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

and mysterious metamorphoses. She never got to finish her scientific study, but she was clearly taken with the eel. She would show off her eels to her friends and tell them about their enigmatic life cycle and long journey to the Sargasso Sea. And she would remain enamored with the eel and eventually return to it.

Her dream of an academic career came to an abrupt end, however, when Carson’s father died in July 1935 and she suddenly found herself forced to financially support her mother and older sister. Continuing her at best modestly remunerated work in the laboratory was out of the question. Ambition and self-realization had to yield to duty and family loyalty. But via her contacts at the university, she was given an opportunity to earn a regular salary by indulging another long-standing interest; namely, writing. She started penning scripts for a radio series about life in the oceans. Over fifty-two episodes, each seven minutes in length, she told her listeners about many aquatic species, in a way that was both scientifically accurate and interesting to a lay audience. And her employer, the US Bureau of Fisheries, was so happy with the result that she was immediately given another assignment: to write the introduction to a pamphlet about marine life. She entitled her piece “The World of Waters,” and it was a story about life in the ocean, about all the creatures lurking under the mirrorlike surface, that live their lives there, hunting or being hunted, being born, propagating and dying. It was a text that rested solidly on her academic knowledge about marine life, but it was also a creative and empathetic narrative. Her supervisor read it and declared it unsuitable for an informational pamphlet from the bureau. This was not what he’d envisioned. This was literature.

“I don’t think we can use it,” he said. “But submit it to Atlantic Monthly.”

And that is how she eventually became a writer; and thus, Rachel Carson’s path did in fact lead her to the sea, to the origin of everything, and her life and work would come to revolve around getting to know and understand this origin.

RACHEL CARSON’S FIRST BOOK WAS PUBLISHED IN 1941. IT WAS called Under the Sea-Wind and was based on her piece about the sea, which was in fact published in the Atlantic Monthly. She wanted to write about the sea as the vast and multifaceted environment that it is, to show at least part of what goes on in its depths, beyond the gaze and knowledge of humanity. And by doing so, she also wanted to point to something much bigger and more universal: how everything is connected. She wrote in a letter to her editor: “Each of these stories seems to me not only to challenge the imagination, but also to give us a little better perspective on human problems. They are as ageless as sun and rain, or the sea itself.”

She therefore turned to an unusual literary method for a marine biologist. She used anthropomorphism, the device of fairy tales and fables. The first part of the book describes life at the water’s edge; the second part is about the open sea, and the third outlines what is happening in its depths. Each part centers on a particular animal. In the first part, we meet a seabird, a black skimmer, living its life on the edge of the sea. It hunts for minnows and crabs, moving with the seasons and tides, an entire life lived as a perfectly adapted cog in a much larger and infinitely complicated ecosystem. The bird is not only given a backstory and a personality but even a name, Rynchops, derived from its Latin name, and over the course of the story, it meets a great many other animals in its unique beach environment: herons, turtles, hermit crabs, shrimp, herrings, and terns. Humans, on the other hand, are nothing but remote strangers in the background.

In the second part, we follow, in a similar fashion, a mackerel by the name of Scomber, navigating the open sea, as part of an enormous shoal, surrounded by gulls, sharks, and whales, but only ever seriously threatened when faceless humans plunge their trawls into the water.

In the third and last part of the book, we are introduced to the eel. It goes without saying that Rachel Carson couldn’t have found a better representative for the compelling complexity of the sea. She explains in a letter to her publisher: “I know many people shudder at the sight of an eel. To me (and I believe to anyone who knows its story) to see an eel is something like meeting a person who has traveled to the most remote and wonderful places of the earth; in a flash I see a vivid picture of the strange places that eel has been—places which I, being merely human, can never visit.”

The story begins in a small lake, Bittern Pond, at the foot of a tall hill. The lake is located almost two hundred miles from the sea, surrounded by bulrushes, cattails, and water hyacinths; two little brooks feed it. That is the scene of our introduction to our main character: “Every spring a number of small creatures come up the grassy spillway and enter Bittern Pond, having made the two-hundred-mile journey from the sea. They are curiously formed, like pieces of slender glass rods shorter than a man’s finger.”

Rachel Carson then homes in on a particular female eel, ten years old, which she calls Anguilla. Anguilla has lived all her life in the lake, ever since she arrived as a small glass eel. She has hidden in the reeds during the day and gone hunting at night “for like all eels, she was a lover of darkness.” She has hibernated in the soft, warm mud of the lake bed, “for like all eels she was a lover of warmth.” Anguilla is a creature who feels and experiences, who remembers her past and knows suffering and love. Who eventually