Lepidopteran: A Cento

Lines and phrases by Vladimir Nabokov, Alan Turing, and Thomas Hardy In    ...    the whitish muslin of a wide-mouthed net, in time of the breaking of nations, and in elementary arithmetic, the lichen-gray primaries keep in sufficiently close touch as to impose one part of a pattern onto another. The vibrational halo of the string figures passing from flower to flower, border to border — night-moths of measureless size, circling among the young, among the weak and old, hawk-moths at dusk hatching the war-adept in the mornings — the vibrational halo near the great wings is not the judgment-hour, only thin smoke without flame written on terrestrial things. I confess I do not believe in time. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness is an imitation game    ...    filled with the mysteries of mimicry    ...    But when a certain moth resembles a certain wasp and a deadly cipher flaps its glad green leaves like wings, what is our solution? Peace on earth and silence in the sky? I think that is not the faith and fire within us    ...    Still, I look into the depth of each breeding-cage, each floating-point form cleft into light and shade, hoping it might be so.