Carson was born in May 1907 and grew up on a small farm in Springdale, Pennsylvania, a stone’s throw from the mighty Allegheny River, which loops around the town. It was here, during her very first years, that she developed her lifelong interest in animals and nature. As a young child, she learned to love the forests and wetlands, the birds and the fish. The river in particular left her spellbound, as did everything in it, all the life that the water from the branched torrents brought with it on its long journey to the sea.
That being said, her professional path was by no means predetermined. Her father was a traveling salesman and her mother a housewife. The family was poor and an academic career hardly a given. But her mother, who had given up her career as a teacher when she got married, encouraged her daughter’s interest in nature. She took Rachel on long walks to study plants, insects, and birds. She trained her in the art of observation and taught her how to notice details and also instilled in her a deep and loving respect for the diversity of life. As soon as Rachel Carson learned how to read and write, she started making little books, illustrated pamphlets with fact-filled stories about mice, frogs, owls, and fish. It’s said she was a lonely child, with few, if any, close friends, but she never felt alone or out of place in nature. That was the world she got to know better than any other.
Eventually, she did end up going to university, at the age of eighteen, after graduating at the top of her class and after her mother sold the family china to pay her tuition. At first, she studied history, sociology, English, and French, but the central interest of her life is obvious from her very first university essay: “I love all the beautiful things of nature and the wild creatures are my friends.” Two years later, when she was twenty, she had a life-changing realization. She herself described it as an epiphany. One day she suddenly realized she was supposed to dedicate her life to the ocean. The ocean was to be the focus of all her curiosity and academic talent. “I realized,” she wrote later, “that my own path led to the sea—which until then I had not seen—and that my own destiny was somehow linked with the sea.”
What drew Rachel Carson to the sea? The choice may seem arbitrary. She had grown up away from the coast and had never laid eyes on the ocean, never dipped her toes into its water or listened to its waves crashing against the shore. And yet it seemed inevitable. It was as though she were following a scent down a mighty river, against the current, all the way to its origin, to the sea, which is the origin of everything. That was the core of her epiphany. We all came from the sea once, and therefore anyone wishing to understand life on this planet has to first understand the sea. Much later, in her 1951 book, entitled The Sea around Us, she explained this insight in a way that encapsulates what sets her apart from most marine biologists, a way that is at once scientific and poetic:
When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal—each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years ago, when a remote ancestor having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the water of the sea.
Thus we are all created from water, we all come from our own mysterious Sargasso Seas. “And as life itself began in the sea, so each of us begins his identical life in a miniature ocean within his mother’s womb.”
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1932, RACHEL CARSON HAD JUST BEGUN HER graduate studies in marine biology and kept in a corner of her laboratory a big tank of eels. She wanted to study how eels react to changes in salinity. She wanted to understand how the animal coped with the radical changes it experienced during its life cycle, how it submitted to its destiny, its long, hopeless migration 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 yearns. Because when autumn comes, something is different about Anguilla. She suddenly longs to leave, a vague, wordless longing, and one dark night, she sets her course for the lake’s outlet, and pushes on down rivers and brooks, the full two hundred miles to the open ocean. We follow her into the sea through obstacles and trials, toward the Sargasso. Down into the depths, toward the abysses that are the “ocean basins,” far down in the shadows where the water flows, “frigid water, deliberate and inexorable as time itself.”
And as Anguilla and all the other mature eels disappear, from view and human knowledge, our focus shifts to the tiny, weightless willow leaves, “the only testament that remained of the parent eels,” moving in the other direction, drifting on the ocean currents in a long journey back through the ocean, over the continental shelf and toward the land that “once was sea.”
Under the Sea-Wind hit American bookshops in November 1941. It was, of course, remarkably unfortunate timing. A month later, worldly affairs intervened when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The United States was at war, and the public’s interest in fairy tales about eels, mackerels, and black skimmers was suddenly minimal. The book sold fewer than two thousand copies and was soon forgotten.
Eventually, however, it would be picked up again, published in new editions and read and loved by successive generations. Above all because it describes the sea in a way that’s beautiful and fantastical, dreamlike and literary, but also always based on science. Rachel Carson’s decision to anthropomorphize the animals was, of course, deliberate and in service of a purpose. She used fairy-tale devices but never went beyond the boundaries of science and fact. She didn’t let the eel speak or act in a way that would be alien to the real animal. She was simply trying to imagine what reality is like for an eel, how it experiences all the hardships, metamorphoses, and migrations of the strange life cycle she also describes with scientific clarity. She explains in the foreword of the first edition, “I have spoken of a fish ‘fearing’ his enemies . . . not because I suppose a fish experiences fear in the same way that we do, but because I think he behaves as though he were frightened. With the fish, the response is primarily physical; with us, primarily psychological. Yet if the behavior of the fish is to be understandable to us, we must describe it in the words that most properly belong to human psychological states.”
