Essays in Idleness

Great and Holy Pascha, or, Easter Sunday — is the entry to Eastertide (in the liturgical arrangements of the West) but also, the access to maturity in human life.

Except for more purely seasonal indications, the animals seem unaware of Him, and persist in their own spaces. We, alone, can formulate an argument for our radical difference from the rest of nature, and indeed what follows: the extreme aloofness of our position on the planet. Often, we try to hide this even from ourselves, and invent the wildest ecological theories as a kind of alternative to the inevitable human religious faith.

Between the natural animal and “unnatural” man, many habits are shared, such as the use of language. One thinks of the honey bees. We can’t have philosophically “meaningful” conversations with them, but then, we cannot deny that they are communicating, among each other.

From an excellent authority on the behaviour of honey bees (the late Karl von Frisch), I learned that they may forage for their nectar and pollen well beyond five miles’ distance from their hive. Then they find their way home again, quite infallibly. They can visit the very same flower the next day, or — and here my credulity was tested — they can precisely describe their route, to a hive-mate. He can then follow it, solo. Through their round-dances, and waggle-tail dances, this information is communicated, just as we would with words; and more complex matters of odour and taste, along with the weather in tiny microclimates, and bracketing details of time, can also be “spoken” by these wax colonials. Their fellow workers seem to understand; and since ancient times, our bee-keepers have knowingly intervened in the honey bees’ routines.

These workers are incidentally all females — all these industrious little bee-souls with their tasks — but incapable of reproducing. They are “eusocial,” like many of the ten-thousand species of bees, ants, wasps, termites; and maybe some others. Each must have elaborate signalling abilities, and as at least the entomologists have come to appreciate, not only discrete languages in one colony from another, but subtle differences of dialect, within and between, and up and down the classes. So, upon meeting, individuals may not only tell each other apart, but know whom to protect and whom to kill, &c.

Whereas, human beings are not actually eusocial, though Professor E. O. Wilson seemed to think that we were. But we would need a strict local caste system in every human settlement to achieve this, and the time suitable for Darwinist evolution to perfect the various orders. And of course, we must eliminate such human eccentricities as free speech and free will, as well as our propensity to speak nonsense, and sing without purpose. (The socialists are working on this.)

By comparison to the other animals, whether eusocial or not, Christ rose, and talks, directly to us. Again, this is discerned, by everyone who attentively listens. Today — this morning — we are reminded that He speaks from either side of death; and that he summons us to follow.