We are all fascinated by the mystery of metamorphosis – of the caterpillar that transforms itself into a butterfly. Their bodies have almost nothing in common. They don’t share the same world: one crawls on the ground and the other flutters its wings in the air. And yet they are one and the same life. Emanuele Coccia argues that metamorphosis – the phenomenon that allows the same life to subsist in disparate bodies – is the relationship that binds all species together and unites the living with the non-living. Bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, animals: they are all one and the same life. Each species, including the human species, is the metamorphosis of all those that preceded it – the same life, cobbling together a new body and a new form in order to exist differently. And there is no opposition between the living and the non-living: life is always the reincarnation of the non-living, a carnival of the telluric substance of a planet – the Earth – that continually draws new faces and new ways of being out of even the smallest particle of its disparate body. By highlighting what joins humans together with other forms of life, Coccia’s brilliant reflection on metamorphosis encourages us to abandon our view of the human species as static and independent and to recognize instead that we are part of a much larger and interconnected form of life.

Spitfire pilot Ross Smith Stagg was one of 33 Allied airmen to defend Darwin against Japanese invasion on May 2, 1943. As one of 14 pilots shot down or experience mechanical failure in the ensuing battle, he parachuted into the sea 18 km from land, 100 km southwest of Darwin in the Fogg Bay area. He reached the shore in a dinghy. For the next 15 days he trudged through inhospitable country in a futile attempt to return to Strauss airbase. What should have been a few days walk turned into his worst possible nightmare as he stumbled aimlessly through mosquito and crocodile infested swamps. "It was almost six days I'd been without sleep, apart from a short period of unconsciousness and those few moments before I fell out of that tree," he said. " I became demented by the cavalcade of mosquitoes and hallucinating badly". His experience was only to worsen - he waded halfway across a tidal river to be confronted by a large saltie. Darwin historian John Haslett help Stagg map the original route by retracing his steps, even managing to relocate an American Kittyhawk Stagg found crashed in the middle of nowhere.