The Prust butterfly
HarryHaller
Susan Sez
> Can somebody tell me what's the Prust butterfly? What does it mean?
[quote 1] Marcel Proust: "...A Monarch butterfly caught in the draft
was lifted twenty feet over our heads. I saw Sid look away from
Charity's unsteadily insistent glance to follow the Monarch's
movement. Perhaps he was fantasizing, as I was, that there went part
of what had once been the mortal substance of Aunt Emily or George
Barnwell or Uncle Dwight, absorbed by the root of a beech tree in the
village cemetery, incorporated into a beechnut, eaten by a squirrel,
dropped as a pellet in a meadow, converted into a milkweed stalk,
nibbled and taken in by this butterfly, destined to be carried south
on a long, unlikely, interrupted migration, to be picked off by a
flycatcher, brought back north in the spring as other flesh, laid in
an egg, eaten by a robbing jay and laid as another kind of egg, blown
out of a tree in a windstorm, soaked up by the earth, extruded as
grass, eaten by a freshening heifer, some of it foreordained to be
drunk, as Charity said, by its own descendeants with their breakfasts,
some of it deposited in cowpads, to melt into the earth yet again, and
thrust upward again, immortal, in another milkweed stalk preparing
itself to feed more Monarch butterflies..."
[quote 2] Wallace Stegner(?): "...if you could forget mortality...you
could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and
progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological
perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually
exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. Seen in
either geological or biological terms, we don't warrant attention as
individuals. One of us doesn't differ that much from another, each
generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are
not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral
reefs...Everything returns upon itself, repeats and renews itself, and
present can hardly be told from past."
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