Unexpected Ugliness
9:49 AM 5/12/2009...It is one thing to react emotionally to the disgust aroused in us by a slimy insect or a rotten piece of fruit, while it is another to describe a person as disproportioned or to say that a portrait is ugly in the sense that it is badly made.
This quote from Umberto Eco's "On Ugliness" reminds me of something...
I was at the Zoo with Jo one day. We were visiting the Invertebrate House, which contains quite a few creatures you might describe as "slimy insects". And, some of them were even eating a "rotten piece of fruit". You exit properly from the building through a greenhouse featuring butterflies.
As we stood in the greenhouse observing the pollinators exhibit, a teenage girl walking past had a run-in with one of the butterflies. It seemed a bit... overwrought.
She confessed to us that she was afraid of butterflies.
I could understand it it were some other bug. Butterflies come in pretty low on the creepy-crawly scale. It isn't as if they want to attack you and lay eggs under your skin. And, how curious that someone might find the fluttering wings a threat. I started to think it might just be an entire generation of children blocked from experiencing nature...
And so, when I read the Eco book, I wonder if I even share the same cultural norms with the people around me. What might it be like to be afraid of butterflies?