In the Amazon basin the greatest violence sometimes begins as a flicker of light beyond the horizon. There in the perfect bowl of the night sky, untouched by light from any human source, a thunderstorm sends its premonitory signal and begins a slow journey to the observer, who thinks: the world is about to change. And so it was one night at the edge of rain forest north of Manaus, where I sat in the dark, working my mind through the labyrinths of field biology and ambition, tired, bored, and ready for any chance distraction.
Each evening after dinner I carried a chair to a nearby clearing to escape the noise and stink of the camp I shared with Brazilian forest workers, a place called Fazenda Dimona. To the south most of the forest had been cut and burned to create pastures. In the daytime cattle browsed in remorseless heat bouncing off the yellow clay and at night animals and spirits edged out onto the ruined land. To the north the virgin rain forest began, one of the great surviving wildernesses of the world, stretching 500 kilometers before it broke apart and dwindled into gallery woodland among the savannas of Roraima.
Enclosed in darkness so complete I could not see beyond my outstretched hand, I was forced to think of the rain forest as though I were seated in my library at home, with the lights turned low. The forest at night is an experience in sensory deprivation most of the time, black and silent as the midnight zone of a cave. Life is out there in expected abundance. The jungle teems, but in a manner mostly beyond the reach of the human senses. Ninety-nine percent of the animals find their way by chemical trails laid over the surface, puffs of odor released into the air or water, and scents diffused out of little hidden glands and into the air downwind. Animals are masters of this chemical channel, where we are idiots. But we are geniuses of the audiovisual channel, equaled in this modality only by a few odd groups (whales, monkeys, birds). So we wait for the dawn, while they wait for the fall of darkness; and because sight and sound are the evolutionary prerequisites of intelligence, we alone have come to reflect on such matters as Amazon nights and sensory modalities.
I swept the ground with the beam from my headlamp for signs of life, and found—diamonds! At regular intervals of several meters, intense pinpoints of white light winked on and off with each turning of the lamp. They were reflections from the eyes of wolf spiders, members of the family Lycosidae, on the prowl for insect prey. When spotlighted the spiders froze, allowing me to approach on hands and knees and study them almost at their own level. I could distinguish a wide variety of species by size, color, and hairiness. It struck me how little is known about these creatures of the rain forest, and how deeply satisfying it would be to spend months,, years, the rest of my life in this place until I knew all the species by name and every detail of their lives. From specimens beautifully frozen in amber we know that the Lycosidae have survived at least since the beginning of the Oligocene epoch, forty million years ago, and probably much longer. Today a riot of diverse forms occupy the whole world, of which this was only the minutest sample, yet even these species turning about now to watch me from the bare yellow clay could give meaning to the lifetimes of many naturalists.
The moon was down, and only starlight etched the tops of the trees. It was August in the dry season. The air had cooled enough to make the humidity pleasant, in the tropical manner, as much a state of mind as a physical sensation. The storm I guessed was about an hour away. I thought of walking back into the forest with my headlamp to hunt for new treasures, but was too tired from the day's work. Anchored again to my chair, forced into myself, I welcomed a meteor's streak and the occasional courtship flash of luminescent click beetles among the nearby but unseen shrubs. Even the passage of a jetliner 10,000 meters up, a regular event each night around ten o'clock, I awaited with pleasure. A week in the rain forest had transformed its distant rumble from an urban irritant into a comforting sign of the continuance of my own species.
But I was glad to be alone. The discipline of the dark envelope summoned fresh images from the forest of how real organisms look and act. I needed to concentrate for only a second and they came alive as eidetic images, behind closed eyelids, moving across fallen leaves and decaying humus. I sorted the memories this way and that in hope of stumbling on some pattern not obedient to abstract theory of textbooks. I would have been happy with any pattern. The best of science doesn't consist of mathematical models and experiments, as textbooks make it seem. Those come later. It springs fresh from a more primitive mode of thought, wherein the hunter's mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors and the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen. To move forward is to concoct new patterns of thought, which in turn dictate the design of the models and experiments. Easy to say, difficult to achieve.
The subject fitfully engaged that night, the reason for this research trip to the Brazilian Amazon, had in fact become an obsession and, like all obsessions, very likely a dead end. It was the kind of favorite puzzle that keeps forcing its way back because its very intractability makes it perversely pleasant, like an overly familiar melody intruding into the relaxed mind because it loves you and will not leave you. I hoped that some new image might propel me past the jaded puzzle to the other side, to ideas strange and compelling.
~~The Diversity of Life -by- Edward O. Wilson
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