“Illness isolates; the isolated become invisible; the invisible become forgotten. But the snail… the snail kept my spirit from evaporating.”
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is a unique and beautiful story of Elizabeth Tova Bailey’s observations of a snail that made a home on her nightstand. A mysterious illness drastically changes Elizabeth’s life, keeping her bedridden and detached from everything that once brought familiarity and comfort. The lack of mobility results in isolation and lengthy days, with a common woodland snail as an unexpected form of fascination and interest.
“We are all hostages of time. We each have the same number of minutes and hours to live within a day, yet to me it didn’t feel equally doled out. My illness brought me such an abundance of time that time was nearly all I had. My friends had so little time that I often wished I could give them what time I could not use. It was perplexing how in losing health I had gained something so coveted but to so little purpose.”
With the illness, Elizabeth lacked the strength to hold a book and was sensitive to the noisiness of a television, so the little snail was a welcome and surprising new companion. The book is incredibly well written and a provides a nice, quiet journey. The focus is mainly on the snail and the author’s observations, along with everything she learns about the snail from her research. Elizabeth’s illness and other people are more in the background, which results in a very powerful story as a whole. One that is a beautiful message of finding connection and hope in the midst of incredible loss.
“Survival often depends on a specific focus: A relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility. Or something more ephemeral: the way the sun passes through the hard seemingly impenetrable glass of a window and warms the blanket, or how the wind, invisible but for its wake, is so loud one can hear it through the insulated walls of a house.”
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