There was, if one could believe the evidence of one’s own eyes, a wavering, fragile, mercurial, and untrustworthy curtain composed of innumerable small moths, which fluttered and quivered in every direction. And behind this living veil, there existed a pair of morose human eyes. They were heavy with some private gravity, and peered through the trembling swarm with an intensity both mournful and tenacious.
Yet it was not the curtain alone that confounded; it was the manner in which the moths performed their caprice: sometimes clustering, sometimes darting, sometimes hanging suspended midair, that determined, ever so subtly, the shape of truth. Or, rather, the shape of truth for those human eyes. For the eyes, as one is wont to observe, are not merely windows to the world but the very entities through which the world is imagined, interpreted, and given measure. Their beliefs shift and tremble with the restless moths. They were bent, teased, and occasionally toyed upon by the relentless, erratic fluttering. And in consequence, the humans found themselves seeing differently, knowing differently, and, most astonishingly of all, being differently. For what, indeed, are humans but an assemblage of thoughts and beliefs that form certainty and fear, hope and doubt, all balanced between perception and imagination? One could argue that all perception is imagination, and all imagination perception.
The moths, in their inconsequential yet tyrannical erraticism, play upon these frail convictions. They toy with the morose eyes, with the very frameworks of knowledge, and with the selfhood that hangs precarious therein. In the end, though perhaps, from a judgement by a mode of perception, there is no true end, only continuance, they alter what is seen, what is known, and who the morose humans believe themselves to be, leaving the world, as it ever does, slightly askew, and the human heart slightly unsettled.
