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

“No, this is pointless.”

That night, we returned to the stream and I carried the bucket down the bank from the car; by the willow tree, I put it down and picked up the eel. It felt cold and lifeless; I lowered my hand into the water and released it. At first, we were both motionless. Then the eel moved. Its body undulated slowly from side to side, and with gentle motions, it swam back down into the dark and disappeared.

15The Long Journey Home

An eel, silvery and fat, swims out to the ocean, setting off on its final journey back to the Sargasso Sea. How does it know where to go? How does it find its way?

When it comes to the eel, we can allow ourselves to ask banal questions, simply because the banal questions don’t always have immediate answers. We can also allow ourselves to welcome this. We should be glad that knowledge has its limits. This response isn’t just a defense mechanism; it’s also a way for us to understand the fact that the world is an incomprehensible place. There is something compelling about the mysterious.

Because what does it really mean when we say we know the eel procreates in the Sargasso Sea? It means we have good reason to believe this, given Johannes Schmidt spent eighteen years sailing back and forth across the Atlantic, catching tiny, transparent willow leaves. We choose to put our faith in Schmidt’s work, in his observations and conclusions. We believe mature silver eels swim all the way back to the Sargasso Sea to spawn, that it’s the only place they breed and that none of them leave there alive. We believe it because everything points to its being true and because no one has offered any plausible alternatives. We can even go as far as saying we know that’s how it is. “We know now the destination sought,” Johannes Schmidt wrote. After all his years on the open sea, he must have felt he had the right to substitute belief for knowledge.

And yet, in this case, any knowledge comes with qualifications. What we rely on when we say we know where the eel procreates isn’t just observations but also a number of assumptions. And for a person who wants to know for sure, that’s obviously a problem. If you want to be categorical about it, which the scientifically minded tend to want to be, knowledge is not a matter of degrees; it’s binary. You either know or you don’t. Science is much stricter than, for instance, philosophy or psychoanalysis in that regard. Sciences like biology and zoology have on fairly solid grounds clung to the conviction that data need to be empirical and that knowledge requires observation.

To some extent, that’s the ghost of Aristotle still haunting us. All knowledge must spring from experience. Reality has to be described as it appears to our senses. Only what we’ve seen can be said to be true. It’s an interpretation of how humans acquire knowledge about the world that has survived because it’s logical, but also because it carries within it a promise. Before we know it, we have only faith, but the person with patience is always rewarded eventually. The truth will appear under the microscope.

When we say we know the eel procreates in the Sargasso Sea, there are still some essential objections to that statement: (1) No human has ever seen two eels mate. (2) No one has ever seen a mature eel in the Sargasso Sea.

That means the eel question remains unanswered; the truth has not yet appeared under the microscope. This uncertainty clearly acts as a driving force and a gravitational pull for eel enthusiasts. The mystery is there to be solved, questions await their answers, but at the same time the riddle is what sparks and perpetuates interest. For centuries, people who have viewed the eel question as a problem to solve have at the same time clung almost lovingly to the enigma of it.

When Rachel Carson wrote about the eel in her fairy tale–like nature book Under the Sea-Wind, she lingered on the mysterious and unexplained. Being a natural scientist, she could have been frustrated by not knowing, but the opposite seems to have been true. Rachel Carson seems to have been drawn to the uncertainty. She approached the eel and nature not just as a scientist but as a human being.

For instance, about the silver eel’s long journey to the Sargasso Sea, she wrote: “As long as the tide ebbed, eels were leaving the marshes and running out to sea. Thousands passed the lighthouse that night, on the first lap of a far sea journey. . . . And as they passed through the surf and out to sea, so they also passed from human sight and almost from human knowledge.”

Aristotle, Francesco Redi, Carl Linnaeus, Carlo Mondini, Giovanni Battista Grassi, Sigmund Freud, or Johannes Schmidt might have objected—perhaps they would have been unable to accept that a creature can in fact leave the realm of human knowledge—but to Rachel Carson, there seems to have been something simple and beautiful about the idea of the eels vanishing into the unknown. A creature that actively seeks to avoid human knowledge. As if that’s the way it should be. “The record of the eels’ journey to their spawning place is hidden in the deep sea,” she wrote. “No one can trace the path of the eels.” To her, the eel question, the enduring mystery, seems to have appeared to be preordained and eternal. As though it were a riddle beyond our human comprehension. Like infinity or death.

Tom Crick, the history teacher and narrator of Graham Swift’s novel Waterland, clings to the same feeling of a kind of fated inexplicability when he expounds on the eel: “Curiosity will never be content. Even today, when we know so much, curiosity has not unraveled the riddle of the birth and sex life of the eel. Perhaps there are