The Lantern Moth of Bad Decisions
Pharalis paenitentia
Natural history
The Lantern Moth is unique among Lepidoptera in that it does not seek out flames. It brings one. A small cold fire, chemically similar to a firefly’s but far less organized, burns at the tip of a long proboscis-like stalk that curves up and back over the moth’s head, dangling the light perhaps two centimeters in front of its face. The moth spends its evenings flying toward this light with total commitment and, for obvious reasons, never arriving.
Early naturalists assumed the lantern was for attracting mates. It is not. Lantern Moths mate by colliding accidentally, both parties having been busy at the time. The lantern’s function, as far as can be determined, is to give the moth something to want. Specimens whose lanterns are gently extinguished do not behave erratically or grieve; they simply land, fold their wings, and wait, with the air of someone who has finished a very long book and is not sure what to do with their hands.
The flight of the Lantern Moth is therefore a perfect circle of pursuit, powered by a desire it manufactures itself and can never satisfy by design. It covers remarkable distances this way. Some of the longest migrations ever recorded for an insect its size were performed by Lantern Moths going, in the strictest sense, nowhere in particular — though it should be said they arrived somewhere all the same.
A fable
A young Lantern Moth once grew tired of the chase. “This is absurd,” she said, hovering in place, cross-eyed at her own flame. “I have flown four hundred miles after a light I am wearing. I could simply stop.”
So she stopped. She landed on a fencepost and folded her wings and let the lantern burn uselessly above her, pointed at nothing. The evening was calm. The fencepost was adequate. Nothing was wrong.
An old moth landed beside her, lantern bobbing. “You’ve noticed, then,” he said. “That the light is attached. That you can’t ever catch it.”
“I have,” she said. “It seems a foolish way to live.”
“It is,” said the old moth. “But look behind you.” And she looked, and saw the four hundred miles: the rivers she had crossed chasing nothing, the mountains, the lit towns asleep below her, all the places a sensible moth on a sensible fencepost would never have seen. The old moth lifted off into the dark. “The trick is not to catch it,” he called back. “The trick is picking what you’ll fail to catch.”
Choose your unreachable light carefully; you will spend your whole life almost getting there.
The moral of it