One of the best passages I’ve read in a while, about fecundity:

Lacewings are those fragile green insects with large, rounded transparent wings. The larvae eat enormous numbers of aphids; the adults mate in a fluttering rush of instinct, lay eggs, and die by the millions in the first cold snap of fall. Sometimes, when a female lays her fertile eggs on a green leaf atop a slender stalked thread, she is hungry. She pauses in her laying, turns around, and eats her eggs one by one, then lays some more, and eats them, too.

Anything can happen, and anything does; what’s it all about? Valerie Eliot, T.S. Eliot’s widow, wrote in a letter to the London Times:

‘My husband loved to recount how late one evening he stopped a taxi. As he got in the driver said: “You’re TS Eliot.” When asked how he knew, he replied: “Ah I’ve got an eye for a celebrity. Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him, ‘Well, Lord Russell, what’s it all about,’ and do you know he couldn’t tell me.”’

Well, Lord God, asks the delicate, dying lacewing whose mandibles are wet with the juice secreted by her own ovipositor, what’s it all about?

—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek