Despite the contradictory feeling the eel arouses, up close, in its natural habitat, it gives the impression of being fairly jovial. It rarely puts on airs. It doesn’t cause a scene. It eats what its surroundings offer. It stays on the sidelines, demanding neither attention nor appreciation.
The eel is different from, for instance, the salmon, which sparkles and shimmers and makes wild dashes and daring jumps. The salmon comes off as a self-absorbed, vain fish. The eel seems more content. It doesn’t make a big deal of its existence.
And thus the eel is in a more fundamental way the opposite of the salmon. Both are migrating fish, both live in both fresh and saltwater and both undergo metamorphoses, but their life cycles differ in their most essential aspect.
The salmon is a so-called anadromous fish. It breeds in freshwater and its offspring swim out to sea after about a year, spending most of their lives there. After just a few years (the salmon clearly doesn’t possess the patience of the eel), the sexually mature salmon swims back up into fresh water and procreates.
The eel, for its part, makes a similar journey, but in the opposite direction. It is a so-called catadromous fish that lives its life in freshwater but breeds in saltwater.
Another, more subtle, indefinable detail also sets them apart. When the salmon wanders back up rivers and waterways, it always returns to the spot where its parents reproduced. Every salmon quite literally walks in its ancestors’ footsteps. Somehow, it knows that’s where it has to go. A salmon can live a free and unrestrained life in the sea, but eventually it will return to the place of its birth and join the community it was destined for. This means there are clear genetic differences among salmon populations from different waters. The salmon is, so to speak, biologically tied to its origin. It doesn’t allow existential transgressions.
The eel, of course, also finds its way back to its birthplace—Sargasso, ho!—but once it reaches this vast sea, it encounters eels from all across Europe and breeds indiscriminately. Origin to an eel is not about family or biological belonging, it’s simply a location. And afterward, when the tiny willow leaf drifts toward the coasts of Europe and turns into a glass eel, it chooses a waterway to wander up seemingly at random. Where it spends its adult life apparently has nothing to do with previous generations of eels; why a particular eel chooses a particular river remains a mystery. This means the genetic variation among eels in different parts of Europe is negligible. Every eel seeks its place in the world without a guide, without inheritance or heritage and existentially alone.
Perhaps the eel’s fate is easier to identify with than the salmon’s predestined lack of independence. And perhaps that’s why the eel, with its enigmatic remoteness, remains such a fascinating creature. Because it’s easier to relate to someone who has secrets, too, people who aren’t immediately obvious about who they are or where they’re from. The eel’s secretive side is also the secretive side of humans. And seeking your place in the world on your own: Surely that is, at the end of the day, the most universal of all human experiences?
OF COURSE, I’M ANTHROPOMORPHIZING THE EEL, FORCING IT TO BE more than it is or wishes to be, which may seem somewhat dubious. Attributing human characteristics to nonhuman creatures has been a common device in, for example, literature: fairy tales and fables about anthropomorphized animals thinking, talking, and feeling, animals demonstrating morality and acting according to a set of values. It’s also common in religion. Divine beings are given human form and characteristics in order to render them fathomable. The Old Norse Aesir were gods in human guise. Jesus was the son of God, but also a human. Only by being both could he represent a link between the worldly and the divine and become the savior of humankind. At heart, what’s at stake is identification, the ability to see something familiar in the unfamiliar and thus comprehend it and feel closer to it. An artist painting a portrait always puts part of him- or herself in it.
But within science, anthropomorphism has never been accepted. Science claims to deal with unadulterated objectivity, the truth that reveals itself only under the microscope. It attempts to describe the world as it is, not as it seems. An eel is not a person and cannot, therefore, be likened to one. Anyone with an objective, empiricist approach to knowledge could not bring himself to speak of animals that way. To experience the world as human belongs to us alone.
But when Rachel Carson wrote about the eel, that was, nevertheless, what she did. She anthropomorphized it. She described the eel as a sentient creature with feelings, an animal with memory and reason, which could be tormented by the tribulations it was destined for or could enjoy the bright side of life. And she had her reasons for doing so. When the history of science is one day summed up, Rachel Carson will stand out as one of the people who contributed most to our understanding of not only the eel but also the vast and complex ecosystem to which it inevitably belongs.
Rachel Carson was one of the twentieth century’s most prominent and influential marine biologists. She was first and foremost an expert in the ocean and its inhabitants; she wrote several groundbreaking books about marine life and eventually also became a pioneer of and icon to the burgeoning environmental movement. She was an extraordinary person in many ways.
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.
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.