THE DARKROOM: The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating--A Book Review

"My bed was an island within the desolate sea of my room. Yet I knew that there were other people homebound from illness or injury, scattered here and there throughout rural towns and cities around the world. And as I lay there, I felt a connection to all of them. We, too, were a colony of hermits." pg. 84

"There is a certain depth of illness that is piercing in its isolation; the only rule is uncertainty, and the only movement is the passage of time. One cannot bear to live through another loss of function, and sometimes friends and family cannot bear to watch. An unspoken, unbridgeable divide may widen. Even if you are still who you were, you cannot actually be who you are. Sometimes the people you know well withdrawal, and then even the person you know as yourself begins to change." pg. 131

Elisabeth Tova Bailey is a fine writer; a much better writer than I will probably ever be. And her book, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, has gotten rave reviews and even won a few awards. And it is a big hit with the folks who frequent the likes of the Good Reads website and other book-related websites and forums. It came highly recommended to me from both people I trust and from internet sources that I look to for book suggestions. And all of this brought about a grand amount of anticipation on my part to get my hands on this little book. I was so sure that I would open up the covers and begin reading an account account akin to Thoreau's Walden or Muir's 1000 Mile Walk to the Gulf. But to my great avail, sadly it was nothing of the sort.

"Slime is the sticky essence of a gastropod's soul, the medium for everything in its life: locomotion, defense, healing, courting, mating, and egg protection. Nearly one-third of my snail's daily energy went into slime production. And rather than making a single batch of "all-purpose" slime, my snail had a species specific recipe for each of these needs and for different parts of its body. It could adjust the ingredients, just as a good cook would, to meet a particular occasion. And in a catastrophic accident in which a snail is squashed, it can release a flood of lifesaving, medicinal mucus packed with antioxidants and regenerative properties." pg. 71

I wanted so badly to like this book because one of my fondest memories is of spending a week hiking the Foothills Trail in South Carolina with my youngest sister and mom and taking the time one afternoon to watch a snail eat. It was one of the most amazing things I have ever watched. And I was hoping Bailey's account would put the feelings I experienced from watching the wild snail eat into words. And I really didn't want to say or write a post saying I didn't like it because of how much I wanted to like this book. Each night I would read a few more pages hoping to come upon the section in the book that would really change things for me. I was waiting and waiting for that magic paragraph where Bailey would take the emotions I felt and turn them into prose, but the last page came and went and I never got to that paragraph. I do hope you will read it and tell me why you liked it and how I missed the goodness of it. I may, as I have done in the past, read it again in an attempt to find the goodness in it. It took me three full readings of, The Catcher and the Rye, before I saw what Salinger was trying to really say. I have tried to explain many times that I am an amateur reader at best and this may be the occasion where you truly see that it is the truth.

There were two items I disliked in the book and which seemed to ruin it for me. The first was that Bailey writes as the stereotypical cold and distanced scientist when it comes to both the snail and her illness. It felt at time as if I were reading a science textbook, but it wasn't the relaying of facts that gave this impression, it was rather the way the writing aside from a few high points, felt void of emotion. I did not expect there to be sappiness on every page or for it to be a great expose of sentimentalism, but I did want there to be the emotionalism that I've come to love and admire from naturalists like this quote from John Muir,

“No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movements of water, or gardening - still all is Beauty!”

But this type of emotion seemed to be void from this book and Bailey wrote as one detached from both nature and from her own personal illness that forced her into the "lonely isolation" she writes from. Her descriptions of the snail and her observations of the snail do contain emotion at times and she even seems amazed at the actions of the snail, but it just seems to be missing something that I felt it needed. It could also just be me. Maybe you will grab the book, a warm cup of coffee or a cold limeade, and settle in for an afternoon of reading and maybe you will feel what she was trying to get across. I just did not feel it.

