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

We searched the entire garage. It was dirty and full of stuff. Wooden boards, ladders, tools, plastic crates, shovels, pitchforks, rakes, buckets, potato crates, and fishing gear. We moved everything, examining every nook and cranny.

We finally found the eel in a corner, behind a pair of wellies. It lay completely still, covered in dust and gravel. I picked it up; its body was cold and limp, its skin dry and rough from the gravel. It drooped like a dirty sock in my hand; its eyes were flat and lifeless.

It was clearly dead. It had been out of the water for at least five or six hours. Maybe more.

“Put it in the bucket; I’ll see to it later,” Dad said.

I dropped it into the water and stood there studying it for a while. At first, it floated on the surface, its pale belly facing up. Then it suddenly turned over. Its body writhed and its head swung from side to side and slowly, slowly, it started swimming around the bucket, its gills opening and closing.

I’d seen this before. Early one morning by the stream, while it was still dark out, we’d trudged down the bank to a spiller set on a small ledge, maybe three feet above the water. On the line running out over the edge dangled an eel. Not in the water but in the air, with its head almost level with the spiller and the tip of its tail an inch or two above the surface of the stream.

I’d heard about eels catching their prey and then spinning their bodies around their own axes in a violent spiral. This eel had apparently spun so violently it had wrapped itself in the line and then kept going until it was lifted out of the water and left dangling in midair.

It hung there quietly, its head lolloping to one side. I picked it up. Several yards of thick nylon line was wrapped tightly around the eel; it had bitten into its skin, leaving bloody stripes along its entire body, as though it had been lashed. I gently untangled the line and held the eel in my hand; it felt limp and heavy and dead. Then I put it into the bucket and watched it float belly up for ten seconds, twenty seconds, before it slowly turned over and started swimming along the inside.

THERE ARE CIRCUMSTANCES THAT FORCE YOU TO CHOOSE WHAT TO believe, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve been the kind of person who chooses to believe what people consider verifiable, science over religion, the rational over the transcendental. But the eel makes that difficult. For anyone who has seen an eel die and then come back to life, rationality isn’t enough. Almost everything can be explained; we can discuss different processes of oxygenation and metabolism or the eel’s protective secretion or its highly adapted gills. But on the other hand, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I’m a witness. An eel can die and live once again.

“They’re odd, eels,” Dad would say. And he always seemed mildly delighted when he said it. As though he needed the mystery. As though it filled some kind of emptiness in him. And I let it sway me, too. I decided that you find what you want to believe in when you need it. We needed the eel. The two of us wouldn’t have been the same without it.

It was only much later, when I read the Bible, that I realized that this is exactly how faith arises. Having faith is to approach the mystery, that which lies beyond language and perception. Faith requires you to give up part of your logic and rationality. Paul wrote as much in his first letter to the Corinthians: “Your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” Put differently, a believer must let go of intellectual thought, must let himself be convinced, not by rational argument or natural science or the truth that reveals itself under the microscope, but by feeling alone. “If any one among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise,” Paul wrote. Anyone who seeks faith must dare to become a fool.

Only a fool can believe in miracles. There’s something both terrifying and tempting about it. When Jesus walks on water, his apostles, who are sitting in a boat, are frightened at first. They think he’s a ghost. But Jesus tells them: “Take heart, it is I; have no fear,” and Peter dares to step out onto the water to meet him. That first step, when Peter lifts his foot over the boat’s railing and puts it down on the water’s surface, is the beginning of everything. The familiar meets the unfamiliar. Something he thought he understood turns out to be something else entirely. And he chooses to believe it. When Jesus reaches the boat, the apostles all fall to their knees and say: “Truly, you are the son of God.”

When they’re out sailing on Lake Galilee and a storm blows up, the apostles are frightened and wake Jesus, who is sleeping in the stern. Jesus rebukes the wind and says: “Peace! Be still!” and the wind ceases immediately. “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?” he says reproachfully, almost mockingly.

I’ve never been able to bring myself to believe in the miracles of any religion, but I can understand why someone would want to swap fear for conviction. I can understand that a person coming across something unfamiliar or frightening chooses the miracle over ongoing uncertainty. It’s a human thing to do. Having faith is giving yourself over to something. To what can be explained only through similes.

And the promise of the Christian faith, what awaits anyone brave enough to become a fool, is the biggest of all promises: “He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes