, even the ways they were useful to humans.
11.
MAYFLY
The mayfly comes to life every May, as its name suggests. In freshwater rivers around the world, it appears, suddenly, on the surface waters, fluttering its wings. Then, it is airborne. It will find a nearby branch and undergo its final molt there. Crawling out of its old skin, it emerges with fully functioning sex organs and prepares for the fight. There is little time left, perhaps hours, no more than a day. Everything has come down to this.
You see, the mayfly appears to humans in May, but it has burrowed in the riverbed for quite some time now. Perhaps two years ago it hatched from a minuscule egg, living an aquatic life mainly unseen by human eyes. It was called a nymph then. In Greek folklore, nymphs were minor female deities, generally regarded as personifications of nature, and often depicted as beautiful maidens. They were not immortal, like goddesses. But they lived much longer than humans.
Underwater, the mayfly nymph eats and grows, eats and grows. Twenty times it will molt, each time looking like a slightly bigger version of its previous self, and a slightly smaller version of the adult. Just before the penultimate molt, it will rise to the surface of the water. There, its wings appear for the first time. But it has lost its mouthparts and has only underdeveloped sex organs to show for it. The full sexual panoply will appear at the final molt, on a branch or blade of grass on the riverbank, within a matter of hours. But the mouth will not appear again, having completed its underwater task.
Unable to eat, the mayfly lives on its quickly dwindling reserves. In late afternoon, many thousands jump off their branches, taking to the skies above the rivers. They’re so dense that they can be detected by Doppler radar, flitting among the riverside trees. Time and again, they will spend their strength darting up into the air, like tiny NASA rockets, then fall downward again like a leaf. This is how they will impress their mates until one is found, serendipitously. Then, in a brief midair tryst, their abdomens will touch, like a kiss.
Now the males fall to the ground, expiring in the thousands on the riverbanks. But the females have one final task. Barely landing on the water, like miniature helicopters out of gas, they release their eggs with one final spurt of energy. As the tiny eggs fall silently to the riverbed, their dying bodies take their final breaths.
Nearly 2,500 years ago, Aristotle asked where creatures come from. For him it was a way to understand cause in an eternal universe, while distinguishing perfect forms from imperfect ones, here on Earth. As Aristotle’s ideas came into Christian hands, they continued to delineate man from woman. Answering his question, it transpired, would entail looking carefully at metamorphosis, a surprising key for unlocking a great mystery.
The mayfly has a history going back three hundred million years, almost an eternity. But a mayfly that lives forever is no mayfly at all.
We approach the end of the first trimester. At the systems review, lights off, gel applied, we glue our eyes to the monitor. Tiny hands, a nose, a clear mouth, a beating heart. From head to toes, no more than the size of a kiwi. Our two kids, Shaizee and Abie, are with us, blinking and smiling nervously. I have a clear memory of each of them at this stage, waving specks of life. Now there will be a middle child, and more of them than us. Staring into an Archimedean point in the darkness, I wonder: Are we ready? Any of us?
I’ve noticed that ever since finding out that she’s pregnant, I turn to Yaeli more tenderly. I see her prodigious qualities and inner beauty in plain sight. I know that the root of this is biological, though I’d prefer to think otherwise. Does a mayfly, too, feel the condition of its own existence, the evanescence of the ones it loves?
part two
where are we going?
1.
ANNA
The first time he laid eyes on her, at the wedding of his brother Karl and her sister Hermine, she was dressed as an elf. It was September, 1852. At seventeen, Anna Sethe was a year younger than he was, and commandingly beautiful. There was a healthy grace, a natural laugh, an unmistakable air of truth to her. But as he watched her dance, he was filled with melancholy rather than desire. Rather than join in the fun, he sat in a corner by himself.
