[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.