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approved, more for the sake of creating employment than for the intrinsic value of the proposal, which no one was yet in a position to judge.

    As usual, Strindberg works himself into a frenzy, heckling a society gone astray, in which cretinism and softening of the brain have taken on epidemic proportions. In the eyes of the volatile writer, the Kingdom of Sweden has become a stronghold of stupidity where ecclesiastical, artistic, scientific and political elites make war on one another with absolutely magnificent imbecility.

But the man who gathered cones, not wanting to come off second best, astonished the world with an enormous artificial system that divided all cones into 67 classes, 23 families and 1,500 orders.
    And as a final proof that his fatherland was now in a state of spiritual distress, he tells us that the pompous men in power have now succeeded in persuading the oppressed masses that “the state would collapse unless the people were prepared to grant a salary and professorship to a gentleman who had mounted a large number of bugs on zinc needles.”
    …
    For a long time, I used the classic insect pins from Austria, but as my interest in hoverflies deepened, I switched to pins from the Czech Republic. They’re cheaper. Otherwise there’s no great difference. They’re made of black enamelled steel, 40 millimetres long, with a little brass-yellow plastic head, and they come in seven sizes. The thickest is as stiff as a nail, while the thinnest, number 000, is as capricious and flexible as a French verb. You stick the pin right through the fly’s thorax. That’s all there is to it. For aesthetic reasons, you can use a couple of straight pins to spread the wings while they dry, but on the whole flies are very compliant collectibles. If you protect them in tight-fitting drawers from dermestid beetles and other misfortunes, they will last for several hundred years, which is a comforting thought for the entomologist.

    About the drawers. The system was invented by a pedant but is nevertheless elegant. A lovely chest of large drawers full of small boxes under glass. The boxes, sixteen to a drawer, have no covers and can be moved around as new specimens are added or the old ones begin to overflow the banks. Suppose, for example, that one summer you decide to pin down a copious number of, say, Brachyopa pilosa in anticipation of the good time you’ll have later, over the winter, as you examine them all under the microscope in hopes of finding a specimen of the very similar but infinitely rarer and in every way mysterious Brachyopa obscura . And when you’ve filled all your boxes with Brachyopa, you just put in a new box and push the others along. Quite simply the same principle as in that children’s game where you move brightly coloured, hard plastic numbered tiles with your thumbs until you have them in numerical order.

    Obviously, spring is going to feel like liberation.
    I always save a few particularly difficult cases for the winter—aberrant specimens of critical families with many species: Platycheirus, Cheilosia, Sphaerophoria . Insects whose names arouse uncertainty as well as hopes of some small advance at the outermost limits of human knowledge. Restful handiwork, and exciting. Then—in winter, by air, around the world, on pins, in little aluminium film cans padded with Bubble Wrap—the most peculiar of these flies travel to renowned and respected experts of oracular status in service of the art of decoding the meandering choreography of the German classification tables.
    A sea eagle, broad as a banner at a protest march, streaks past over the ice outside my window, and sometimes the crossbills are busy out there in the dusk, dropping cones on the terrace from the spruce at the corner, which I vow to cut down every autumn for the sake of the light. Ravens reconnoitre from the top of the radio tower on the other side of the village whose age no one knows. Otherwise nothing. The north wind and the