The Life of a Moth
Repost from April 2nd, 1997
The life of a moth is short, fragile, and insignificant. It is short because it cannot live for even one year; it is fragile because even one human finger can end its arduous struggle against death; it is insignificant because one often does not even care to end its struggle. But the moth never gives up his life. He, presented as “a tiny bead of pure life” in Virginia Woolf’s essay “The Death of the Moth,” uses up every bit of his energy to refuse death, to show the dignity and miracle of life.
To live is not necessarily more comfortable or enjoyable than to die. In Woolf’s essay, the description of the moth’s life invokes one’s pity. From the beginning, Woolf has made up a sad mood for the moth, when she takes away the name of the moth, “Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths,” and any pleasant feeling that can be associated with the moth, “they do not excite . . . pleasant sense.” Then she uses the contrast between the “enormous. . . various” pleasure of other creatures (the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and, as she says, the lean bare-backed downs) and the moth’s “meagre opportunities” of life to invoke the “queer feeling of pity for” the moth. In contrast to “the width of the sky”(5), the moth’s battlefield with death, the window-pane, is so small; in contrast to “the romantic voice. . . of a steamer out at sea,” what the moth could do is so inconsiderable.
The life of the moth is pitiful, and his struggle to live seems painful and prolonged. He started as fluttering from one corner to another corner of the window until almost all of his energy is exhausted. Without wasting the remnant of the energy, he still fluttered at the bottom of the window-pane until he could not even right himself from back. He did not give up yet, and his legs “agitated”(6:5). With energy that did not seem to come from him, he made his last “frantic” protest against death by righting himself to die. The phrases describing the moth’s life in second paragraph(“his zest in enjoying his meagre opportunities to the full,” “a fibre, very thin but pure,” “his frail and diminutive body”. . .)and describing his effort to live near the end (“this gigantic effort on the part of an insignificant little moth, against a power of such magnitude”) make a strong contrast between the moth’s struggle and what he was struggling for—a life that “no one else valued or desired to keep”(6). Such contrast “move[s] one strangely”(6).
When Woolf is describing the moth, she understands that the dignity of life is still less obvious when life has the appearance of a moth, so she often makes connection between moth’s life and other lives. Before she starts telling the truggle of the moth, she gives us a picture of the background, which includes the various kinds of lives. Then she makes a connection between them: “The same energy which inspired the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and even. . . the lean bare-backed downs, sent the moth fluttering from side to side of his square of the window-pane”(5). Later, she refered to these lives again when she “looked out of doors”(6). At this time, the moth has lost energy to right himself and is wandering at the border of death, while “the power [of those lives outside] was there all the same, massed outside indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in particular”(6). When Woolf is writing “indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in particular,” she is describing what human beings feel when they are seeing down to a poor life struggling against death, feeling they are rid of the fragility of that life. This kind of feeling is similar to the one implied at the end of James Baldwin’s essay “Equal in Paris,” when Baldwin elicited “the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real”(147).
This kind of feeling hinders people from seeing the dignity of life, and Woolf is clear about it. In paragraph three, she addresses the dignity of life directly: “One is apt to forget all about life, seeing it humped and bossed and garnished and cumbered so that it has to move with the greatest circumspection and dignity.” To shatter human beings arrogance and illustrate the importance of the moth’s struggle against death, Woolf points out that the oncoming doom, which the moth is making “extraordinary efforts” against, “could. . . have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing. . . had any chance against death”(6).
Although life always dies at the end, it never gives up. Because life is so obsessed about its own exitence, it exists even though to live means to be able to feel pain, tiresome, boredom, and loneliness. At the end of her essay, Woolf says, “O yes, he [a dead moth] seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.” She cannot write this earlier, because a living moth is never willing to accept the inevitibility of his death; only a dead moth has to accept, because he loses the energy of life to deny death. If a moth could express his thought, he would use all the energy that he could use to say “Yes, death is stronger” to say “No, I am not defeated”; he would only say “no” more until he could say no more. Once the life is gone, it cannot come back (this is what death means), so life cannot let itself cease away. The life of the old little women in George Orwell’s essay “Marrakech” is pityful: their bodies, shrunk to “the size of children” and “reduced to bones and leathery skin, bent double under the crushing weight” of firewood(49). But they, like the moth, struggle to live, even painfully.
Because life never gives up to live, it is different from non-linving things. The difference between the dead moth and the moth alive just one minute before is the life of the moth. Clearly, what is important is life itself. If life was not so important and unique, it would not be any necessity for it to struggle to survive, and there would be no life. In Orwell’s another essay “Shooting an Elephant,” life itself has been subordinated under a few human beings desire: “it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie”; “I was very glad that the coolie had been killed”; “I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool”(41).
Maybe the moth looks like a fool. He struggles for such a short, fragile, and insignificant life, a life that no human being values or desires to keep. Although the life of the moth on Woolf’s window-pane is gone forever, countless moths are still fluttering on window-panes. O yes, they are trying to prove, life is still strong.
