They [blackflies] remind me day after day in their season that I'm really not the center of the world, that I'm partly food, implicated in the crawl and creep of things. They are a humbling force, and even if for a time I can involve them in my self-aggrandizing myths, they still exert a slow and persuasive pressure of their own.
— Bill McKibben, Consuming Desires by Roger Rosenblatt, editor