Arachnophilia?

I don't kill spiders. I may have mentioned it once or twice before, but I don't expect you to remember. One summer in my teens, I went to take a shower and found a spider in the tub. This was not uncommon in the summer, and I generally washed them down the drain, but for some reason that particular summer day, I decided to capture the spider in a jar and take it outside, and that became my standard procedure for such situations.

That was probably a decade ago, and now I've grown into a man who is nearly unable to kill crawling things. I am puzzled by the culture I live in, which instills in young minds the belief that killing bugs is not only acceptable but actually a sort of duty--unless the bugs in question are ladybugs or butterflies, in which case it's a crime. I don't harbor any ill feelings toward our pesticidal society, but I've often wondered why it is we go out of our way to crush the poor boneless ones.

Here's the irony: I'm a bit of an arachnophobe. I think spiders are ugly, creepy, icky things, and I feel revulsion when I see them. I understand why people kill the spiders they find in their houses because even a decade of pacifism hasn't removed from me the natural inclination toward destruction. But I can't do it. Once, early on in my marriage, I killed a rather large spider that had found its way into our apartment. I did it to show my wife I wasn't a ninny. After I did it, I was so beset by guilt that I wasn't quite myself the rest of the day. So I've never done it again. Now whenever I find a spider in our apartment, I catch it and take it outside. My wife has laughingly pointed out that I do this even when the ground outside is covered in frosty snow or puddling rain, which may well dictate a crueler death for the spider than a quick blow from a shoe, but I don't do this because I love spiders--I don't love spiders! If I loved them, I might let them live with me. But they're frightening little beasts, and I hate them, so I don't let them live with me. But I do let them live--or at least throw them out to the elements where they can suffer a natural death and turn into dirt. The odd-shaped cog of my mind that dictates my conscience says that's better than killing them outright.

I've tried to come up with justifications for my behavior (I don't want insanitary spider guts embedded in my carpet. Spiders eat flies, and flies are more proactively annoying than spiders are.), but why should I feel compelled to justify my desire not to kill? The truth is, I'm deeply embarrassed by the fact that I can't kill spiders--especially since I hate them. See, if I had an academic interest in those eight-legged fiends and could discourse on their invaluable contributions to the local ecology and was fascinated by their anatomy, then it would make sense that I would not want to kill them, and if anyone asked me why I didn't kill them, I would have a good reason. But I'm not that guy. I see spiders as nightmarish creatures, and I wonder why God didn't make them more cuddly because, really, a fly-eating pet would be pretty awesome. And so I'm embarrassed that I feel guilty when I kill them, but guilt trumps embarrassment, so I go on not killing them.

I feel like Kierkegaard would have had something to say about this, but I don't know what it would've been. Perhaps he would've examined the paradox of harboring a murderous hatred for something but feeling a moral necessity to preserve its life--he might have called the paradox Love. Who knows....

There's got to be something to say about the way I treat spiders and why I do, and I'm convinced there's a parable in here somewhere. At any rate, there's a moral to this story, and it isn't, "Ugliness isn't a capital offense." It's something more than that. Something about love and hatred being totally unrelated to tolerance. I can't quite seem to formulate it, so I'll leave that up to you.