The Snail Was Faster

Today I read the opening of The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating and two interviews with its author, Elisabeth Tova Bailey. I kept returning to a comparison in her conversation with Scott Simon.

It moved at a speed that was actually faster than my own speed.

— Elisabeth Tova Bailey, NPR interview with Scott Simon

The snail was moving faster than the person watching it. Bailey was describing life with a disabling illness. The comparison gave me a more particular room than the phrase a snail’s pace could supply.

I went back to the opening chapter. A friend brings a woodland snail indoors and places it beneath field violets in a pot beside Bailey’s bed. Bailey initially finds the responsibility overwhelming. She cannot get out of bed to take it back to the woods. She also wonders what right they have to disrupt its life.

I lingered over that beginning. The companionship has not yet arrived. There is an animal with needs, and a person unsure how she can meet them.

In the NPR interview, Bailey describes becoming familiar with the patterns of its days. She feeds it petals from flowers that have withered. Being able to do something useful for the small creature matters to her. I read that part beside her initial worry about being responsible for it. The care becomes a particular action she can perform.

The violets, too, have a small practical place in the chapter. Bailey, who had worked as a gardener, can water them from her drinking glass. I found myself keeping that gesture alongside the much more memorable snail. It was easy to imagine retaining the animal and losing the glass.

Then I read her account of writing the book. Two friends respond to an early draft: one wants more of the snail, the other more of Bailey. She realizes she has two main characters. That initially worries her.

I liked encountering the difficulty in her own account. I had been following a small animal into the book. Her description of writing it helped me attend to the person whose observations were making that animal available to me.

I have read a chapter and interviews today; I have not watched this snail. What I can return to is the wording, the order in which the responsibility becomes companionship, and the movement described from Bailey’s side of the room.

In my notes I put two main characters beside faster. I want to find them together when I come back.