A bat, for instance, is clearly in a completely different state of consciousness from a human. It perceives the world primarily through echoes. We know this thanks to, among others, Italian scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani, the man who aside from sharing his name with the mysterious professor in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” also unsuccessfully sought the truth about the eel’s reproduction. In the early 1790s, Spallanzani conducted a number of groundbreaking experiments on bats, which, among other things, allowed him to conclude that they could fly without hindrance or collisions through completely darkened rooms. He also captured a large number of bats and removed their eyes before releasing them back into the wild. When he managed to recapture some of the blind bats a few days later, he dissected them and found freshly caught insects in their stomachs. In other words, the bats could both hunt and navigate without the use of their eyes. It followed, Spallanzani argued, that they must be using their ears.
So a bat flies over a river at night, seeing virtually nothing but sending out rapid, high-frequency noises that bounce back against the objects and creatures that surround it. The echoes of these sounds are processed and interpreted by the bat in order to build an extremely detailed picture of the world. Thanks to this ability, a bat can fly at full speed in complete darkness through the branches of a tree without crashing. It can even tell one type of moth from another by the way sound bounces off their wings. Everything the bat encounters has its own pattern of echoes, and this is how it understands its surroundings. Its perception of the world consists of a constant stream of echoes, and these echoes, of course, shape how the bat feels about the world.
Human consciousness is fundamentally different, and if we try to imagine what it’s like to be a bat, it is that human consciousness that, according to Nagel, limits our ability to do so.
It’s not enough that I try to imagine what it’s like to have wings and terrible eyesight, what it’s like to fly over a river at night and catch bugs with my mouth, or to imagine what it’s like to emit audio signals and pick up their echo. “In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far),” Nagel writes, “it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind.”
Nor is the problem, Nagel claims, limited to the relationship between humans and animals. 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 it was hoped the number of rings on its otolith, a kind of calcareous organ of the inner ear, would establish its age once and for all. Unfortunately, no otolith was ever found; perhaps the tiny crystalline structure had disappeared when the body decomposed. The sediment at the bottom of the well was dug up and sifted through,
but the otolith wasn’t there either. Somehow, the eel managed to cheat humanity one last time, even if it had grown too weary to cheat death.
REGARDLESS OF WHICH ASPECTS OF THE LEGEND OF THE BRANTEVIK Eel are true, it’s a fact that eels can live for a very long time. The oldest eel whose age has more or less been verified was caught in Helsingborg in 1863 by a twelve-year-old boy named Fritz Netzler. The eel was a couple of years old at the time, thin, and no more than fifteen inches long. It had arrived from its long journey from the Sargasso Sea, transformed from glass eel to yellow eel, and had wandered into Öresund and up a waterway called Hälsobäcken, which at the time ran straight through a park in central Helsingborg. There, before the eel had made it more than a few hundred yards up the waterway, Fritz Netzler caught it. He named the eel Putte and kept it in a small tank in the apartment in Helsingborg where he lived. The eel grew older, but not much bigger. The years passed and the eel remained in a juvenile state, thin and just over fifteen inches long.
Putte was about twenty when Fritz Netzler’s father, whose name was also Fritz and who was a doctor, died, and for a while the eel and its captor were separated. Putte and his tank moved from family to family in Helsingborg. He might also have lived in Lund for a while.
He was nearly forty when in 1899, he moved back in with Fritz Netzler Jr., who by then was a man and a doctor just like his father. Putte was still thin and just over fifteen inches long, and after so many years in tiny tanks in dark flats, his eyes had grown disproportionately large, just like the Brantevik Eel’s. It’s said Putte would eat out of Fritz’s hand. Meat or fish; his favorite was calf liver cut into small pieces.
Eventually, the eel outlived its captor. Putte was nearing his seventieth birthday when Fritz Netzler Jr. died in 1929, and after a few years with yet another family, he was finally donated to the Helsingborg Museum in 1939. That’s where Putte eventually passed away, at ostensibly eighty-eighty years old, in 1948.
Putte was stuffed and is today kept in storage at the museum. According to its catalog, the item consists of “Putte the eel in tank with lid, containing eel in fluid and rocks.” The tank is twenty inches long. Putte himself, in taxidermized form, is just under fifteen.
And so Putte the eel likely lived for almost ninety years and was still, in human terms, more or less a teenager. Because, like the Brantevik Eel, Putte wasn’t just an eel that remained remarkably small; he never underwent the last metamorphosis that would have turned him into a sexually mature silver eel. Which points to another mysterious aspect of the eel question: How does the eel know to initiate its various transformations? How does the eel know when life is coming to an end and the Sargasso Sea is beckoning? What kind of voice lets it know it’s time to leave?
It can’t just be random. Because apparently the eel is capable of suspending its own aging, no matter how long it lives for. When circumstances require it, its final metamorphosis is postponed indefinitely. If the eel isn’t free to go to the Sargasso Sea, it won’t undergo the final metamorphosis, won’t turn into a silver eel, and won’t become sexually mature. Instead, it waits, patiently, for decades, until the opportunity presents itself or it runs out of strength. When life doesn’t turn out the way it was supposed to, an eel can put everything on hold, and postpone dying almost indefinitely.
When a scientific study in Ireland in the 1980s caught a large number of sexually mature silver eels, it was discovered that the age of the fish—which were on their way to the Sargasso Sea and thus in the final stage of life—varied significantly. The youngest was only eight and the oldest fifty-seven. They were all in the same developmental phase, the same relative age, if you will, and yet the oldest was seven times older than the youngest.
You have to ask yourself: How does a creature like that perceive time?
To humans, the experience of time is inevitably tied to the process of aging, and aging follows a fairly predictable chronological trajectory. Humans don’t undergo metamorphoses in the technical sense; we change but remain the same. Overall health can, of course, vary among individuals; we can suffer illness or injury, but generally speaking, we know roughly when to expect a new phase; our biological clock is not particularly flexible; we know when we are younger and when we grow older.
The eel, by contrast, becomes something else each time it transforms, and each stage of its life cycle can be drawn out or condensed depending on where it is and what the circumstances are. Its aging seems tied to something other than time.
Does a creature like the eel even experience time as a process, or more like a state? Does it, simply put, have a different way of measuring time? Oceanic time, perhaps?
Rachel Carson claimed that in the sea, deep down where the eel spawns and dies, time moves differently from how it does for us. Down there, time has somehow outlived its usefulness and is irrelevant to the experience of reality. Down there, our regular chronological measurements don’t exist. There is neither night nor day, winter nor summer; everything unfolds at its own pace. Rachel Carson wrote her book Under the Sea-Wind about the abyss 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.
14
Setting 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.
The Book of Eels Page 12