The title of this delightful little book refers one of many evenings when the author, seriously ill and bed-ridden, was unable to sleep. She had been casually observing a small snail that a friend had dropped into a pot of wild violets, as it nightly crept over the edge of the pot in search of food and water. She noticed that it had munched through some envelopes and, thinking it sought more nourishment, she started leaving it wilted violets that had fallen from their stems (it would not eat the fresh ones from the plant). As Bailey describes the experience,
"It [the snail] made its way down the side of the pot and investigated the offering with great interest and then began to eat one of the blossoms. A petal started to disappear at a barely discernible rate. I listed carefully. I could hear it eating. The sound was of someone very small munching celery continuously."
The author proceeds to relate many of the things she then learned about gastropods, as she read her library books and watched the little visitor, now in its own terrarium, explore its world. She--and we--learn about the chemistry and functions of the snail's slime, its teeth, and how it perceives its environment through its three senses. She compares her life, now so immobile, with the snail's activities, its body's functions, and physical capabilities--how it can move, balance and navigate blindly, relying chiefly on its sense of smell. She imbues the snail with life; it appears puzzled, it has memory, it can make an epiphragm, "...the snake is home but is not accepting visitors."
Elisabeth Tova Bailey has written a book that is at once philosophical and highly informative. It is the perfect book to take readers away from their hectic lives and experience another specie's world as nineteenth-century naturalists.
