[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":3,"doc-seo-661165-105":59,"doc-detail-661165-en":129},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",[7,13,18,23,28,33,38,43,48,51,55],{"id":8,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":10,"show_sort_weight":11,"slug":12},1,"Document","Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":14,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":15,"show_sort_weight":16,"slug":17},2,"Literature",80,"literature",{"id":19,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":20,"show_sort_weight":21,"slug":22},4,"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":24,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":25,"show_sort_weight":26,"slug":27},5,"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":29,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":30,"show_sort_weight":31,"slug":32},6,"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":34,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":35,"show_sort_weight":36,"slug":37},7,"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":39,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":40,"show_sort_weight":41,"slug":42},8,"Research & Report",30,"research-report",{"id":44,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":45,"show_sort_weight":46,"slug":47},9,"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":46,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":49,"show_sort_weight":46,"slug":50},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":52,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":53,"show_sort_weight":52,"slug":54},10,"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":56,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":57,"show_sort_weight":24,"slug":58},19,"General","general",{"code":4,"msg":60,"data":61},"ok",{"site_id":62,"language":63,"slug":64,"title":65,"keywords":66,"description":67,"schema_data":68,"social_meta":122,"head_meta":124,"extra_data":126,"updated_unix":128},105,"en","the-death-of-the-moth-by-annie-dillard","The Death of the Moth - By Annie Dillard","","A solitary narrator in Washington State observes a spider’s web in a bathroom corner, filled with the remains of small creatures, especially moths. The text dwells on the transformation of bodies over time, comparing fresh moth matter to later fragments reduced to dust, skins, and headless chitin. A separate camping experience explains the narrator’s belief, describing moths burning in candlelight, igniting wax into a flame-like “moth essence” that lasts for hours. The piece ends by reflecting on choosing to become a writer.",{"@graph":69,"@context":121},[70,84,104],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":15,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/literature/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/the-death-of-the-moth-by-annie-dillard/661165/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":98,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":99,"interactionStatistic":100},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/the-death-of-the-moth-by-annie-dillard/661165.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"How to eat","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-28",true,{"@type":101,"interactionType":102,"userInteractionCount":4},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":103},"ViewAction",{"@type":105,"mainEntity":106},"FAQPage",[107,113,117],{"name":108,"@type":109,"acceptedAnswer":110},"What does the narrator see in the bathroom, and why does it matter?","Question",{"text":111,"@type":112},"The narrator lives alone beside a spider whose web contains numerous corpses, including moths. The repeated evidence leads the narrator to recognize moth bodies at different stages of burning and decay.","Answer",{"name":114,"@type":109,"acceptedAnswer":115},"How does the Virginia camping experience explain the narrator’s conclusions about moths?",{"text":116,"@type":112},"While reading by candlelight, the narrator watches moths fly into the flame, burn, and leave fragments. One moth becomes a kind of wick, igniting and burning for hours, which clarifies what the bathroom remains likely are.",{"name":118,"@type":109,"acceptedAnswer":119},"What does the narrator ask the class at the end, and what response is given?",{"text":120,"@type":112},"The narrator asks how many want to give their lives and become writers, and all hands rise. The narrator then struggles to explain what that choice truly requires, especially the sense that one cannot be anything else.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":123,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":125,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":127,"site_id":62},661165,1793159016,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":130},{"doc_id":127,"user_id":131,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":132,"doc_module":4,"category_id":14,"category_name":15,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":133,"file_id":134,"file_url":135,"file_type":136,"file_size":137,"view_count":4,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":81,"language":138,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":139,"faqs":140,"seo_title":141,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":128,"read_time":24},962093541613,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_9964176cb1d06d4a9deccf72a44ae3dc","“The Death of the Moth” By Annie Dillard  \n(Taken from Holy the Firm)  \nI live on Northern Puget Sound, in Washington State, alone.  \nThere is a spider in the bathroom with whom I keep a sort of company. Her little outfit always reminds me of a certain moth I helped to kill. The spider herself is ofuncertain lineage, bulbous at the abdomen and drab. Her six-inch mess of a web works, works somehow, works miraculously, to keep her alive and me amazed. The web itself is in a corner behind the toilet, connecting tile wall to tile wall and floor, in a place where there is, I would have thought, scant traffic. Yet under the web are sixteen or so corpses she has tossed to the floor.  \nThe corpses appear to be mostly sow bugs, those little armadillo creatures who live to travel flat out in houses, and die round. There is also a new shred of earwig, three old spider skins, crinkled and clenched, and two moth bodies, wingless and huge and empty, moth bodies I drop to my knees to see.  \nToday the earwig shines darkly and gleams, what there is of him: a dorsal curve of thorax and abdomen, and a smooth pair of cerci, by which I knew his name. Next week, if the other bodies are any indication, he will be shrunken and gray, webbed to the floor with dust. The sow bugs beside him are hollow and empty of color, fragile, a breath away from brittle fluff. The spider skins lie on their sides, translucent and ragged, their legs drying in knots. And the moths, the empty moths, stagger against each other, headless, in a confusion of arcing strips of chitin like peeling varnish, like a jumble of buttresses for cathedral domes, like nothing resembling moths, so that I should hesitate to call them moths, except that I have had some experience with the figure Moth reduced to a nub.  \n****  \nTwo years ago I was camping alone in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. I had hauled myself and gear up there to read, among other things, James Ramsey Ullman’s The Day on Fire, a novel about Rimbaud that had made me want to be a writer when I was sixteen; I was hoping it would do it again. So I read, lost, every day sitting under a tree by my tent, while warbler swung in the leaves overhead and bristle worms trailed their inches over the twiggy dirt at my feet; and I read every night by candlelight, while barred owls called in the forest and pale moths massed round my head in the clearing, where my light made a ring.  \nMoths kept flying into the candle. They hissed and recoiled, lost upside down in the shadows among my cooking pans. Or they singed their wings and fell, and their hot wings, as if melted, stuck to the first thing they touched—a pan, a lid, a spoon—so that the snagged moths could flutter only in tiny arcs, unable to struggle free. These I could release by a quick flip with a stick; in the morning I would find my cooking stuff gilded with torn flecks of moth wings,  \ntriangles of shiny dust here and there on the aluminum. So I read, and boiled water. And replenished candles, and read on.  \nOne night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burned dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked p when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away, and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I coul","cbCaiae4uGfJxDpU","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiae4uGfJxDpU","pdf",199680,"English","# The bathroom web and its remains\n## Corpses observed and identified\n# The camping trip in Virginia\n## Reading by candlelight and moths in the fire\n# The burning moth and “moth essence”\n## The candle shaped into a wick\n# The writer’s question and class response","[{\"question\":\"What does the narrator see in the bathroom, and why does it matter?\",\"answer\":\"The narrator lives alone beside a spider whose web contains numerous corpses, including moths. The repeated evidence leads the narrator to recognize moth bodies at different stages of burning and decay.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the Virginia camping experience explain the narrator’s conclusions about moths?\",\"answer\":\"While reading by candlelight, the narrator watches moths fly into the flame, burn, and leave fragments. One moth becomes a kind of wick, igniting and burning for hours, which clarifies what the bathroom remains likely are.\"},{\"question\":\"What does the narrator ask the class at the end, and what response is given?\",\"answer\":\"The narrator asks how many want to give their lives and become writers, and all hands rise. The narrator then struggles to explain what that choice truly requires, especially the sense that one cannot be anything else.\"}]","The Death of the Moth - By Annie Dillard | PDF"]