The Life of the Bee - Maurice Maeterlink

Intrigue has prompted me to find out more about the new arrivals, so this book, seemingly waiting in my bookcase for this moment, is now providing a rather florid insight into the hidden workings of the hive. Written in 1901, The Life of the Bee by the Symbolist poet and essayist Maurice Maeterlink does not purport to be 'a treatise on apiculture, or on practical bee-keeping'. Far from it, in writing of the 'spirit of the hive' the language is that of rapture and heroics. What startling synchronicity, since I have just finished reading A.S. Byatt's Possession, a story situated in just the same era -that is the late 19th century and the Romantic Poets. 

What is home anyway?

On the meaning of home, when Gertrude Stein returned to the US after an absence of 30 years she wrote: 'Roots are so small and dry when you have them and they are opposed to you. You have seen them on a plant and sometimes they seem to deny the plant if it is vigorous....... Well we're not like that really. Our roots can be anywhere and we can survive, because if you think about it we take our roots with us. I always knew that a little and now I know it wholly. I know because you can go back to where they are and they can be less real to you than they were three thousand, six thousand miles away. Don't worry about your roots so long as you worry about them. The essential feeling is to have the feeling that they exist, that they are somewhere. They will take care of themselves and they will take care of you, too, though you may never know how it has happened. To think of only going back for them is to confess the plant is dying.'