“When the body is rendered useless, the mind still runs like a bloodhound along well-worn trails…”
“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.”
“...Pondering its circumstance with a regal air, as if from the turret of a castle, it waved its tentacles first this way and then that, as though responding to a distant melody.”
“The snail would make its way through the terrarium while the hands of the clock hardly moved — so I often thought the snail traveled faster than time.”
“My illness brought me such an abundance of time that time was nearly all I had. My friends had so little time that I often wished I could give them what time I could not use. It was perplexing how in losing health I had gained something so coveted but to so little purpose.”
“I eagerly awaited visitors, but the anticipation and the extra energy of greetings caused a numbing exhaustion (…) Each visit was a window that opened momentarily into the life I had once known, always falling shut before I could make my way back through.”
“ I found myself preoccupied with the energy level of my visitors, and I started to observe them in the same detail with which I observed the snail. The random way my friends moved around the room astonished me; it was as if they didn’t know what to do with their energy. They were so careless with it.”
“Looking into the terrarium was like entering that ancient era.”
Oliver Goldsmith, 1774:
“Sometimes these animals are crushed seemingly to pieces, and, to all appearance, utterly destroyed; yet still they set themselves to work, and, in a few days, mend all their numerous breaches . . . to the re-establishment of the ruined habitation. But all the junctures are very easily seen, for they have a fresher colour than the rest; and the whole shell, in some measure, resembles an old coat patched with new pieces.”
“I observed my snail’s spiral shell from the outside, but what was it like to live inside such a shape? Just a month before the onset of my illness, I had visited the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Halfway down the rotunda’s spiraling interior, I stopped. It was dizzying to look up as the floors curved around and above me and equally so to look down to the ground level far below. Now I tried to imagine, were I as large in proportion to the Guggenheim as the snail to its shell, what it would be like to have my head stick out the main entrance below and my body wind all the way up the spiraling floor.”
Elizabeth Bishop from “Giant Snail”, 1969:
“My wide wake shines, now it is growing dark.
I leave a lovely opalescent ribbon: I know this.”
Kobayashi Issa:
why
such careful consideration
snail?
Lorenz Oken, a German naturalist, in his Elements of Physiophilosophy:
‘Circumspection and foresight appear to be the thoughts of the [snail] . . . What majesty is in a creeping Snail, what reflection, what earnestness, what timidity and yet at the same time what firm confidence!? Surely a Snail is an exalted symbol of mind slumbering deeply within itself.’
Hans Christian Andersen, The Snail and the Rosebush, 1861:
“‘I am going to withdraw from the world; nothing that happens there is any concern of mine.’ And the snail went into his house and puttied up the entrance.”
