Clouds of Life

When the goblins approach the Lonely Mountain towards the end of The Hobbit, Gandalf warns “the bats are above his army like a sea of locusts.”  This “bat-cloud” even blocked the light of the sun.  Early observers in North America likewise noted a super-abundance of animals.  In their famous journals, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark noted “innumerable herds of living anamals” and “miriads of the feathered tribes”  Particularly in the past, and still in some places today, we see examples of life in reckless abundance.

No one wants to fight an army of goblins heralded by swarms of bats, but there is something marvelous about a world so suffused with life that even the solemn, stony mountains – the dark abodes of fluttering bats – are brimming and bursting with life.  Perhaps Henry David Thoreau put it most provocatively in Walden, writing, “I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey upon one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp – tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! … The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence.” 

 

 

Image: Edmund Dulac, “The Entomologist’s Dream”

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