I had not thought much about spiders until I read Maria Tatar’s Arachnomania; now I can think of little else. I even watched a film mentioned in the book – Eight-Legged Freaks. It was awful, though it did bring home how very scared people can be of spiders, especially large ones. But, as Tatar shows, spiders are also part of human history and culture; and they really are different. I use fly sprays to get rid of insect intruders. I would never now use them against arachnids as well.
Tatar was first drawn to spiders by the Covid pandemic which locked us all down. It was then she discovered that the eight-legged freaks offered the possibility of ‘finding a model for survival and creativity in times of seclusion, darkness and gloom’. They are, as we shall see, paragons of survival.
Darwin was thrilled by the spiders he saw on his world voyage and sent a box full of them back to Cambridge
The author is an 81-year-old American academic, born in Germany. Her learning is formidable and at times weird. She notes that, like spiders, we make webs – notably the World Wide Web, which showed us how to ‘transform our own solitary havens into hives of productive activity’. Like us, spiders are busy creatures; they are also creative, especially when it comes to webs. And they are worldwide.
