Aesop and the Brothers Grimm would have loved The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. For two decades, its author, Elisabeth Tova Bailey, suffered from withering maladies — chronic fatigue syndrome and an acquired mitochondrial disease that paralyzed her skeletal muscles. A refugee from her farmhouse, she lived in a studio apartment where a caretaker and loved ones tended to her needs. She could barely lift her head.
One day a friend gave her a present — an acorn-sized, white-lipped forest snail, a neohelix albolabris to be precise, one of more than 35,000 known snail species. Some specimens are smaller than this “o.” At first the intrepid gastropod explored a flowerpot. “With astonishing poise, it moved gracefully,” writes Bailey.
Gastropod means stomach-foot. One of a snail’s many amazing abilities, the author would learn, is that it drinks water through its base, or foot, along which it slides on pedal mucus, a sheet of super-sticky slime.
At first Bailey didn’t like the snail. “It was not of much interest, and . . . the responsibility — especially for a snail, something so uncalled for — was overwhelming,” she wrote. With little else do to, though, she soon tracked its daily expeditions. She got hooked. A friend created a terrarium for the beastie inside a rectangular fish tank.
Bailey realized her new companion was a “fearless and tireless explorer.” And she grew aware of something she and the snail had in common: “The snail and I were both living in altered landscapes not of our choosing; I figured we shared a sense of loss and displacement.”
During the year that followed, the snail’s exploits gave her hope. “Illness isolates; the isolated become invisible; the invisible become forgotten,” she observed. “But the snail . . . the snail kept my spirit from evaporating. Between the two of us, we were a society all our own, and that kept isolation at bay.”
Bailey found that her companion lived a life of purpose. “Setting off on an expedition, its tentacles stretched out in anticipation, the snail appeared confident about where it was going,” she writes. Over one hour, she marveled as the snail “meticulously ate an entire purple petal for dinner.” She could hear it when it nibbled celery.
Aristotle noticed that snail teeth are “sharp, and small, and delicate.” Bailey’s mollusk had 2,640 chompers, though how they were counted she does not say. Arrayed like a rasp, they did the snail’s corn-on-the-cob style “minuscule munching.” (One of this book’s delights is the way in which the author weaves in lore from scholars and authors who range from Darwin and haiku poet Kobayashi Issa to thriller writer Patricia Highsmith.)
“If life mattered to the snail and the snail mattered to me, it meant something in my life mattered, so I kept on,” Bailey concludes. Life did indeed mean something to her companion, so much so that the snail laid eggs. Being possessed of both sexes, snails can create new life independent of a mate. Still, when it comes to pairing off, snails know something about that, too. “The snail is, in fact, a very model lover,” wrote a Victorian naturalist whom Bailey quotes. “It will spend hours . . . paying attention the most assiduous to the object of [its] affections.” Their leisurely, lascivious clasping may last seven hours, trysts documented in many pulse-pounding (though slow-going) YouTube videos.
But that is not the sauciest aspect of snail-mating. Romans, thanks perhaps to Julius Caesar’s adventures in Gaul, fancied snail antipasto and kept snail ranches. They noticed something fantastic about how they mated. During foreplay, snails fire calcium carbonate darts at each other, many of which have four finlike blades. Malacologists, i.e. snail experts, believe these harpoons contain a pheromone that boosts sperm success rates. Though Bailey does not say so, one wonders whether this fact sparked the notion of Cupid’s arrow.
Bailey’s snail laid 118 fertilized eggs in all, which it buried in caches. Whether these self-originated or came from stored sperm, the writer never knew. Then she watched the snail tend its eggs. It put them in its mouth to bathe them in moistening slime. Such is a snail’s love.
“I thought of the terrarium’s limited space, and how the snail had seemed content as it ate, explored, and fulfilled a life cycle,” she writes. “This gave me hope that perhaps I, too, could still fulfill dreams, even if they were changed dreams.”
Sentences like that are one reason why I love deep thin books — books that can be read in one or two sittings and impart life lessons, like A Christmas Carol; Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich; Man’s Search for Meaning by death-camp survivor Viktor Frankl; Animal Farm; and Life of the Beloved by the Dutch priest Henri Nouwen. Such literary confections often lure readers into their embrace by their dreamy simplicity. Like a fable or fairy tale, they teach moral lessons free of a thick tome’s slog.
Bailey shares a spiritual kinship with St. Francis of Assisi, who saw God’s grace in animals, even in the lowly worms he rescued from hooves and wagon wheels. Molluscan mysteries would have fascinated him. Bailey tells us snails “see” the world through smell. They cannot hear and have only primitive vision. “The snail’s two independent tentacle-noses give it a kind of stereoscopic sense of smell. . . . [It] sweep[s] them slowly back and forth and up and down, just as a boat under way in the dark swings its searchlights about to look for navigational aids.” She compares a snail’s sensory world to that of the deaf and blind Helen Keller, who said that for her “everywhere the river of touch is joined by the brooks of odor-perception.”
Finally, the time came for Bailey to return the snail to the woods. One thinks of the end of Charlotte’s Web, when the wind wafts away the spider’s hatchlings. Life ends, and life goes on. Bailey kept one baby for a new pet. Her illness persisted many more years, yet she writes that she would always remember her first snail.
“Naturally solitary and slow paced, it had entertained and taught me, and was beautiful to watch as it glided silently along, leading me through a dark time into a world beyond that of my own species,” she writes. “The snail had been a true mentor; its tiny existence had sustained me.”
This humblest of creatures comforted Bailey, gave her courage to endure. “Survival,” she writes, “often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility.” We all face trials in our lives, and this little book can inspire us to inch forward toward better days.
George Spencer is a freelance writer who lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.