Cicadas

Cicadas are making news. With millions of cicadas crawling above ground after 17 years of underground life, we are going to have a noisy summer.

For many people, cicadas are not pet material. They are suspiciously harmful to the trees (which, in fact, is untrue). Their singing is loud, piercing and monotonous (which, unfortunately, reminds me of my rude neighbors). And they are ghastly ugly. Although they do not rank high on my own scale of insect aesthetics, either, I do not have particularly bad feelings against them. In fact, I always have a soft spot in my heart for them.

Odd, right? I think it is because of the French entomologist Jean Henri Fabre's book The Stories of Insects. We had an excerpt from that book in our middle school text book. That excerpt, by coincidence, is about cicadas. Fabre's magic essay turned the grubby life of cicadas into a charming fairy tale, with a sublime ending by something like:"Four years of hard labor in the dark, one month of rejoice under the sun. A note so high to sing his happiness, so precious, yet so short."

I guess I never listened to cicadas' singing with detesting feelings again.