[r3trohack3r]

The concept of the cicada lifecycle fills me with awe and wonder.

Could you imagine spending a majority of your life below ground. All you know is soil. You are pretty slow and clumsy burrowing around in the below ground world.

Then, you go through this metamorphosis. Not only do you reach an entirely different plane of existence (going from the below ground world to the above ground world) - but you enter that new world with wings free to travel in 3 dimensions at high speeds. You have sun, weather, mammals, cars, birds, buildings, trees... All things you are experiencing for the first time. And you get two weeks to pack it all in during a frantic mating frenzy.

Imagine if this experience happened to you.

[nescioquid]

You remind me a little of Stendhal and the mayflies towards the end of The Red and the Black:

“In the same way, death, life and eternity, are very simple things for anyone who has organs sufficiently vast to conceive them. An ephemeral fly is born at nine o’clock in the morning in the long summer days, to die at five o’clock in the evening. How is it to understand the word ‘night’?”

It is quite the contrast, though, to the cicada-epiphany you were imagining.