And the second item I found in this book that really kept getting to me was Bailey's constant mentioning of or her dogged dedication to the "evolution" of the snail species as well as the evolution of all species. I fully understand that the theory of evolution, though invalidated by truly scientific evidence (observable, measurable repeatable evidence), is believed by most all people, especially academics. I know this. I teach science for a living. I use both Christian and Secular textbooks. I have been to museums all over the country and they are full of the "facts" of many people's grand theories about how things might have come about. I can usually stand a small bit of an author's obligatory need to mention his or her dedication to the evolution of all things, but Bailey seems to mention it at every turn. And what I found to be most distracting to me was that she would either mention something amazing about a snail; whether it be it's slime, or eating habits, or ability to go dormant, or their odd and varied reproduction processes. And she would either precede or conclude these true facts about snails with a conjecture of some other scientist's theory about something involving evolutionary theory and the chanced development of something that makes the snail perfect for what it is. And this for me is pure lunacy of which it is hard for me accept. It is not the existence or presence of a theory that is different from one I hold to be true that seems crazy to me, but rather it is the blind dedication to something that doesn't need to be true in order for something to be seen as amazing. Bailey could have written an account of her observations of her snail and never mentioned how it may have evolved and it would have been a good and truly scientific account. I just kept finding it amazing that she would write of something so intricate and then would attribute it to chance adaptation and mutations.

I would have let this dedication to evolution to go and just chalked it to being a book involving aspects of science that was written after the 1960's until I read her epilogue where she describes in detail both the acquiring of her snail knowledge and more aspects about the snail species and of her illness. She writes of genetic mutations that once acquired in her body wreaked havoc on her and in her poor body. And this is where I have lost patience or even tolerance with writers, speakers, scientists, etc. Evolution, though parts of it being found true and possible at times, is a scientific theory. Theories, by definition, lack the evidence in order to be made into laws, which also by definition, are true in every aspect as long as certain perimeters exist. However, nowadays, it seems that one either believes evolution to be wholeheartedly true or they are ignorant and foolish. It would seem crazy if this were felt about some other theory, say something economic like Keynesian economics or say whether or not Bigfoot exists. It would seem ludicrous for whole groups of people to force those around them to believe in something where there exists more than one field of thought about an item and no true science or proof for the belief. And yet, with evolution, this is this par for the course. And what frustrates to no end at times is if one truly takes the time, as Bailey did, to observe nature, it seems almost hard for me to comprehend how one could throw all the brilliance and intricate complexity that is found in even one square foot of nature to the winds of chance and mutation, but Bailey, as well as most writers and thinkers today do this.

Now, please do not read this as a demand for them to just believe as I believe because I will not do as they do. I do not expect them to observe the nature that surrounds them and then write a brilliant piece on how Genesis 1 & 2 are real and they have proved the existence of the triune God by watching a snail eat. I do not want this, but I do expect for them to think and truly focus on the images they are seeing and put that up against the knowledge and facets of evolution that they know to be true and those that are merely the thoughts of men. I do not see how one could explain the perfect complexities of snail slime/mucus and then attribute it all to perfect adaptation or genetic mutation over long periods of time while being forced to lie in a bed because of a genetic mutation that has almost taken everything that she holds dear from her. Knowing full well with enormous amounts of true scientific evidence, the observable, measurable, and repeatable type of evidence, that mutations and adaptations only leave an organism with no new traits and mutations at best leave organisms with odd, seemingly unuseful traits, say like a dog with two colored eyes or a person who is double-jointed or in the worst case scenario, the mutations being terminal. The mutations don't aid in their survival but rather take away from it or end up being a non-factor.

I know that I am beating an old, decomposed and long dead horse, but it just seems odd to me and a bit tragic to read an author, like Bailey, who is a very fine writer, and read several pages about how a snail's reproduction processes and how they are hermaphrodites and how this allows them to regenerate their species in a full variety of ways depending on the current environmental conditions and then get to watch the whole reproductive process take place and then chalk it all up to a theory where no true evidence exits while watching real, true science taking place in front of your very own eyes that sit in your ravaged body that is being torn apart from a pathogen and its mutations and say that the snail developed these amazing and awe-inspiring reproductive processes through millions of years of constant adaptation and genetic mutation. It just doesn't add up to me and the longer I watch nature and the longer I observe even the most minute aspects of the world around me, the harder it becomes for me to understand this line of thought.