And thus, the eel’s behavior became comprehensible to us for the first time, or at least slightly more comprehensible than before. What Rachel Carson realized, and what makes her unique in the history of natural science, was that she had to be able to see part of herself in another creature in order to truly understand it. She identified with animals, and this identification gave her the ability, and the courage, to anthropomorphize them. She did something that’s taboo in traditional science: she gave the eel awareness, an almost human consciousness, and thereby managed to get closer to it. She didn’t do it because she believed eels posses that kind of awareness, in the strictly scientific sense, but to help us better understand what a unique and complex creature it is. To let the eel be an eel, but also something we can to some degree identify with. A mystery, but no longer a complete stranger.
SO WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AN EEL AND A HUMAN? A common definition of what makes us human is that we’re aware of our own existence, and with this awareness comes a desire to affect existence. At least that’s how the difference between humans and animals has been historically conceived.
In the seventeenth century, René Descartes claimed all creatures except humans should be thought of as “automata.” Animals were bodies, the actions of which were nothing more than mechanical reactions. Humans, on the other hand, had something all animals lacked, a soul. The soul enabled thinking, which was in itself proof of the existence of awareness. Ergo, humans had awareness because they had a soul. Animals had no soul and therefore no awareness.
With the aid of a soul, humans were elevated above animals, but also above the passage and transience of time. The notion of a soul was and is still associated with the idea that humans are individuals. The word individual, in turn, means something that can’t be divided, a unit that stays whole and unchanged even when everything else changes. And since the human body is unarguably changeable, as are the external conditions of a human life, there must be something else, something permanent, that makes us individuals. This something has since time immemorial been the soul.
That being said, this particular difference between animals and humans has never gone unchallenged. When Carl Linnaeus published the tenth edition of his constantly reworked Systema Naturae (the edition usually considered the most important because it contains the beginnings of zoological nomenclature), in 1758, it featured some controversial revisions from previous editions. This is where Linnaeus, among other things, recategorized whales from fish to mammals, and bats from birds to mammals. But this was also where he temporarily erased the line between human and animal. In this particular edition, he placed the orangutan in the same genus, Homo, as humans. Which meant that according to Linnaeus, the orangutan was human. That we, Homo sapiens, were not, after all, the only living members of our genus, that we weren’t as unique as we’d always assumed.
That was a scientific mistake and it was quickly corrected, but even so, it did raise interesting questions. If the orangutan was human, did that mean the orangutan had a soul? Was it aware of its own existence? If so, what was the difference between a human and an orangutan? And if that difference was erased, what was really the difference between humans and bats or eels?
Eventually, Charles Darwin came along and robbed us of our eternal soul once and for all. The theory of evolution didn’t allow for the concept of an unchangeable soul, since it posits that all life, and all parts of it, are changeable. The human became an animal among other animals. And in time, as modern science developed, the animals of the world have, conversely, become a bit more like us. They’ve been given if not a soul then at least awareness. We know today that animals can possess considerably more complex states of consciousness than previously thought. Research shows that most animals, including fish, can feel pain. Signs point to animals being able to experience fear, grief, parental feelings, shame, regret, gratitude, and something we might call love.
There are also animals, such as primates and crows, that can perform advanced mental tasks, that can learn to communicate and interact both with members of their own species and with others, that can imagine the future, that can decline a reward in the present in exchange for a promise of a greater reward later on. All the criteria that we have throughout history postulated as pivotal to separating humans from animals—awareness, personality, the use of tools, a concept of the future, abstract thinking, problem solving, language
, play, culture, the ability to feel grief or loss, fear or love—all these criteria have been shown to be at the very least disputed, often insufficient, sometimes completely erroneous. The difference has, to some degree, in fact been erased. A crow placed in front of a mirror knows that it’s looking at itself, which means it’s aware of its own existence. It knows that it is, regardless of whether it can be said to know what it is.
SO THE EEL HAS AWARENESS, AT LEAST AT SOME LEVEL. BUT IS IT aware of its own existence? And if so, what does an eel feel? How does it experience its many metamorphoses, its long wait, and its migrations? Can it feel boredom? Impatience? Loneliness? What does the eel feel when that final autumn comes and its body changes, growing strong and turning silvery gray, and something profound and unfathomable urges it out into the Atlantic Ocean? Is it longing? A sense of incompleteness? A fear of death? What is it actually like to be an eel?
Rachel Carson anthropomorphized the eel in order to help us understand it better, to let us imagine the experience of the eel and better comprehend its behavior. But does that mean we really understand what the eel itself experiences?
That question has become increasingly key over the past few decades. The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous article in 1974 about the philosophy of mind. He entitled it “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” And his answer to this seemingly simple question is succinct: We really can’t ever know.
All animals have consciousness, Nagel posits. Consciousness is above all a state of mind. It’s the subjective experience of the world, a narrative told by our senses about the things around us. But even so, a human can never fully comprehend what it’s like to be a bat, or an eel, or an imagined extraterrestrial, for that matter. Our experiences as humans limit our ability to imagine the consciousness of other species.
The Book of Eels Page 11