Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer 2008 (via suicideblonde)
Paul Villinski, “Paradigm”, from the series: birds and butterflies
(via mianoti)
The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth’s part in life, and a day moth’s at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meagre opportunities to the full, pathetic. He flew vigorously to one corner of his compartment, and, after waiting there a second, flew across to the other. What remained for him but to fly to a third corner and then to a fourth? That was all he could do, in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea. What he could do he did. Watching him, it seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body. As often as he crossed the pane, I could fancy that a thread of vital light became visible. He was little or nothing but life.
Yet, because he was so small, and so simple a form of the energy that was rolling in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain and in those of other human beings, there was something marvellous as well as pathetic about him. It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zig-zagging to show us the true nature of life.
— Virginia Woolf, “The Death of the Moth”
Large Emerald Moth, Geometra papilionaria
Ah, one of the major mysteries of my childhood solved! This watercolor was gifted to me by a friend, who had painted it from the collection of a Rev. Frederic Hope. While hunting an Oak Eggar across the shrubbery so long ago in Russia, I noticed a soft pale green wing caught in a spider’s web — the same wing, as I realize now, caught in this watercolor.
(via vsirin aka V. Sirin, a Vladimir Nabokov biography-tumblr project)
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss
Poems that take a thousand years to die
But ape the immortality of this
Red label on a little butterfly.— Vladimir Nabokov
(published as “On Discovering a Butterfly” in The New Yorker (15 May 1943))
Photo: Carl Mydans, 1958 - LIFE
(via i12bent)
Butterflies
My mother sent me an email with two photographs attached of butterfly species she found in her garden.
My mother wrote, “Do you remember when we moved to Brisbane and you were at the tricky age of 16 and found it tough - understandably - for the first few weeks and then blossomed beyond all expectation?”
Bright Star
![Vladimir Nabokov’s first important American catch, taken on June 9, 1941, from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. He named it Neo-nympha dorothea for Dorothea Leuthold, a friend who drove the Nabokovs west on the trip and “kicked up” the first specimen, enabling the butterfly’s discovery.
[from Nabokov’s Butterflies]
(via workman:liquidnight)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ktk5gu5l5Q1qzhl9eo1_500.jpg)
Vladimir Nabokov’s first important American catch, taken on June 9, 1941, from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. He named it Neo-nympha dorothea for Dorothea Leuthold, a friend who drove the Nabokovs west on the trip and “kicked up” the first specimen, enabling the butterfly’s discovery.
[from Nabokov’s Butterflies]
(via workman:liquidnight)
(via mypeterpancomplex: tiresome)
“Radiant in wedding white, with wings just an inch or two across, slender-bodied Campaea perlata appears almost impossibly fragile. Its common name is pale beauty. A fingertip slid under the gossamer wings detects no weight, registers no sensation of contact at all.”
Image by Joseph Scheer, National Geographic.
Lepidoptera
–noun: order of insects that includes moths and butterflies
