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

underneath the Sargasso Sea, where “change comes slow, where the passing of the years has no meaning, nor the swift succession of meaning.” And she wrote The Sea around Us about sailing across the open ocean on a starry night, gazing toward the distant horizon and feeling that neither time nor space is finite: “And then, as never on land, he knows the truth that his world is a water world, a planet dominated by its covering mantle of ocean, in which the continents are but transient intrusions of land above the surface of the all-encircling sea.”

The oldest creatures we’ve found so far all came from the sea. Ming the clam, a so-called ocean quahog caught off the coast of Iceland in 2006, turned out to be at least five hundred and seven years old. Scientists estimated its year of birth to be 1499, a few years after Columbus made it to North America and during the time of the Ming dynasty in China. Who knows how long it could have lived if the scientists in their efforts to establish its age hadn’t also accidentally killed it. In the Pacific Ocean, east of China, there are organisms called glass sponges, which, it’s been shown, have the ability to live for over eleven thousand years. At the bottom of the sea, where the earth’s orbit and the rising and setting of the sun are meaningless, aging seems to follow a different law. If there really is something eternal, or nearly eternal, the ocean is where we’ll find it.

EELS MAY NOT BE IMMORTAL, BUT THEY ALMOST ARE, AND IF WE ALLOW ourselves to anthropomorphize them slightly, we must inevitably ask ourselves how they handle having so much time. Most people would say there’s nothing worse than boredom. Ennui and waiting are fiendishly hard to endure, and time is never as present and persistent as when we’re bored. One shudders at the mere thought of a hundred and fifty years at the bottom of a dark well, alone and practically in sensory deprivation. When there are no events or experiences to distract us from time, it becomes a monster, something unbearable.

I imagine a hundred and fifty years alone in the dark as an endless, sleepless night. The kind of night when you can feel each second being added to the one before, like a slow, interminable jigsaw puzzle. I try to imagine the impatience of a night like that, being so utterly aware of the passing of time and yet so utterly unable to speed it up in the slightest.

To the eel, things are, it would seem, different. An animal probably doesn’t experience tedium the same way humans do. An animal doesn’t have a concrete notion of time, of seconds turning into minutes and years and whole lifetimes. Perhaps boredom doesn’t make eels impatient.

But there’s a different kind of impatience, which may be relevant. It’s the one we feel when we are forced to endure lack of fulfillment. The impatience at being stopped from doing what you set out to do.

That’s what I think about when I think about the Brantevik Eel. Even if it lived to a hundred and fifty, no matter how long it managed to postpone death, there wasn’t enough time for it to make its predestined journey and complete its existence. It overcame every obstacle, survived everyone around it; it managed to draw out its long and hopeless life—from birth to passing—for a century and a half. Yet even so, it never got to go home to the Sargasso Sea. Circumstances trapped it in a life of endless waiting.

From this we can learn that time is unreliable company and that no matter how slowly the seconds tick by, life is over in the blink of an eye: we are born with a home and a heritage and we do everything we can to free ourselves from this fate, and maybe we even succeed, but soon enough, we realize we have no choice but to travel back to where we came from, and if we can’t get there, we’re never really finished, and there we are, in the light of our sudden epiphany, feeling like we’ve lived our whole lives at the bottom of a dark well, with no idea who we really are, and then suddenly, one day, it’s too late.

14Setting an Eel Trap

We lived in a white brick house—my mother, father, older sister, younger sister, and me. We had a garage, a lawn, fruit trees, and a greenhouse in which Mom and Dad grew tomatoes. We all had our own rooms, and there was a bathroom with a tub, a decent-size kitchen, and a living room with paintings on the walls where no one ever spent any time. We had a TV room with a large sofa. We had a basement with a laundry room and a boiler room. We had a garden with potatoes, carrots, and strawberries, and a compost pile where you could dig for worms. We had a Ping-Pong table, a loom, and an extra freezer, and a still for making moonshine, which every other month or so bubbled away in the shower, sending a strong smell of mash throughout the house. We had an apple tree and a plum tree, which together formed a perfect soccer goal. We had a sandbox and a conservatory with a plastic roof that pattered like rifle fire when it rained. We lived on a street where all the houses had been built at the same time. Our neighbors were butchers, pig farmers, janitors, and truck drivers, and there were children everywhere. We were completely unremarkable. We were amazingly unremarkable. That was the only thing that made us special.

I understood early on that the life Mom and Dad had made for themselves had not been a given. They were both from somewhere else and had ended up where they’d ended up because people like them had been swept along in a process that in three short decades