The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson (best books to read for self development TXT) 📕

Dad coaxed and pulled, bit his lip and cursed helplessly. He knew there were only two ways out of this situation and that both had its losers. Either he managed to dislodge the eel and pull it up, or he could cut the line and leave the eel where it was, tangled in the reeds with the hook and heavy sinker like a ball and chain.

This time, there seemed to be no other option. Dad took a few steps to the side, trying a different angle, pulling so hard the nylon stretched like a violin string. Nothing worked.

“Nope, no luck,” he said at length and tugged as hard as he could, breaking the line in two with a loud snap.

“Let’s hope it makes it,” he said, and we moved on, climbing up and down the bank.

At the fifth spiller, Dad bent down and tentatively touched the line. Then he straightened up and stepped aside. “You want to take this one?” he said.

I grabbed the line and pulled on it gently and could immediately feel the strength that answered back. The same force that Dad had felt with just his fingertips. I had time to realize that the feeling was familiar, then I pulled a bit harder and the fish began to move. “It’s an eel,” I said out loud.

An eel never tries to rush, as a pike might; it prefers slithering sideways, which creates a kind of undulating resistance. It’s surprisingly strong for its size and a good swimmer, despite its tiny fins.

I reeled it in as slowly as I could, without letting the line slacken, as though savoring the moment. But it was a short line, and there were no reeds for this eel to hide in; before long, I pulled it out of the water and saw its shiny yellowish-brown body twisting in the early-morning light. I tried to grab it behind its head, but it was virtually impossible to hold. It wrapped itself around my arm like a snake, up past my elbow; I could feel its strength like a static force more than movement. If I dropped it now, it would escape through the grass and back into the water before I could get a secure hold.

In the end, we got the hook out and Dad filled the bucket with water from the stream. I slipped the eel in, and it immediately started swimming around and around the inside; Dad put his hand on my shoulder, said it was a beauty. We moved on to the next spiller, stepping lightly up the bank. And I got to carry the bucket.

3Aristotle and the Eel Born of Mud

There are circumstances that force us to choose what to believe. The eel is one such circumstance. If we choose to believe Aristotle, all eels are born out of mud. They simply appear, as though out of thin air, in the sediments at the bottom of the sea. In other words, they’re not created by other eels reproducing, by the union of reproductive organs and the fertilization of an egg.

Most fish, Aristotle wrote in the fourth century BCE, do, of course, lay eggs and breed. But the eel, he explained, is an exception. It is neither female nor male. It neither lays eggs nor mates. Eels do not give life to other eels. The spark of their life comes from somewhere else.

Aristotle suggested: Study a small pond with a tributary during a period of drought. When the water has evaporated and all the mud and muck has dried out, there is no life at all to be found on its hardened bottom. No life can be sustained there, much less a fish. But when the first rain comes and the water slowly returns, something incredible happens. Suddenly, the pond is once more full of eels. Suddenly, they’re just there. The rainwater brings them into existence.

Aristotle’s conclusion was that eels simply spring into being, like a slithering, enigmatic miracle.

Aristotle’s interest in eels is not entirely unexpected. He was interested in all forms of life. He was, of course, a thinker and theoretician and the man who, along with Plato, laid the foundation for all Western philosophy; but more than that, he was a scientist, at least by the standards of his age. It’s often said that Aristotle was the last person to “know it all”; or in other words, he was the last person to possess all the knowledge accumulated by humanity. And, among other things, he was ahead of his time when it came to observing and describing nature. His great work Historia Animalium (The History of Animals) was a first attempt, more than two thousand years before Linnaeus, to systematically categorize the animal kingdom. Aristotle observed and described a wide range of animals and what differentiated one from another. What they looked like, their body parts, coloring, and shape, how they lived and procreated, what they ate, their behaviors. Modern zoology grew out of the Historia Animalium; it remained a standard work in the natural sciences well into at least the seventeenth century.

Aristotle grew up in Stagira on Chalcidice: a peninsula ending in three narrow spits of land that jut out into the Aegean Sea, like a hand with three fingers. His life was one of privilege, with a father who was physician to the Macedonian king; he received a good education, and his father likely envisioned a future as a doctor for his son. But Aristotle was orphaned at a young age. His father died when he was about ten, his mother probably before that. He was taken in by a relative and at seventeen was sent to Athens to study at the finest school in antiquity, the Platonic Academy. A young man, alone in a strange city, curious and brilliant and with a passion for understanding the world that can be comprehended only by those whose own roots have been severed. He studied