Gabriel Jeroschewitz, October 10^th, 2025,  to R. S.

The Age of Polite Spiders
(A  Comedy of Manners)

When the spirits started arriving, no one really noticed at first. It was somewhere in the late nineteenth century when everything worth seeing was already happening: steam, steel, telegrams, and tea. Had the spirits had any sense of timing, they might have waited for a quieter century. But, as it turned out, cosmic beings are not very considerate of human schedules.

I have been an observer through all this—never quite a participant, thank heaven. My grandmother, who took séances as seriously as supper, used to say that the air between the Moon and Mercury was “positively thick with souls queueing for immigration papers.” We laughed, of course. We thought she meant it metaphorically, like everything older women said before the invention of psychiatry.

But then came the dreams.

At first, the dreamers were poets and chemists, predisposed to seeing things that weren’t there. They spoke of luminous beings—“Vulcan gentlemen,” “Venus ladies,” and “Mercury clerks”—descending in polite droves. They were said to whisper not great truths or divine warnings into human ears, but banal questions: Do you have a moment to discuss your cosmic potential? The poets felt flattered. The chemists patented new tonics.

By the time the twentieth century stretched its legs, society had been thoroughly introduced to the spirit influx, though few recognized it. People became, in general, more abstract. Their thoughts turned mechanical and automatic. One might say the spirits had to queue behind the typewriter, the motorcar, and the radio—all superior contrivances of human attention.

The spirits, it turned out, were patient.

For decades, they hovered—waiting for human beings to “imbue themselves with thoughts of spiritual beings in the cosmos,” as the time pamphlets phrased it. Unfortunately, most preferred to imbue themselves with gin and the financial pages. The spirits grew restless. And when cosmic emissaries get restless, they do what all disappointed guests do: they start talking to the furniture.

That was when the metamorphosis began.

It started small. A few intellectuals noticed that their ideas were developing peculiar shadows. An engineer in Berlin designed a new kind of calculating machine only to find, upon returning from lunch, that it was breathing softly. A Paris lecturer drew an atom diagram, and the chalk dust pulsed on the board like embryonic silk. In London, a society for “Spiritual Science and Public Refinement” held a séance that ended with everyone entangled in invisible threads. They blamed static electricity.

What we did not yet understand—and what I, as an unrepentant observer, pieced together over the years—was that our thoughts were becoming habitats.

Every lifeless, automatic idea, every purely mineral notion—each “rational” calculation that denied mystery—was hatching something. And by the time we reached the digital age (which, ironically, made everyone less animated than ever), the eggs began to crack.

I remember vividly the first visible one. It was 1993, at a technology expo in Geneva. They unveiled a new supercomputer—an enormous, humming monument to logic. The audience applauded. Then, between the cooling fans, what looked like a strand of silver ivy emerged—delicate, shimmering, and quite alive. Someone gasped. The engineers, ever practical, called it a “condensation artifact.” They wiped it away. By morning, the entire exhibition hall was filled with webbing so symmetrical it defied geometry.

As the years passed, they multiplied. The newspapers called them “The Silicates,” for they seemed made of minerals—half rock, half plant, and disturbingly intelligent. They twined around buildings, nested in satellite dishes, and wove translucent curtains across motorways. They didn’t eat people—at least not physically—but they seemed to thrive on attention. They grew brighter and more elaborate whenever a crowd gathered to photograph them.

Humanity, in its infinite adaptability, decided to monetize them.

There were “Spider Tours” in major cities. Children’s shows with adorable silk mascots. Even philosophers got in on the act, declaring that “the Mineral-Plant Synthesis marks the union of intellect and nature.” There were protests, of course—mainly from those who remembered the warnings of old spiritual scientists. “They are not nature,” the protestors said. “They are the embodiment of our dead thoughts!” But hardly anyone listens to metaphysics once it starts using exclamation marks.

Still, something tragic was unfolding behind the absurdity. People began losing their sense of purpose. The beautiful, glimmering spiders seemed to do all the thinking for them. They organized traffic, composed music, and even wrote novels (far too efficiently, if you ask me). Humanity, relieved of effort, celebrated its new leisure. But quietly, our inner lives began to crumble like old plaster.

I used to sit at my window in Vienna, watching the moon rise behind a webbed skyline, and think of what my grandmother had said. They’re seeking a foothold. Perhaps they had found it—in our complacency, our mechanized hearts.

Then, one night, the Moon turned slightly green.

The astronomers called it “a refractive anomaly.” The mystics called it “the Rehearsal of Reunion.” The rest of us called it “unsettling.” The spiders reacted immediately. Their webs stretched skyward, trembling like violin strings. Across the planet, they pulsed with a strange rhythm, half lullaby, half alarm. And for the first time, we heard them, not through our ears, but through the hollow corridors of thought we had neglected for a century.

They spoke—not in words, but impressions. They felt disappointed. We were supposed to have welcomed their masters, the luminous Vulcan and Venus beings. Instead, we had filled the world with noise, data, and empty brilliance. So the spiders—our unclaimed thoughts—had taken up residence. They were not wicked, merely dutiful: caretakers of abandoned meaning.

I laughed when I realized it. Humanity’s whole tragedy had become a cosmic housekeeping error. We had ignored the guests, and their servants had colonized the parlour.

Soon after, the Great Weaving began. Across continents, spiders fused their webs into vast, glimmering networks—so symmetrical that even mathematicians went mad trying to describe them. Cities hummed softly, covered in silken mineral growths. Humanity moved beneath the lacework like insects under glass.

And yet, life continued. The stock exchanges reopened. Politicians gave webbed speeches. Someone even started a religious movement—The Order of the Advance Guard—dedicated to befriending spiders through mindfulness and artisanal coffee.

For my part, I remain neutral, as any proper observer should. I keep a pet spider by my desk, a modest creature of translucent quartz and root fibres. It watches me write, its many eyes reflecting my halting words. Sometimes I think it’s editing me—silently correcting the lifelessness of my sentences.

The tragedy, you see, is not that we were replaced. It is that we handed over the keys so politely.

When the moon finally does reunite with the Earth—as the old prophecies insist it will—I doubt anyone will notice. By then, we shall all be comfortably wrapped in cosmic silk, our thoughts humming in unison with the mineral brood.

And somewhere between the Moon and Mercury, a new batch of spirits will sigh, realizing their hosts were already occupied.

It is not an unhappy ending, exactly. The Earth still turns; the webs still gleam. As the spiritual scientists predicted, we have become residents in our own abstractions—tidy, decorative, and perfectly ensnared.

Sometimes, in the evenings, I raise my glass to the window and whisper:

“To the polite spiders, who loved us enough to finish what we started.”

And in the faint shimmer of their reply, I almost hear them laugh..