“Design”

I didn’t realize spiders were territorial creatures, but for the last two weeks or more, a tan and brown spider who could stand comfortably on a dime has been living on the dashboard of my treadmill in the garage. I like to watch him (her?) while I’m running; he will walk over the buttons and LED screen. I tolerate him because he doesn’t leave spiderwebs everywhere he goes and he has never shown any tendency to jump. Once he wandered down the treadmill’s handle, but he must have sensed my apprehension for he quickly retreated to his regular domain.

A spider always makes me think of the difficult Robert Frost poem, “Design.” The first eight lines of the exquisitely constructed Italian sonnet describe a white spider and a white moth on a white flower. In the last six lines, at the turn, the poet muses about what brought together the strange and the beautiful. He questions what terrible force created the pessimistic arrangement before him.

What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern a thing so small.

This dreadful prospect – “design of darkness” – rather makes me think of Habakkuk (one of my favorite prophets), who asks God what seems to me to be a strongly related question: “Why do You look with favor / On those who deal treacherously?” (2:13). Oh, that old, old problem of evil. And maddeningly enough, the most useful thing God appears to have to say is, “Wait and see.”

I thought about killing the spider, but I decided not to.