SUNDAY, 11 MAY 2025

When I was a young man, I wrote a fairy tale about a boy who tried to catch the butterfly of his soul but accidentally killed it by breaking its wings. I imagine I must have read somewhere about the ancient Greek word psyche meaning both ‘butterfly’ and ‘the soul’ (although I have no recollection of this). I don’t have the story any longer – it got lost on my travels around the world – but I remember that it had a happy ending when the boy went up into the mountains and discovered a new soul.

My fairy story drew heavily on one of the most common connotations of ‘butterfly’: something that is beautiful but transitory, and never quite within our reach. This was an image in a successful pop song of the mid-sixties, Bob Lind’s Elusive Butterfly, which sang about chasing ‘the bright, elusive butterfly of love’. This metaphor is hardly surprising to anyone who has ever watched a butterfly skip from flower to flower. I know that when I see a butterfly, I often wish it would rest on a flower for a while and spread open its wings to take in the sun, so that I have time to look at and enjoy its outrageous beauty rather than the dull surface of its underwings whenever it lands. But almost at once it’s in flight once more, and all I can do is to try to follow its flapping, which is much too fast and unpredictable for the human eye. Butterflies have a beauty almost always hidden from us except for the briefest of flashes.

This restlessness is reflected in the host of words for ‘butterfly’ in different languages: butterfly (Eng), papillon (Fr), mariposa (Sp), borboleto (Por), farfalle (It), fluture (Rom), schmetterling (Ger), vlinder (Dut), sommerfugl (Dan), fjäril (Swe), babushka (Rus). What is really striking here is that even closely related languages which usually share cognates, such as the five most important Romance languages listed, all have completely different words for the same insect. It is as if the nature of the creature flitting from flower to flower has somehow created a linguistic flightiness that demands a new word in each language. Meanwhile in Indonesian, as I know from my time there, the word for butterfly is kupu-kupu, with a rather poetic rhythm which suggests the flapping of wings, while prostitutes are kupu-kupu malam, or ‘butterflies of the night’.

There is a negative side to this freedom of spirit which is expressed in a related, but more unfavorable connotation of butterfly, to describe someone who has no substance or loyalty, as in the phrase ‘a social butterfly’: a person who feels no deep commitment to anyone or anything. In matters of the heart, they are promiscuous, and have no meaningful friendships: when the going gets tough, they get going. The sense of beauty remains, but it is a narcissistic beauty that attracts in the way that emeralds and rubies attract, for their glitter and their monetary value, not because of any deep intrinsic worth. Their lightness becomes a lack of moral seriousness: life as an aesthetic game. Which is fine until the gestapo comes knocking on your door and you need a neighbour with courage and principles to hide you in their own home.

Another key idea surrounding the butterfly is its transformation from the dull grub of a caterpillar to a creature of great beauty: if you’ll forgive my clumsy mix of metaphors, the ugly duckling transforms into a swan. On this issue of beauty, it is amazing how many of our impressions of animals and things in nature are essentially aesthetic. As biologists point out, there are good reasons why human beings should fear snakes, and why such a fear should be built into our genes; however, there are also many creatures and things in nature which we should definitely avoid and yet we find their beauty alluring, sometimes dangerously so, including even the most venomous of snakes. We are influenced far too readily by aesthetic considerations: a snail is cute because it bears its house on its back, while a slug is an ugly blob of snot which leaves behind a trail of slime. If a butterfly had no wings or the wings of a fly or a cockroach, we would almost certainly feel repulsion rather than attraction.

Perhaps this partly explains the distinction between butterflies and moths in the popular imagination. Butterflies are beautiful creatures that flit from flower to flower and gather pollen in bright sunlight; moths are stupid creatures that immolate themselves in candle flames or pests that chomp at the clothes in our wardrobe. As creatures of the night, moths are generally far less colourful and tend to be chunky rather than slender, and even sometimes rather hairy. They are Morlocks to the butterflies’ dazzling Eloi.

