Recently, when I reread ‘‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’’ alone, in quarantine, it felt less like reading than remembering.
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Years later, I read it again so many times with my own children that it blended into their psyches too, and back into my own again, this time in a deeper color. Like many children, I read the book so many times that it blended into my psyche as a kind of background color. ‘‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’’ is a small, eccentric masterpiece - a children’s book, yes, but also a formative exploration of the complex nature of change. The caterpillar I know best was created, out of scraps of painted paper, by a man who grew up in Nazi Germany: Eric Carle. That’s how you get a butterfly: out of the horrid meltdown of a modest caterpillar. These parts gorge themselves on the protein of the deconstructed caterpillar, growing exponentially, taking form, becoming real. Imaginal discs are basically the seeds of crucial butterfly structures: eyes, wings, genitalia and so on.
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Inside that gruesome mush are special clusters of cells called ‘‘imaginal discs,’’ which sounds like something from a Disney movie but which I have been assured is actual biology. Only after this near-total self-annihilation can the new growth begin. What is it actually like inside a cocoon? Is it cozy and peaceful? Or cramped and dim? Is the bug’s stay voluntary, involuntary or something in between? And what really happens during that seemingly magical change? Is it inspiring and wondrous? Or is it unpleasant and grim? What did I not learn in kindergarten? I’m interested in precisely the part of the story that tends to be skipped: the confinement, the waiting, the darkness, the change. I don’t really care anymore what goes in or what comes out those are questions for different times, for ancient pasts and distant futures. Lately, I have found myself wondering - as I sit here hunched inside my dark house, for infinity weeks, hardly moving, wearing the same green sweatshirt while eating the same four snacks - about cocoons. The emphasis always seems to be on the before and the after, never the during.
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Magic! In fact, that is exactly how we tend to learn about it - as one of nature’s great magic tricks, if not inexplicable then largely unexplained. They introduce us to the wonder of metamorphosis: A little blobby squirmy thing disappears into a sac and emerges as a flamboyant colorful flappy thing.
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What the ABCs are to language, cocoons are to biology. They’re one of the first things we learn about the natural world. By Sam AndersonĮvery child knows about cocoons. The Truth About Cocoons What caterpillars really go through in there has applications for our moment.