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. Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility. In paying such tender and total attention to the snail’s life, she learns to pay attention to life itself at the focal point of the living moment, which is the only share of eternity we have. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)Ĭaptive in her bedroom, she comes to see the snail’s home as a microcosm of existence - its terrarium an entire world, its miniature movements an ongoing odyssey, emanating what the great naturalist Henry Beston celebrated as the sacredness of smallness. Goldthread - aptly named for its colorful roots - holding its trio of delicate, paw-shaped leaves high on a thin stem partridgeberry, with its round, dark green leaves and its small, bright red berries, which lasted for months the larger, waxy leaves of checkerberry many kinds of moss small polypody ferns a tiny spruce tree a rotting birch log and a piece of old bark encrusted with multicolored lichen. Having once made a living as a professional gardener, Bailey takes vivifying delight in populating the tiny botanical garden, listing out plants she doesn’t know whether she will ever again see in the wild: In a dusty corner of the barn next to the studio where she is bedridden, her caretaker finds a discarded glass aquarium that soon becomes a lavish terrarium filled with native plants from the snail’s woodland home. Art by Ping Zhu from The Snail with the Right HeartĪt first indignant about what she could possibly do with a bivalve pet when she can hardly sit up, Bailey grows quickly fascinated by the creature’s feeding habits, its sleep rhythms, its gentle insistence on survival. Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.Īnd then the blur is suddenly interrupted by a peculiar gift: One day, a friend brings her a pot of violets from the nearby forest, housing a single Neohelix albolabris - a common woodland snail. Millennia after Seneca contemplated the balance of time spent, saved, and wasted and a decade before Zadie Smith considered the pandemic as a lens on time, Bailey observes: She slips into the time-warp of illness - the way it has of making an eternity of a single moment while letting entire days vanish. Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties. (Available as a print.)Īt thirty-four, while traveling through Europe, Bailey was felled by severe neurological symptoms - the result of a mysterious viral or bacterial invasion that savaged her mitochondria, vanquishing youth’s sense of invincibility, subverting the common faith in modern medicine: In and out of hospitals as treatment after treatment failed to help, she was eventually left pinned to her bed at home, the distance to the bookshelf across the room an expedition demanding a whole day’s energies. Not long after I wrote an existentially hued children’s book about a snail, a friend sent me Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s slender, splendid memoir The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating ( public library) - the record of an uncommon experiment in learning that the smaller the aperture of attention, the more wonder rushes in. Anything you lavish with attention will become a mirror, a portal, a lens on the meaning of life - a dandelion, a muskrat, a mountain.
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