JimZ's Reviews > The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

I became aware somewhere in the middle of this book that I was saying, out loud, “geez”, over and over again. If it wasn’t an astounding thing I had never heard before about snails, it was reading what this poor woman had to go through with her viral, neurological illness (an acquired mitochondrial/metabolic disease) that nearly killed her.

I bet you didn’t know that:
• Snails cannot hear and they can barely see (they can make out light and dark); they have an acute sense of smell and also do pretty good regarding tasting and touching.
• They have eyes on top of their 2 tentacles (that sprout from their head), and they have one foot.
• They have 2,640 teeth, 80 rows, and the author likened the teeth to a rasp (a coarse file or similar metal tool with a roughened surface for scraping, filing, or rubbing down objects of metal, wood, or other hard material).

The author was ill for nearly 2 decades and for the longest time doctors were clueless as to what she had—but there was no doubt she was very sick. Her autonomic nervous system was seriously screwed up. She had severe hypotension and could not stand for any extended period of time (minutes!). During most of the writing of this book she was confined to bed where it was a tremendous effort to roll over. Good God…A tremendous effort to roll over? 😦

Her whole life for a while was keeping tabs on a snail that came from her garden and placed in a terrarium near her bed where she could watch it. So she became quite the expert on its behaviors and its anatomy and physiology. A good deal of the book we learned about snails and the rest was her reflections on her illness and on time which was really interesting. I think if the book was only about snails it would have been “just alright”, but her telling us how she felt and what she thought about her illness made for fascinating reading (for me at least).

One thing early on in the reading that bothered me was how she wrote about the snail using anthropomorphic language. The snail was contented, curious, pondering its circumstances, slowly waving its tentacles with apparent delight, etc. etc. But after awhile I said “Oh what the hell…” It made for interesting reading. If she were to have written about her observations using language reserved for a scientific journal I would have been bored. And I learned a lot about snails, and her book was carefully written with a number of reference works at the end. And she consulted with malacologists during the writing of this book (zoologists specializing in the study of mollusks). So I came to accept the anthropomorphizing, and enjoyed the rest of the ride.

Many of her reflections really hit home with me. These are just a couple:
• We are all hostages of time. We each have the same number of minutes and hours 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.
• I could never have guessed what would get me through this past year—a woodland snail and its offspring; I honestly don’t think I would have made it otherwise. Watching another creature go about its life…somehow gave me, the watcher, purpose too. If life mattered to the snail and the snail mattered to me, it meant something in my life mattered, so I kept on…

- When I read the above passage on the meaning that she got from life when she was very ill, it’s like I read it before in another book. And I thought for a while and it hit me…this was similar in thought to a passage that resonated with me from a fantastic book I read last November called Sweet Bean Paste (Durian Sukegawa). In it, a woman was reflecting on her life when she had been living in a leper colony, a virtual outcast from society. Was life worth living? And she said the following:
- I can’t tell you how many times I wish I were dead. Deep down, I believed that a life has no value if a person is not a useful member of society. I was convinced that humans are born to be of service to the world and to others.
- But there came a time when that changed, because I changed.
- I remember it clearly. It was a night of the full moon, and I was walking alone in the woods. … On this night, the moon cast its pale, brilliant light on everything around me, and energy seemed to radiate from trees swaying in the wind. … And oh, what a wonderful moon it was! I was enchanted. It made me forget everything I had suffered because of the illness, about being shut up in here and never getting out. Then next thing, I thought I heard a voice that sounded very much like the moon whispering to me. It said: I wanted you to see me. That’s why I shine like this.
- From then on, I began to see everything differently. If I were not here, this full moon would not be here. Neither would the trees. Or the wind. If my view of the world disappears, then everything that I see disappears. It’s as simple as that. ..- I began to understand that we were born in order to see and listen to the world. And that’s all this world wants of us. It doesn’t matter that I was never a teacher or a member of the workforce, my life had meaning.

Note:
• Winner of the 2010 John Burroughs Medal, the Natural History Literature category of the 2010 National Outdoor Book Award (joint award), and the non-fiction category of the 2012 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

Reviews
• This is a long but informative review from the Journal of The Institute for the Medical Humanities [Volume 30, Number 1, Spring 2012]: http://www.elisabethtovabailey.net/fi...
• https://www.ecolitbooks.com/2016/01/0...
• https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti... (a review from the editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal)