The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
This spring, I re-read a tiny book that is simply beautiful. A few years ago a friend wrote, “You must read Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s book, “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.” Intrigued by the title and a reviewer’s description of the book as “the earthly adventures of a woman and a gastropod,” I ordered it immediately.
Viruses are embedded into the very fabric of all life. - Luis P. Villarreal
The author of the book had suffered from a flulike virus that within weeks caused a dysfunction of her autonomic nervous system. After successive severe relapses, she was forced to move from her rustic 1830s Maine farmhouse with hand-hewn beams and squareheaded nails overhead to a small studio apartment with stark white walls. Barely able to move on her own, Bailey missed the golden-brown hues of the overhead beams with their “knots that told a history of branches and long-ago wildness” that she had studied for countless hours in the earlier years of her illness when she still lived in her rural farmhouse.
One day, a friend placed a pot of wild violets on Bailey’s nightstand. In the pot was a small snail that the friend had found on a walk in the woods. Initially feeling burdened by the tiny mollusk that she was incapable of caring for, Bailey grew to consider the snail her companion and friend. In her later book, she notes how the snail, when removed from its own natural environment, gradually came out of its shell and began to eat, sleep and reproduce.
The author writes, “Each evening the snail awoke and, with an astonishing amount of poise, moved gracefully to the rim of the pot and peered over, surveying, once again, the strange country that lay ahead. Pondering its circumstance with a regal air, as if from the turret of a castle, it waved its tentacles first this way and that, as though responding to a distant melody.”
One morning after Bailey awakens to find a small square hole eaten out of an envelope on her nightstand, it occurred to her that the snail might like something more familiar to eat. She began feeding it the dry petals from flower arrangements that friends brought as gifts. She then describes the sounds she began to hear.
“I put some of the withered blossoms in a dish beneath the pot of violets. The snail was awake. It made its way down the side of the pot and investigated the offering with great interest and then began to eat one of the blossoms. A petal started to disappear at a barely discernible rate. I listened carefully. I could hear it eating.”
As I slowly digested each page and chapter of Bailey’s book, I felt myself shrinking down in size as if entering the small, confined space from which the author observed her tiny snail’s anatomy, decision making, and locomotion. I recalled essayist Anne Fadiman’s reaction to the author’s observations of her small pet. “As I read Bailey’s descriptions of how her snail moved…I felt myself shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, like Alice in Wonderland, until I was snail-sized myself.”
Eventually, the snail begins to explore, pressing us to engage in our own exploration of the heart and spirit. Inspired by the tiny snail, I decided to set out myself in soft rain toward our creek where my feet brushed masses of naturalized daylilies, wild Sweet William, stands of May Apple, and lacey native ferns dancing in filtered light across the woodland floor. Observing my every footstep, I searched for morel mushrooms—the favorite food of Neohelix albolabris, the common woodland snail.
Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s observations of a humble snail are written from a single year of the nearly two decades of her illness. As sparsely and beautifully constructed as a Japanese haiku, the book reveals a courageous journey of survival and resilience as quietly as a prayer.
The natural world is the refuge of the spirit…richer even than human imagination. - Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia, 1984