The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson [bill gates best books .TXT] 📗

a simple laboratory on the Mediterranean with a knife in one hand and a dead eel in the other.

THE NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD SIGMUND FREUD WAS A YOUNG MAN WITH big plans. The year before, he’d visited Manchester and loved it, even the rain and the climate. He was keen to travel more and was, above all, eager to spend more time on practical scientific work, learning more about everything, making discoveries, describing things, understanding things. He loved the laboratory. What he saw through the microscope was always unequivocally true; there was no room for prejudice or superstition. All human knowledge came from the laboratory. He envisioned a life in the service of science, possibly in England, maybe somewhere else entirely. And he was seriously considering dedicating his life to natural science, to biology or physiology, the tangible and concrete. In a family portrait from 1876, he can be seen standing in the middle with his hand on the chair of his mother, Amalia, the tallest of his siblings, wearing a three-piece suit, with his hair parted to the side and a dark, well-trimmed beard. He’s looking straight into the camera, his gaze steady, as though nothing in the world could perturb him.

It was this nineteen-year-old who in the spring of 1876 arrived in Trieste, with the ambition of solving the mystery of the eel and leaving his mark on the history of science. Trieste, located in the northeast corner of the Adriatic Sea, belonged at this time to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was an important metropolis, home to a naval base and a large port. Since the completion of the Suez Canal in 1867, it had also been a gateway to Asia. Coffee, rice, and spices were unloaded at the city’s docks. Ships came from all over the world, and people gathered there from all over Europe: Italians, Austrians, Slovenes, Germans, and Greeks. As early as Roman times, Trieste had been a meeting point and a site of pilgrimage, a place where all kinds of languages and cultures rubbed shoulders. Compared with Freiberg or Vienna, it was almost certainly a city that made an impression, complex and elusive.

So what did young Sigmund Freud find in Trieste? Quite a bit is known about that, since he wrote several letters to his childhood friend Eduard Silberstein describing his experience. He wrote in Spanish—since the two of them had become close while studying that language—about the city, its restaurants, shops, and residents. On occasion, his word choices are peculiar, possibly on account of Spanish not being his native tongue, but more likely as a kind of code between friends.

In his first brief letter, from March 28, Freud writes that Trieste is a very beautiful city and that “las bestias son muy bellas bestias”; its beasts are very beautiful beasts. By beasts, Freud meant women. During his first few days in Trieste, the city’s women seem to have fascinated him more than anything else. In his letters, he writes about being struck during his first day in town by the fact that every woman he met looked like a “goddess.” He describes their appearance and physical qualities in detail, saying they’re tall and slim with long noses and dark eyebrows, that they’re paler than they should be and have beautiful hairstyles and that some of them leave a lock free to hang down in front of one of their eyes like a tempting hook. He visits the neighboring city of Muggia and writes about how the women there must be particularly fertile since virtually every other woman he saw was pregnant and that the local midwives probably have no trouble finding work. He speculates ironically about whether the women might be affected by “the marine fauna,” making them “bear fruit year-round,” or whether they procreate at certain times all together. “These questions will have to be answered by future biologists.”

He observes and describes the women almost like a scientist, but at the same time, they’re alien to him, like members of a different species. Freud does not, however, seem to have made any close female acquaintances in Trieste, and before long, his mood and attitude toward the city changed. He starts expressing frustration with his situation in his letters to Silberstein: at the women who tempt and attract him, both younger and older ones, but who also confuse him emotionally. He remarks on their overuse of makeup. He writes about how they have a habit of sitting in their windows, looking out, smiling and meeting the eyes of men; he complains, slightly ironically, about having to distance himself from them, on account of his work.

Then, suddenly, he writes that all women in Trieste are “brutta, brutta,” exceedingly ugly. It’s as though he’s uncomfortable with the realization that his feelings won’t conform to the model of the cold, systematic man of science he strives to be. “Since we are not allowed to dissect people, I have nothing to do with them,” he writes, after noting that in Trieste, even young girls use makeup.

As though to steel himself against the distraction of his sexual confusion, Freud instead focuses on his work. He has his own room at the laboratory, which is located a stone’s throw from the Adriatic Sea. “I’m five seconds from the most recent Adriatic wave,” he writes to Silberstein, and then gives a detailed description of his workplace:

My little room has an odd floorplan, one window, in front of which is my worktable, with a great number of drawers and a large top, a second table for books and ancillary implements, three chairs, and several shelves holding some twenty test tubes. Last but not least, there is also a sizeable door, which, if you follow its lead, takes you outside. On the left side of the table, in the corner, stands the microscope, in the right corner the dissection dish, in the center four pencils next to a sheet of paper (my drawings are therefore cartoons, and not without value), in front stands a series