[[../writing/Bibliography]] Svensson, Patrik. _The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World_. First edition. New York: Ecco, 2020. Patrik Svensson, *The Book of Eels* Eels have turned out to be not only uncommonly difficult to observe – due to their strange life cycle, their shyness, their metamorphoses, and their roundabout approach to reproduction – but also secretive in a way that comes across as deliberate and preordained. Even when successful observation is possible, even when you get really close, the eel seems to pull away. Given the inordinate amount of time so many people have spent studying and trying to understand the eel, we should, simply put, know more than we do. That we don't is something of a mystery. Zoologists call it 'the eel question.' – p. 20, Patrik Svensson, *The Book of Eels* ^ce207b > [The eel] has become a symbol of what is sometimes referred to as the metaphysical… It is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with what exists outside, or beyond, the objective nature, beyond what we can observe and describe with the help of our senses… It is, rather, an attempt to describe the true nature of things, the *whole* of reality… I like to think that's why the eel has continued to be a source of fascination. Because that intersection between knowledge and faith, where knowledge is incomplete and therefore allowed to contain both fact and traces of myth and imagination, is compelling. Because even people who trust in science and an orderly natural world sometimes want to leave a small, small opening for the unknowable." – p. 24-25, Patrik Svensson, *The Book of Eels* ^aad60e > [Eels] were, if anything, a reminder of how little a person can really know, about eels or other people, about where you come from and where you're going. > p. 32 Eels have no visible sex organs until they need them. Its metamorphoses are not just superficial adaptations to new life conditions. They're existential. An eel becomes what it needs to be when the time is right. – p. 51, Patrik Svensson, *The Book of Eels* ^55695f I want to believe that the mystery draws us in because some aspect of it is familiar. The origin of the eel and its long journey are, despite their strangeness, things we might relate to, even recognize: its protracted drifting on the ocean currents in an effort to leave home, and its even longer and more difficult way back – the things we are prepared to go through to return home. The Sargasso Sea is the end of the world, but it's also the beginning of everything. That's the big reveal.… When I held them in my hands and tried to look into their eyes, I was close to something that transcended the limits of the known universe. That is how the eel question draws you in. The eels' mystique becomes an echo of the questions all people carry within them: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?…The time willow leaves drifting on the ocean currents in one direction and the fat, fully matured silver eels, their course stubbornly set for the Sargasso Sea, swimming in the other. Year after year, they continued their mysterious journey away from home and back again, unperturbed by world wars and human curiosity… The eels didn't care about the eel question, and why would they? To them, it was never a question in the first place. – p. 73-74, Patrik Svensson, *The Book of Eels* ^37a558 > The small village of Aguinaga, located on the river a few miles inland, has only six hundred residents but no fewer than five companies that catch and sell glass eels. Here, too, professional knowledge is ancient and inherited. The glass eels come in on the tide on cold nights, under a full or crescent moon and preferably when the sky is slightly overcast. They float near the surface in massive shoals, like enormous, silvery tangles of seaweed; the fishermen glide slowly back and forth in their boats; the light from the lanterns at their prows is reflected in the living blanket of fish. They lift the glass eels out by hand, with round nets attached to long rods. > p. 89-90 This is the great paradox, which has also become part of the eel question of our time: in order to understand the eel, we have to have an interest in it, and to have an interest in it, we have to continue to hunt, kill, and eat it (at least according to some of the people who, after all, are closer than most to the eel). An eel is never allowed to simply be an eel. It's never allowed to just be. Thus, it has also become a symbol of our complex relationship with all the other forms of life on this planet. – p. 95, Patrik Svensson, *The Book of Eels* ^6bdf61 The eel can teach us, Tom Crick argues. It tells us something about the curiosity of humankind, about our unquenchable need to seek the truth and understand where everything comes from and what it means. But also about our need for mystery. "Now there is much the eel can tell us about curiosity– rather more indeed than curiosity can inform us of the eel." – p. 115, Patrik Svensson, *The Book of Eels*, quoting 1983 novel *Waterland* by Graham Swift, New York: Poseidon Press, 1983 > We all came from the sea once, and therefore anyone wishing to understand life on this planet has to first understand the sea. Much later, in [Rachel Caron's]… book, entitled *The Sea around Us*, she explained this insight… > When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal – each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements of sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years ago, when a remote ancestor having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the water of the sea. > Thus we are all created from water, we all come from our own mysterious Sargasso Seas. > p. 134-135, quoting Rachel Caron, *The Sea Around Us*, New York: Oxford University Press, 1951 In the third and last part of the book, [*Under the Sea-Wind*], we are introduced to the eel. It goes without saying that Rachel Carson couldn't have found a better representative