11th May 2020

Are spiders deaf? I ask the question because a spider has apparently been living in the smoke-alarm outside my bedroom door, and from time to time, taking responsibility for setting it off. Usually about 1.00am in the morning. For ages I thought it was a faulty battery. But the smoke-alarm man who visited recently discovered that the culprit was a spider who caught moths, dissected them, and then distributed their dismantled parts inside the unit in such a way as to set off the sonic boom.

Hence my question. Does the spider not hear the alarm? It can be heard three blocks away! And if it can hear the alarm, why does it persist? The more intriguing question is to wonder why something so intelligent can respond so nonchalantly to something so serious. Perhaps the question of even greater import is to wonder why those of greater intelligence can act with such nonchalance in the face of a greater alarm.

Like what? Like a Judgement Day. Is it not coming? And are there not tremors which give some hint of its approach? And yet the world cares so little and sleeps so soundly. Jesus said that in the days before the Flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark, willfully ignorant of what would happen on the day after the door was closed. Hence my question. Not the one about the spider. But the one about you and me.

DM 11^th May 2020