Something you lavish with consideration will grow to be a mirror, a portal, a lens on the which means of life — a dandelion, a muskrat, a mountain.
A snail.
Not lengthy after I wrote an existentially hued children’s book about a snail, a pal despatched me Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s slender, splendid memoir The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (public library) — the document of an unusual experiment in studying that the smaller the aperture of consideration, the extra marvel rushes in.
At thirty-four, whereas touring by means of Europe, Bailey was felled by extreme neurological signs — the results of a mysterious viral or bacterial invasion that savaged her mitochondria, vanquishing youth’s sense of invincibility, subverting the widespread religion in trendy medication: Out and in of hospitals as remedy after remedy failed to assist, she was ultimately left pinned to her mattress at residence, the space to the bookshelf throughout the room an expedition demanding an entire day’s energies. She displays:
Given the benefit with which well being infuses life with which means and function, it’s surprising how swiftly sickness steals away these certainties.
She slips into the time-warp of sickness — the way in which it has of creating an eternity of a single second whereas letting whole days vanish. Millennia after Seneca contemplated the balance of time spent, saved, and wasted and a decade earlier than Zadie Smith thought of the pandemic as a lens on time, Bailey observes:
Time unused and solely endured nonetheless vanishes, as if time itself is ravenous, and every day is swallowed complete, leaving no crumbs, no reminiscence, no hint in any respect.
After which the blur is all of a sudden interrupted by a peculiar reward: At some point, a pal brings her a pot of violets from the close by forest, housing a single Neohelix albolabris — a typical woodland snail.
At first indignant about what she might presumably do with a bivalve pet when she will hardly sit up, Bailey grows rapidly fascinated by the creature’s feeding habits, its sleep rhythms, its light insistence on survival. She decides to present it a correct residence. In a dusty nook of the barn subsequent to the studio the place she is bedridden, her caretaker finds a discarded glass aquarium that quickly turns into a lavish terrarium stuffed with native vegetation from the snail’s woodland residence.
Having as soon as made a dwelling as an expert gardener, Bailey takes vivifying enjoyment of populating the tiny botanical backyard, itemizing out vegetation she doesn’t know whether or not she is going to ever once more see within the wild:
Goldthread — aptly named for its colourful roots — holding its trio of delicate, paw-shaped leaves excessive on a skinny stem; partridgeberry, with its spherical, darkish inexperienced leaves and its small, shiny crimson berries, which lasted for months; the bigger, waxy leaves of checkerberry; many sorts of moss; small polypody ferns; a tiny spruce tree; a rotting birch log; and a bit of previous bark encrusted with multicolored lichen.
Captive in her bed room, she involves see the snail’s residence as a microcosm of existence — its terrarium a complete world, its miniature actions an ongoing odyssey, emanating what the good naturalist Henry Beston celebrated as the sacredness of smallness. In paying such tender and whole consideration to the snail’s life, she learns to concentrate to life itself at the focus of the dwelling second, which is the one share of eternity we’ve got. She displays:
Survival typically is dependent upon a selected focus: a relationship, a perception, or a hope balanced on the sting of risk. Or one thing extra ephemeral: the way in which the solar passes by means of the arduous, seemingly impenetrable glass of a window and warms the blanket, or how the wind, invisible however for its wake, is so loud one can hear it by means of the insulated partitions of a home.
Wanting in on the snail’s miniature universe, she learns to look out — out of the human-sized terrarium of her bed room, out of the painful circumstance of her sickness, out of the limiting if-only thoughts that tells us we’d like sure circumstances in an effort to really feel the majesty and thriller of life; she learns that even the smallest opening is sufficient for magnificence and marvel to pour in, and that we make the opening with the sharpness of our consideration — for consideration is how we render reality what it is.
With a watch to her widened lens of marvel, she writes:
As I window-watched, I noticed the comings and goings of my neighbors; they, too, had been a part of the rhythm of my acquainted rural panorama. They might depart for work or errands and later return, stroll their canine, lower firewood, and examine their roadside mailboxes. As twilight deepened, the low dart of a nighthawk over the sphere would catch my eye. Darkness introduced the sparking of secret codes from the mate-seeking fireflies. Then, black on black, the swift shapes of bats would swoop for late-night morsels, and the hooting of owls would come softly, softly, from the woods — till all was quiet and nonetheless beneath the traditional brightness of distant stars and the shape-shifting moon.
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is a benediction of a e-book in its entirety — the sort rapturous to learn, tough to write down about. Couple it with Virginia Woolf on illness as a portal to self-understanding, then revisit Helen Macdonald’s beautiful memoir of what a hawk taught her about life.
