The Fly Trap (14 page)

As the Far Eastern earth surface trembles, as volcanoes erupt near and far,

The Doctor examines a sawfly, which he quietly stuffs in a jar.

As bandits approach him in China with rifle and pistol and knife,

He places a bug in a test tube and sits down to study its life.

But high in the mountains of Asia, beyond reach of man or machine,

Dwell sawflies and buglets aplenty that he never, no, never has seen.

So that’s where he longs to escape to, and that’s where his plan is to flee

From the poplar-tree sawflies of Sweden, from the song of the native-born bee.

Every last detail had been seen to and the departure date set for 4 November 1939. It was then the boat would leave. But the war got in the way. The plan fell to pieces. Burma was his last expedition. He bought himself a house in the Stockholm archipelago instead, in Simpnäs, some way up the coast, and by the time the war was over in 1945, he was consumed by other interests.

The age of Linnaeus and Nordenskiöld was over. Exploration had changed. In the first place, the world lay in ruins, and later, in the ’50s, it was the turn of the nature filmmakers to become the popular heroes in search of distant lands. Innumerable scientific expeditions to collect nameless creepy-crawlies have sailed in the years since then, of course, but the lustre and honour have never really returned. Journeys that were public business before the war are now carried out in silence. Adventurers don’t even make films anymore, they just have adventures, as if the Himalayas were an obstacle course for ambitious men who would never dream of making a torturous detour by way of the incomprehensible taxonomy of sawflies.

Chapter 13

Slowness

The island’s population increases tenfold in the summer—three thousand people in varying states of freedom. At first you don’t see them, for at the start of their holidays they stay in their summer houses with their families, often several generations together. This lasts no more than a couple of weeks at most, or until life in these usually small cottages grows unsustainable and begins to become as threatening as something in a play by Lars Norén. That’s when the long walks begin in earnest. My image as a fly-collector is in many ways a product of this phenomenon—because I answer the questions these restless wanderers ask about what I’m doing and why.

As long as the wild chervil is in bloom, everything is fine, because it grows everywhere and I know some remote spots, ideal for hoverflies, where no other person ever ventures. But when the raspberry thickets bloom and the thistles and the spirea, then I have to stand closer to the roads and the questions.

You get used to it. But sometimes, on certain days, the nicest days, when there are a lot of people out and about, I get tired of explaining and start lying instead, like a hitchhiker. They almost always lie, at least on the main roads, for the simple reason that otherwise they’d get sick of their own history. It can be very taxing to stick to the truth for a whole day, in maybe a dozen different cars, answering the same questions about where you’re going and why. That’s why hitchhikers live such interesting lives. It’s all lies. The same is true of fly-collectors whom people will not leave in peace.

“What are you doing?”

“Catching butterflies.”

That’s the cheapest lie. It almost always works extremely well and does not lead to follow-up questions. I believe that the butterfly-hunter is seen as a somewhat touching figure, delicate and a little pathetic, a person who ought to be left there in the sunshine without further comment. Just a motherly smile and, tops, an encouraging “I see.” No one needs to ask what a butterfly is, and everyone knows there are grown men who collect them.

However, it is not entirely risk-free, the butterfly lie. If your luck is bad, the person who disturbs your peace may be one of those increasingly common individuals who believe that all butterflies are protected by law and that consequently the collector is a criminal, possibly a pervert. In that case, the dialogue by the side of the road can be both long and tiresome, and in the meantime the flies are flying and so is the time.

“I’m collecting hoverflies” is an equally risky answer. Primarily because it’s inadequate. On hearing the word “hoverfly,” every relatively normal Swede thinks of those small, enervating flies of quite different families, fruit flies mostly, that circulate indoors, even in winter, among the potted plants. It generally goes something like this:

“Flies!?”

“Yes, hoverflies.”

“Boy, you ought to come over to our place. We’ve got masses of them.”

So then you have to clear up that misunderstanding. It takes a while. And once you’ve said A you have to say B, whereupon you’re quickly drawn into a whole seminar about the natural history of hoverflies, their evolution, for example, and their importance for pollination, as well as the uses and joys and technical practicalities of hoverfly-collecting, not to mention everything else that has any connection with flies or insects or nature in general. The conversation glides along and suddenly you’re standing there with your hands on your hips, philosophizing freely about the prospects for a good mushroom season. It can be pleasant, it really can, and it can bring some days to a close with a productive exchange of views about the modern era’s lack of leisure and contemplation. But no flies are caught.

How easily we’re transformed into dancers when someone is willing to listen.

“I’m collecting hoverflies” can also be taken as an absurd joke, or, worse yet, as a base provocation. I’ll never forget the youngish man who came along on his bicycle one day when I found myself dangerously close to the road. It was when the bishop’s weed was blooming in the drainage ditches, so there weren’t a lot of really good places to choose from. Roads, gardens, refuse heaps, all of them hazardous places—socially, I mean—but bishop’s weed is absolutely unbeatable for collecting flies, so I usually grit my teeth and take the risk. The man caught sight of me and braked so hard the gravel flew. A tourist on a rented bike, wearing an open Hawaiian shirt. From the corner of my eye, I saw the way he was looking at me.

“What the hell are you doing?”

His tone was not exactly unfriendly, but I could tell right away that he felt compelled to deliver some observations, as if I were a communal tourist attraction, an EU-financed aborigine placed in the terrain exclusively as a form of outdoor entertainment. Such things apparently exist. Nevertheless, I told it like it was, and since I had just netted a couple of specimens of the magnificent hoverfly
Temnostoma vespiforme,
I handed him my poison jar in order to finish my hoverfly lecture as quickly as possible. He gave my catch a quick glance, handed the bottle back to me, and said: “Those are wasps.”