for the compelling complexity of the sea. She explains in a letter to her publisher: "I know many people shudder at the sight of an eel. To me (and I believe to anyone who knows its story) to see an eel is something like meeting a person who has traveled to the most remote and wonderful places of the earth; in a flash I see a vivid picture of the strange places that eel has been – places which I, being merely human, can never visit." …A particular female eel, ten years old, which she called Anguilla. Anguilla has live all her life in the lake, ever since she arrived as a small glass eel. She has hidden in the reeds during the day and gone hunting at night "for like all eels, she was a lover of darkness." She has hibernated in the soft, warm mud of the lake bed, "for like all eels she was a lover of warmth." Anguilla is a creature who feels and experiences, who remembers her past and knows suffering and love. Who eventually years. Because when autumn comes, something is different about Anguilla. She suddenly longs to leave, a vague, wordless longing, and one dark night, she sets her course for the lake's outlet, and pushes on down rivers and brooks, the full two hundred miles to the open ocean. We follow her into the sea through obstacles and trials, toward the Sargasso. Down into the depths, toward the abysses that are the "ocean basins," far down in the shadows where the water flows, "frigid water, deliberate and inexorable as time itself." And as Anguilla and all the other mature eels disappear, from view and human knowledge, our focus shifts to the tiny, weightless willow leaves, "the only testament that remained of the parent eels" – p. 137-139, Patrik Svensson, *The Book of Eels* ^c6be02 (describing the fyke net) It was about fifteen feet long, considerably wider at one end and tapering toward a point at the other, and it had two mesh wings by the opening that could be extended out to either side, making it at least ten feel wide. I pictured it on the bottom of the stream, catching everything carried into it by the current. It would be full to the brim with fish. This was something other than setting spillers. This was something that upset the balance of power. With this trap, we would no longer be temporary, unobtrusive guests in the constant cycle of life and activity in the stream; we would be almost omnipotent. It was as thought we could now intervene in the fundamental order of things. – p. 159, Patrik Svensson, *The Book of Eels* ^053d82 There is no consensus on how significant it would really be to find a mature eel in the Sargasso Sea. Some scientists feel it's beside the point, since we already know that's where the eels are going. Others claim our knowledge of the eel's life cycle can't be considered complete until someone has observed an eel at its spawning ground. To these scientists, the elusive eel is something of a scientific holy grail. – p. 178-179, Patrik Svensson, *The Book of Eels* ^c7a832 The eel is vastly popular on Japanese dinner tables and the subject of a multimillion dollar industry. If it could be farmed, the way salmon is, for instance, it would mean a lot more eel at a fraction of the cost. Consequently, the market is prepared to invest large sums in research that could make farming possible. – p. 182, Patrik Svensson, *The Book of Eels* > there's a simple explanation as to why a dosing rod moves… called the ideomotor phenomenon. What happens is that a type of minute muscle movement is executed without the conscious intent of the person in question. Rather than deliberate acts, these movements are the expression of an idea, a feeling, or a perception… In other words, a person holding a dowsing rod unconsciously causes it to strike the ground through tiny, barely perceptible movements. But for it to work, the person has to have an idea or preconceived notion, an unconscious will leading him or her to a certain spot. Not necessarily the right spot, whether the goal is to find water or metals, but to a specific spot nonetheless. What does the unconscious find there, when the branch tugs our hands down toward the ground? > p. 188-189 > What the IUCN primarily bases its assessment on… [is] the number of glass eels that turn up in Europe in the spring. A lot more is known about this, and it's these data that suggest the situation is absolutely catastrophic. All reliable counts indicate the number of newly arrived glass eels in Europe today is only about 5 percent of what it was the end of the 1970s… This is the basis fro the IUCN's decision to categorize the European eel, *Anguilla anguilla*, as critically endangered… The eel could potentially disappear, in the foreseeable future, and not just from our sign and our realm of knowledge, but from the world. > p. 205 ^82af14 The closer humanity gets to the eel, and the more it's exposed to the influence of our modern living, the faster it dies…The eel is struggling with disease, and more so now than before… What we also know is that the eel is particularly sensitive to pollution… Some modern threats that researchers consider the most serious, and which are unquestionably caused by humans, are the various physical impediments to the eel's migrations. Locks, sluices, and other artificial means of water regulation can keep young eels from swimming up waterways and mature eels from reaching the sea. And hydroelectric plants, beneficial as they may be for the greater environment, are death to eels. The dams' turbines kill scores of silver eels on their way toward the Atlantic… Particularly devastating to the eel's complex life cycle has been the fishing for glass eels… A threat that's more difficult to illustrate, but which may nevertheless be the most serious, is climate change. It's an indisputable fact that when the climate changes, both the direction and the strength of the great ocean currents change, which seems to be impeding the eel's migration significantly." – p. 207-210, Patrik Svensson, *The Book of Eels* ^396d9e