Ernst Haeckel would one day attempt to solve the seven great riddles of the universe. The result was a book that made him famous, and survived. Gandhi commissioned a translation into Gujarati as a remedy for the wars of religion plaguing his country. Haeckel’s other admirers would include the hard-headed Thomas Edison, the dancer and free love proponent Isadora Duncan, the writer D. H. Lawrence, and Sigmund Freud, who made his biology the centerpiece of his psychoanalysis. Lenin would extol Haeckel’s work as a great weapon in the class struggle, and his images of deep-sea creatures would shape the sinuous forms of art nouveau. Haeckel would establish a whole new kingdom of life, the Protista, locate heredity in the nucleus, and coin the words ecology, phylum, and stem cell. It was he who set the stage for modern embryology, he who spoke first of the “missing link” between humans and chimpanzees.
A figure of classical proportions, curly-blond and imposing, his calf muscles were as muscular as his beard was stylish, and men and women would fall in love with him with equal ease. Others would despise him, look at him with shame.i During a long and tumultuous life, he would travel the world like his hero Alexander von Humboldt before him, to the Canary Islands, to India, Malaysia, and Ceylon. He would become one of the most widely read authors of the nineteenth century, teaching more people about the theory of evolution than even Charles Darwin himself. A theoretician as brash as he was an observer, he’d describe a law of life that would dominate and divide his community years after his death. Anatomist, marine zoologist, philosopher, and naturalist, he was also a talented artist, and his drawings of embryos would become the most fought over images in the history of modern science. Haeckel sought to depict the world with the precision of a scholar and the passion of a mystic. To arrive at this vision he would need to unite two conflicting worlds—an outer world of rigor and system, to be discovered by science, and an inner world of strange and dark-lit forms, glimpsed by poetry, and art.
But in September 1852 at the wedding, he was still a brooding youth. One who had heeded his father’s advice, against his own inclinations, and begun to study medicine. Attending Germany’s leading medical school in Würzburg, he’d come across the great biological minds of the age: the master microscopist Albert von Kölliker and the luminary Rudolf Virchow, who taught that all of life was built of cells. Reeling from their lectures, he would climb into bed with tales of his hero Humboldt in the tropics. A romantic, Humboldt was as artistically inclined as he was a master measurer, of temperatures and mountains and currents, of birds and trees and soils and tides. Reared at the feet of Germany’s greatest philosopher of the previous century, he’d imbibed Immanuel Kant’s argument that the universe conformed to some fundamental plan that humans could understand. A grand intelligence was the source of creation, not God in the traditional sense, but a mind existing everywhere and at all times. A mind that needed both science and art to divine.
But Haeckel’s august professors were teaching something different. They saw no evidence or need for any master plan. For them, science was science, devoid of any spirit. Nor was art a necessary companion to uncover hidden truths. There were physical principles guiding life, of matter and motion. Any suggestion of an abstract supervising intelligence, or purpose expressed through beauty, should be consigned to the past.
Could there be a middle way? This was the question—a question of crushing, existential import: a spur to scientific research and a beacon of terrible misgiving—that haunted young Haeckel. For this was a moment when biology promised to answer, not only the riddles of life and death, but whether there was meaning in the universe. It overshadowed his every waking hour, even in the midst of a wedding, even in the face of the most beautiful, most divine elf he had ever seen.
Irresistibly drawn to the new science, Haeckel decided to take a summer course in comparative anatomy in Berlin with a man named Johannes Müller, a world-leading physiologist and zoologist, and an insomniac. Unlike Virchow, Müller believed that nature was, indeed, imbued with a vital force. At the same time, Müller was hardheaded: Humanity needed to understand the material, mechanical rules of cause and effect if it was to discern any higher purpose. His course made a big impression. When it was over, in August of 1854, Haeckel traveled with a friend to the archipelago of Helgoland, off the German coast in the North Sea, and was surprised and delighted to come upon his teacher, researching marine creatures with his son. Collecting and dissecting starfish and sea urchins, his heart opened up to the sea. As the four of them fished together in the boat capturing medusae, Haeckel wondered about the “astonishing generational alternation of these creatures,” who turn from tiny, soft, coral-like creatures into jellyfish. Müller looked at him, resigned. “Yes, we are faced with a great riddle!” he said. “We know nothing of the origin of species!”
