Eight Ways of Looking at a Spider: An Eight-Legged Essay

We write the way spiders spin webs. Thoughts on the medieval Chinese writer Liu Xie — and spiders!

Image: Zoological illustrations of spiders made by A. T. Hollick (c. 1900) for the Biologia Centrali-Americana, an encyclopedia of the natural history of Mexico and Central America. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

1. Spider

Liu Xie’s fifth century masterpiece on the art of writing, the Wenxin diaolong, or The Heart of Literature and the Carving of Dragons, makes no mention of spiders…