When I was down with COVID in mid-September this year, two friends lent me Elisabeth Tova-Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating — a short, beautifully written account of a year in the author’s life. It was just the kind of reading I needed as I recovered. I finished the book a few weeks later at my usual slow — snail-like? — pace, completing a few paragraphs or a few pages each evening.
A viral infection — not COVID, for this was some decades ago — is also the central event in Tova-Bailey’s book. She catches it after a trip to Europe and finds herself in the middle of a debilitating illness that lasts two decades. The virus, she says, “re-wrote the instructions followed within every cell in my body, and in doing so, it rewrote my life, making off with nearly all my plans for the future.” The year that this book documents, Tova-Bailey is largely bed-ridden. Even standing or sitting up for a few minutes is hard.
On a whim, a visiting friend brings a wild snail (Neohelix albolabris) from the woods into her room. The snail makes its home in a pot of violets and in its early days — finding itself suddenly removed from its natural habitat and with nothing else to eat — consumed whatever paper it could find, paper being the only ‘woody’ thing in the room. This is the first of many remarkable details in the book:
The night before, I had propped an envelope containing a letter against the base of the lamp. Now I noticed a mysterious square hole just below the return address. How could a hole — a square hole — appear in an envelope overnight? Then I thought of the snail and its evening activity.
When Tova-Bailey puts some withered blossoms, the “snail investigated the offering with great interest and began to eat one of the blossoms”. Realizing that the snail needs a home that is closer to its woodland habitat, Tova-Bailey arranges for terrarium, a small habitat put together in a large glass bowl consisting of soil, mosses of various kinds, ferns and rotting bark. She feeds the snail with portobello mushrooms. (Check this Vimeo link to see the terrarium and hear a recording of the snail eating.)
The poignancy of the Tova-Bailey’s narrative, the melancholy beauty of her sentences comes from losing her everyday life to a chance, debilitating infection. “The snail and I were both living in altered landscapes not of our own choosing,” she writes. “I figured we shared the sense of loss and displacement.” She follows the activities of the snail in the terrarium. Through scientists, authors, poets, some from as far back as the 17th century, who’d studied or expressed fascination for snails, she learns some intriguing natural history details: the thousands of regenerating teeth a snail has, its spiral protective shell and slimy mucus, the tentacles by which a snail smells and tastes the world around it (it has rudimentary vision and no sense of hearing). Most strange of all is the snail’s mating behavior which includes the firing of darts: “tiny beautifully made arrows made of calcium carbonate ” that “look as if they’ve been crafted by the very finest of artisans” The darts — like Cupid’s arrows! — emerge from each of the mating snails and pierce the other prior to the snails’ lusty embrace.
§
The book is about snails, but its most searing passages convey the loss of one’s health and mobility and the new (and painful) perspectives they bring. Take this excerpt in which Tova-Bailey reflects on the passage of time:
Inches from my bed and from each other stood the terrarium and a clock. While life in the terrarium flourished, time ticked away its seconds. But the relationship between time and the snail confused me. The snail would make its way through the terrarium while the hands of the clock hardly moved — so I often thought the snail traveled faster than time. Then, absorbed in snail watching, I’d find that time had flown by, unnoticed. And what about the unfurling of a fern frond? Its pace was undetectable, yet day by day it, too, reached towards its goal.
The mountain of things I felt I needed to do reached the moon, yet there was little I could do about anything, and time continued to drag me along its path. We are all hostages of time. We have the same number of hours and minutes to live within a day, yet to me it didn’t feel equally doled out. My illness brought me such an abundance of time that time was nearly all I had. My friends had so little time that I often wished I could give them what time I could not use. It was perplexing how in losing health, I had gained something so coveted but to so little purpose.
And this one, in which Tova-Bailey observes her own species with the same curiosity that she brings to snails:
As the snail’s world grew more familiar, my own human world became less so; my species was so large, so rushed, and so confusing. I found myself preoccupied with the energy level of my visitors, and I started to observe them with the same detail with which I observed the snail. The random way my friends moved around the room astonished me; it was as if they didn’t know what to do with their energy. They were so careless with it. There were spontaneous gestures of their arms, the toss of a head, a sudden bend into a full body stretch as if it were nothing at all; or they might comb their fingers unnecessarily through their hair.
It took time for visitors to settle down. They sat and fidgeted for a while, then slowly relaxed until a calmness finally spread through them. They began to talk about more interesting things. But halfway through a visit, they would notice how little I moved, the stillness of my body, and an odd quietness would come over them. They would worry about wearing me out, but I could also see that I was a reminder of all they feared: chance, uncertainty, and the sharp edge of mortality. Those of us with illnesses are the holders of the silent fears of those with good health.
How true that last sentence is. When my wife was diagnosed and went through breast cancer treatment in 2018-19, I too suddenly became aware of these silent fears. I felt — viscerally — that my own health, which had been good until then, could unravel any moment, for no reason at all. This recognition — that one is as susceptible to “chance, uncertainty and the sharp edge of mortality” as anyone else — is perhaps why we instinctively wish others well.
§
A few days after I’d finished reading the book, I saw something squirming on the wet asphalt of my campus parking lot. It was a warm October day, and I first thought it was one of the many worms that appear with rain. But then I noticed the pair of quivering antennae that are characteristic of gastropods: a class that includes thousands of species of slugs and snails. I bent down to take a closer look. There was no shell. Looks like I’d spotted a slug.
But for the fleeting sensation of having caressed something slimy on a tree-trunk some years ago — a brilliantly camouflaged slug, indistinguishable from the textured bark — I had not encountered a gastropod before. And here was one, just days after I’d read the book! Could it be that the book had primed me to look closer, to pay attention to the details: in this case the quivering tentacles by which slugs and snails sense the world? Possibly. Whatever the reason, it was a joyous moment of recognition.