It’s time again to get back to the books. But some of us—happily—never left them. It has been a summer of discovery for me, and I recently realized that some of my reading friends have been learning the same things.
At a Fourth of July party, talk turned to books—specifically, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Alabama-native E.O. Wilson’s Anthill. This work of fiction draws heavily on the renowned biologist’s own life and, of course, his life’s work. Two other friends at this party of about 20 people also had just finished the book, and another said it was next on her list. That’s all the more interesting when you consider that the novel came out more than a year ago so it’s not really on all that many “must-read-right-now” lists, and, until the party, we had not talked about it at all.
This shared experience is actually rather ant-like.
It also happened that two of us had read Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff earlier this summer. We found that some parallels between ants and men are too interesting (and surprising) to be ignored.
When Wilson writes of ant tournaments, it’s easy to compare them to military parades. “The opposing forces were careful not to start a battle. ... The effort they were making was meant to persuade the other side that their colony had a great many soldiers. A few small workers served as counters ... moving about among the crowds ... in order to gain an estimate of the size of the soldier force.”
Then Wilson writes: “Peace with honor was not, however, the way of the Nokobee anthills. After three weeks of advance, culminating finally when the tournaments were held at the edge of the Trailheader nest mound, the (Streamsiders) suddenly switched to an all-out attack on the Trailhead Colony. No more propaganda for them, no more bluffing. ... a Streamsider worker—the elite scout and tournament veteran—crossed the threshold of aggression and single-handedly began the war.”
Finally, there’s this: “The Streamsiders had defeated the Trailheaders, and then, as a parallel of some Old Testament tribe wiping out a defeated people, they committed myrmicide, the ant equivalent of genocide. Total destruction ensured, as for the Roman conquerors at Carthage, that their rivals would never rise again.”
Now all of these passages come from the middle third of Wilson’s book—specifically from the young protagonist’s college dissertation about the births, halcyon days and deaths of certain ant colonies in one sunny clearing in a South Alabama nature preserve. My friends and I all decided that it is the best part of the book. Wilson pulls us right down into the ant hole, and into their world, at the very beginning with the words: “It was true. The Trailhead Queen was dead. In the first days there had been no overt sign that her long life had ended. There was no fever, there were no spasms, no farewells. She simply sat on the floor of the royal chamber and quietly died. ... Her stillness by itself failed to give warning to her daughters that a catastrophe had occurred for all of them.”
In Anthill, we see the world from an ant’s point of view, and we learn about their life cycles, how they form mounds, how they divvy up jobs. We understand their excitement (their good fortune!) when a picnic blanket is spread nearby. We learn that they farm (ants and humans are the only creatures who do), keeping herds of aphids healthy and productive. Wilson details how the ants communicate with complex chemical signals. He explains their caste system. It’s all absolutely fascinating.
To be sure, I don’t tolerate ants in my kitchen any more than I did before reading Anthill, but I certainly have a new and deep appreciation for them. I’ve marked the middle part of Anthill, and I am insisting that my science-minded reluctant reader spend some quality time with it.
The thing about Wilson’s Anthill is that he shares a huge amount of information about ants in a way that is both easy to understand and not so easy to forget. Besides, the story is quite a compelling and smart read with commentary on conservation, overpopulation, biodiversity, Southern culture and human behavior. I was thinking how cool it would be for middle-school science classes or even high-school biology classes to read this book and then have book group discussions. (My own book group is why I read it.) My guess is that they, like my friends and I, would see that the lives we lead as humans are, in so many ways, ant life writ large.
For that matter, Schiff’s Cleopatra taught me more about that time in history than I knew before this summer. That’s another book worth exploring and discussing in class.
With this sort of contemporary, bestselling-book approach to learning, I think that hitting the books again might be more interesting and more exciting than ever.
This column originally appeared in the August issue of Birmingham magazine.
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