Returning to my fairy tale, my talk of ‘the soul’ might draw derision from materialists as an outdated and superstitious way of thinking that humanity needs to transcend. They may be right, yet even hard-nosed scientists are not immune to the lure of the butterfly as metaphor. For example, when they seek to explain chaos theory to the general public, scientists turn to the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil and causing a typhoon in China (the countries and details differ between several versions but the core metaphor remains the same). More predictably, philosophers and poets have also turned to butterflies for inspiration. There is the famous example of Zhuangzi dreaming that he was a butterfly and now wondering in the daytime if he is a butterfly dreaming he is a man. Or, in the field of the arts, Apollinaire’s experimental concrete poem, or what he termed a calligramme, Papillon, with its words written on the page in the shape of a butterfly.

Butterflies (along with bees) are also often used as indicators and symbols of how we are destroying planet Earth and replacing nature’s diversity with identical slabs of concrete and stretches of asphalt. Rats and cockroaches thrive in our cities; in contrast, bees and butterflies rapidly vanish. It’s certainly true that there are fewer butterflies around these days compared to when I was young. One of the nice things about living where I do now, on the island of Gozo in Malta, is that I sometimes see butterflies on my walks through the countryside, which I doubt I would if I were walking the streets in the town where I was born. In fact, I suspect that many young people born in cities have never seen a real butterfly in their lives. It is not surprising, therefore, that butterflies should become a symbol of our broader alienation from nature.

This brings me to a shameful confession: when I was in my early teens, I collected butterflies. I had a little book listing all the butterflies in Britain (part of the Observer series, if my memory is correct), but instead of merely sighting them and ticking them off my list like a good train-spotter, I caught them in my net and then preserved them in my collection. At the time this was seen as a perfectly normal or even a praiseworthy thing for a boy to do, keeping him off the streets and teaching him about the natural world. Nothing could better express the instrumentalist relationship to nature which is actively encouraged in western thinking, with human beings as lords and masters of the planet, which is there for our pleasure and use. Now that I’m adult, however, when I see a butterfly in a glass case, I don’t see something that is beautiful but something which is dead.

My interest in lepidoptery also led to my first awareness that nature was not always the benign goddess that existed in the Romantic poets I was reading at school, with their rainbows and nightingales and odes to autumn. I kept some cabbage white caterpillars in a jar in my bedroom, along with some leaves they could feed on, hoping to see them turn into chrysalises and then emerge one day as butterflies. One night I went to bed and I looked at my jar and there were maggots crawling out of their bodies. There is a parasitic wasp which injects its eggs into caterpillars and when they hatch the grubs eat the caterpillar from the inside out. I panicked and took the jar outside and emptied its contents onto the ground and crushed them under my feet, and then had nightmares all through the night. As a boy who had grown up in an industrial area and had very little day-to-day contact with nature, this was the first time I came into real contact with its indifference to the individual suffering of its creatures, or, from our human point of view, its mindless cruelty.

One thing I would love to do before I die is to witness the hatching of the monarch butterflies in Mexico before they head off northwards. I’ve seen videos and it really looks incredible, and I would love to be surrounded by thousands of them fluttering all around me. Sadly, though, I have read that this amazing gathering is at threat because of climate change. Could it even come to an end one day? At first thought this seems impossible simply because there are so many of them. But then we remember the billions of passenger pigeons which were so numerous that during their migration they could block the sun, yet human beings drove them to extinction in a very short moment of evolutionary time, so surely we must wonder if the monarch couldn’t go a similar way. We are making a total mess of this beautiful world.

Normally at this point I try to sum up my essay. But it’s hard to do that here, because it feels as if, in some spooky way, my essay has taken on the flightiness and transience of the subject I have chosen. My thoughts have skipped from point to point, as my essay has become a kind of butterfly gathering pollen and transporting it around, bearing little inner structure or the thread of a coherent argument. So all I can do to try to describe the labyrinth I have wandered through and to wrap up this piece is offer a suggestion: do your best to get to a place where you can see butterflies because they are truly elusive and will become even more so in the future, as human cities grow and grow and more of the world is covered in concrete.