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

How can, for instance, a hearing person imagine how a person who has been deaf since birth perceives the world? How can a sighted person explain a picture to a person who has always been blind?

What Thomas Nagel does reject is what’s called reductionism, which is the idea that complex concepts can be explained and understood through simpler concepts. For example, that we would be able to understand the mind of another creature by studying and describing the physical or chemical processes of that creature’s brain. Reductionism tries to explain big things through small things; the whole is made up of smaller components that can be explained and understood individually, and which is expected to make the whole fathomable in turn.

But it’s not enough, Nagel argued. When it comes to consciousness, there are states that are completely unknown to us and will remain so, even if the human species were to survive until the end of time. Some things will always remain out of our grasp, be they about bats or eels. We can learn where these creatures come from, how they move and navigate, we can get to know them, almost as humans, but we will never fully understand what it’s like to be them.

This is a logical approach to the world, and by all appearances correct. And yet it’s tempting to think Rachel Carson did manage to reach a kind of understanding that shouldn’t really be possible. Not through reductionism or empiricism or even science’s traditional belief in truth as it appears under the microscope, but by having faith in an ability that may in fact be unique to humans: imagination.

THE FAIRY TALE GOES SOMETHING LIKE THIS: ONCE UPON A TIME, A boy caught an eel. The boy’s name was Samuel Nilsson and he was eight years old. The year was 1859.

Samuel Nilsson dropped his catch, a relatively small eel, into a well on his home farm in Brantevik, in southeast Skåne, the southernmost part of Sweden. The well was then sealed with a heavy stone lid.

The eel remained there, alone in the dark, kept alive by the occasional worm and insect that would fall into the water, cut off from the world and robbed not only of the sea, the sky, and the stars, but also the meaning of its existence: the journey home, back to the Sargasso Sea, the thing that would make its life complete. And the eel lived on while everything around it disappeared. The eel lived on while at the end of the nineteenth century its contemporaries grew strong and shiny and set their course for the Sargasso to spawn and die. It lived on while Samuel Nilsson grew up and old and eventually died. It lived on while Samuel Nilsson’s children did the same. And his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The eel lived for so long it eventually became famous. People traveled from far and wide to look down the well and maybe catch a glimpse of it. It became a living link to the past. An eel robbed of life that had gotten its revenge by cheating death. Perhaps it was even immortal?

Calling it a fairy tale is really neither right nor fair, though. That there really was an eel in the well in Brantevik is indisputable. That it had been there a long time is by all appearances equally true. Only the bit about Samuel Nilsson is slightly difficult to verify. Exactly how long the Brantevik eel had lived in its well can’t be established beyond doubt.

Nevertheless, some have tried. In 2009, the Swedish nature television program Mitt i naturen visited the farm in Brantevik. At that point, the eel was, according to legend, one hundred and fifty years old, and by documenting its existence, the crew wanted to shift at least some aspect of it from the world of myth to that of reality.

It was one of Swedish nature television’s most dramatic moments. The TV team managed to heave the big, square stone lid aside and look down into the well, which was no more than fifteen feet deep and lined with large stones. There was, of course, no sign of the eel. They set up a pump and drained the well of water. Still no sign of the eel. The host, Martin Emtenäs, climbed down and searched the cracks between the stones as water trickled back in. Still no sign of the eel.

They were just about to put the big stone lid back when they suddenly spotted movement in the murky water at the bottom of the well; Emtenäs climbed back down to check what it might be.

The eel, the mysterious Brantevik Eel, which they finally managed to pull out, was a strange creature. It was small (twenty-one inches long), thin, and pale, but with abnormally large eyes. While all other parts of it had shrunk to adapt to life in the cramped, dark well, its eyes had grown several times larger than a normal eel’s—as though it was trying to compensate for the light it had lost. Slithering through the grass next to the well, it looked like a visitor from another world. So tragically marked by a life of darkness and solitude. So odd and alien once it was pulled up into the light to join the rest of us.

“It’s perfectly possible the myth of the Brantevik Eel is true,” Emtenäs mused afterward. Perhaps it really was one hundred and fifty years old. After it had lived for a century and a half in those conditions, the TV crew probably felt it would be high-handed to disturb the order that had let the eel cheat death for so long. After measuring and examining the eel, they dropped it back into the well, back into the darkness where it seemed intent on surviving us all.

The Brantevik Eel survived for a few more years before finally giving up. In August 2014, the owner of the well discovered it was dead. Its remains were shipped to a laboratory in Stockholm, where