The artist is, and remains, a scientist — but of a particular kind:one who grew disillusioned when urged, with all the firmness of progress, to descend to the molecular scale — for that, they said, was the future of biology.

“And what of the living beings, then?” So the living beings — or what remains of them — the artist collects in small boxes.

Why do so many creatures come to die at my feet? gathers these traces of life barely erased, lingering in fragments and tatters. At times, it feels as though they’re still there, poised to leap, to bite, or take flight.The muscles offer up one last flicker. Often, the colours endure. Always, the fundamental structures remain — inner or outer bones, scales, feathers.

Life, as a phenomenon, is a wall of remarkable strength,resisting all our efforts to crush it. But we shall never again know the living as it once was, just decades ago. It is a family touched by time: its faces shift, its children become parents, its parents survive only in pictures, its pictures crumble to dust.

The only emotion permitted — because it is faithful to what life is — is melancholy. The artist is melancholic: his familiars fall by the thousand, and no one sees them.

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