Fire and Knowledge

Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth—so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane—quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count the throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.

–Jane Eyre in Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847; Reader’s Digest, 1984), p. 285

Instead of imposing pro-choice and pro-life political litmus tests, why not work together on teen pregnancy, adoption reform, and real alternatives for women backed into dangerous and lonely corners? Do we really want to dramatically reduce abortion and make it “rare,” as Bill Clinton once suggested, or have both sides just continue to treat this issue as a political football?

–Jim Wallis, God’s Politics (2005), p. 79

Rheobatrachus silus [is] an Australian frog that swallows its fertilized eggs, broods tadpoles in its stomach, and gives birth to young frogs through its mouth.

–Stephen Jay Gould, “Here Goes Nothing” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 294

The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.

–John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952), p. 215

What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.

–John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952), p. 74

At the other end of the row [on the airplane], divided by an empty seat from the man with the newspaper, a woman in a tailored suit is sitting with a legal pad on her lap…. Her taste and bearing are splendid. She is impeccable.

And Andy would like to give her a little peck on her ear. His mind is calling out to her: “Hello, my Tinkerbelle, my winsome, weensy crocodile. Come out! Come out! I know you’re in there somewhere.”

He says to his mind, “Shut up, you dumb bastard!”

–Wendell Berry, Remembering in Three Short Novels (2003), p. 199-200

The egg of a parasite chalcid wasp, a common small wasp, multiplies unassisted, making ever more identical eggs. The female lays a single fertilized egg in the flaccid tissues of its live prey, and that one egg divides and divides. As many as two thousand new parasitic wasps will hatch to feed on the host’s body with identical hunger. Similarly—only more so—Edwin Way Teale reports that a lone aphid, without a partner, breeding “unmolested” for one year, would produce so many living aphids that, although they are only a tenth of an inch long, together they would extend into space twenty-five hundred light-years.

–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), p. 167

Fabre says that, at least in captivity, the female [praying mantis] will mate with and devour up to seven males, whether she has laid her egg cases or not. The mating rites of mantises are well known: a chemical produced in the head of he male insect says, in effect, “No, don’t go near her, you fool, she’ll eat you alive.” At the same time a chemical in his abdomen says, “Yes, by all means, now and forever yes.”

While the male is making up what passes for his mind, the female tips the balance in her favor by eating his head. He mounts her. Fabre describes the mating, which sometimes lasts for six hours, as follows: “The male, absorbed in the performance of his vital functions, holds the female in a tight embrace. But the wretch has no head; he has no neck; he has hardly a body. The other, with her muzzle turned over her shoulder continues very placidly to gnaw what remains of the gentle swain. And, all the time, that masculine stump, holding on firmly, goes on with the business! … I have seen it done with my own eyes and have not yet recovered from my astonishment.”

–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), pp. 57-58