“Yes, so you might think,” I said, and explained politely about mimicry, whereupon he asked to have another look. I handed back the jar, and this time he studied them long and hard in thoughtful silence.

“Those are wasps.”

His tone was now slightly irritated. I stuffed the jar in my pocket. Presumably he thought I was having a little fun with him, or else he simply wasn’t used to being contradicted.

The situation was never threatening, more like comic. He lowered the kickstand on his bike, stationed himself with his legs wide apart and his arms crossed over his chest and fixed me with his gaze, as if awaiting my retreat in the face of an intellectually and morally and in every other respect superior opponent. I attempted a neutral smile. No reaction. In fact, he looked a little angry. I decided instead to ignore him, but he stood where he was, immovable. He stood there like that for several minutes, trying to come up with a decisive final word. It was: “Wasps! And don’t you forget it!”

And then he cycled away, his Hawaiian shirt flapping in the breeze.

…

I borrowed the dancer from Milan Kundera. He uses the expression in an elegant comedy about vanity, ambition and the lust for power—just a short dialogue, in simple scenes, that breaks out here and there in a short novel called, precisely,
Slowness
. Well, “novel” is possibly not the right word to describe it, but it is in any case charming and as double-bottomed as an oil tanker. To be honest, I have never really understood what the book is about, but as with “The Man Who Loved Islands,” I was very taken with it before I knew much more than that it existed.

As with Lawrence, I was satisfied for years just to know that a theme that interested me was also of interest to a man of Kundera’s calibre. Moreover, I had, as usual, some theories of my own.

Slowness was quite simply a theme granted me by nature.

No, come to think of it, that’s not true. It was the summer people who, with their questions, turned slowness into a theme granted me by nature. I had simply told one of them in a moment of inspiration that my fly-collecting was a method of exercising slowness. And because that comment was met with an understanding I’m not accustomed to, I continued using that answer and developed my theory later. The reactions were always effusive. As soon as I raised the subject, it was as if everyone in the whole world was, deep down, a fly-collector, though they had never realized it before. Some of them had read entire books about slowness and could hold long monologues about the excellence of everything slow.

At the time, I had never discovered that fascination, maybe because I am a rather slow person and had always wished that I was a bit faster. Now, quite unexpectedly, I had become a pioneer in the field. It felt good. I listened eagerly to these summer people fleeing from family life and to their almost feverish lectures about the way our whole age is infected with speed. Communications are faster than ever, the news cycle too. People talk faster, eat faster, change opinions more often, experience more stress, while at the same time the whole world is being transformed at a breakneck pace. The speed of technological development is absolutely sensational, new models of innumerable devices literally pour out into the market and all of them are faster than the ones that poured out last year, or just six months ago. Computers take the prize, of course, and telephones, but even toasters are now so fast they’re approaching the critical limit where the bread gets brown on the surface before it’s warm in the middle. And let’s not even talk about the markets in currencies and securities.

“Yes, it’s terrible,” I used to say, and make a few swipes with my net.

This apparently universal, self-generating acceleration does clearly create discomfort and concern of many kinds, and I was always happy to agree.

But to tell the truth, I still think it would be worse the other way around. If everything just got slower and slower we’d all go pretty much nuts and beg for speed with a sincerity that the preachers of slowness never come close to. If nothing else, the trend towards more and more, faster and faster, is preferable to its opposite because you can always get off an express train but there’s no good way to speed up a donkey caravan. What’s more, everyone has the freedom not to travel and in that way protect themselves from a lot of indigestible impressions and barbaric languages. If you think the torrent—of pictures, messages, people, whatever—goes too fast, then in nine cases out of ten you can turn it off or just close your eyes and breathe your own air for a while. Most of it is optional. That’s the wonderful significance of Swedish prosperity.

But I didn’t usually say all that to the summer people.

Some of us can’t keep up, it may be as simple as that. It’s just too much. We notice it while we’re still in school. And since the pipes we learn to dance to are carved by people who love speed and can tame the profusion, we lose our balance and sink into a sullen sense of inadequacy. Some of this can be ascribed to sordid commercialism, but not nearly all of it. Cultural life is a department store, as is science when glimpsed from a distance. Brilliance and speed, helter-skelter.

Slowness is not an end in itself—neither a virtue nor a defeat.

Next summer I think I’ll say that my fly-collecting is a way of exercising concentration. A focus so intense that I forget myself. Which is not always so easy on the dance floor of our time. Kundera was onto that. He begins at that end.

So, of course, I finally bought the book, got myself all comfortably situated in the shade on the jetty and thought, all right, now I will really roll around in truths about life, the kind I could readily apply to my own slow fly-hunting and to what was perhaps my even more indolent life on the island. I recognized myself at once, right on the first page, in a man who is

caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.

That was it. Exactly.

The unfortunate part was merely that Kundera wasn’t describing an indolent entomologist in this passage but a reckless motorcyclist in the midst of the perilous whirlpool of French traffic. In fact, it turns out that this irresponsible daredevil is the source of the author’s reflections on slowness. Why, he asks, have the pleasures of slowness disappeared? “Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear?”

How disappointing. A little halfheartedly I glanced at the wormwood to check for
Volucella inanis
and considered not reading on, considered not reading any book with an enticing title ever again. In the future I would just try instead to imagine the great truths they might contain. At the time, this seemed to be the most attractive solution. But then I went on reading anyway. The hook was well baited. “In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks.”