The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World

by Patrik Svensson

Metaphysics is not necessarily concerned with God. It is, rather, an attempt to describe the true nature of things, the whole of reality. It claims there’s a difference between existence per se and the characteristics of that existence. It also claims the two questions are separate. The eel is. Existence comes first. But what it is, is a completely different matter.

I read that octopuses have myriad nerve endings in their limbs. There are in fact more nerve cells in an octopus’s limbs than in its brain, and each prehensile arm is also a nerve center, independent of the central brain in the animal’s head. It’s as though octopuses have small but autonomous brains at the end of each arm—which is to say that each one can act of its own volition. An octopus can, for example, both taste and feel with its arms, and some species even have photosensitive cells in their limbs, which give them some degree of vision. But what’s more; if you cut off an octopus’s arm, it doesn’t just continue to move, it acts almost like an independent creature. Throw it a piece of food and it will seize it and try to feed the head to which it’s no longer attached.

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.

It’s a devastating metaphor. The eel as death incarnate. Or rather, not just death but also death’s opposite. The eel as a kind of symbolic link between beginning and end, between the origin of life and its demise. Ashes to ashes, eel to eel.

Even when we get really close to it, it somehow remains a stranger.

Eventually, I also came to understand that in addition to there being a difference between humans and animals, there’s also a difference among different kinds of animals. That boundary was even more vague and less defined. The difference seemed to be less about the nature of the animals than about our perception of them. If you looked at an animal and saw something of yourself in it, you inevitably felt closer to it. That didn’t mean killing any animal was easy, or that it should have been easy, just that there was a difference among different animals. Apparently, that was how human empathy worked. An animal looking you in the eye, you can identify with. That animal is harder to kill.

What we rely on when we say we know where the eel procreates isn’t just observations but also a number of assumptions.

When we say we know the eel procreates in the Sargasso Sea, there are still some essential objections to that statement: (1) No human has ever seen two eels mate. (2) No one has ever seen a mature eel in the Sargasso Sea.

That would not only explain the differences in the behavior observed but also lend some kind of logic and relevance to what at first seemed random. Maybe eels are, quite simply, individuals, who not only have different abilities but also different means and methods of reaching their goal. Maybe they’re all aiming for the same destination, but no two journeys back to the origin are exactly the same.

You don’t have to believe the miracle to believe the meaning of the miracle.

In Sweden, legal death has nothing to do with heartbeats and breathing. According to Swedish law, a person is alive as long as his or her brain shows some form of activity. The first paragraph of the law outlining the criteria to determine death in a human states that “a person is considered dead when there is complete and irrevocable cessation of all brain function.”