Elisabeth Tova Bailey Quotes
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We are all hostages of time. We each have the same number of minutes and hours to live within a day, yet to me it didn't feel equally doled out. 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.
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The life of a snail is as full of tasty food, comfortable beds of sorts, and a mix of pleasant and not-so-pleasant adventures as that of anyone I know.
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We are all hostages of time.
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We had each journeyed to this office from our own distant planet of illness. Though strangers, we became instant, silent companions. We were here for the same purpose: to describe our alien experience to the doctor in hope of survival advice.
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Still, my friends were golden threads randomly appearing in the monotonous fabric of my days.
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We all have some genes that for unknown reasons are in the "off" mode; perhaps scientists will someday figure out how to flip these switches, and we'll each be able to choose other interesting animal traits: a tail, striped fur, wings, or even gastropod tentacles.
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My bed was an island within the desolate sea of my room. Yet I knew that there were other people home-bound from illness or injury, scattered here and there throughout rural towns and cities around the world. And as I lay there, I felt a connection to all of them. We, too, were a colony of hermits.
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Whereas the future had once beckoned with many intriguing paths, now there was just one impossible route. So it was into the past, with its rich sedimentary layers, that my mind would go instead.
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Illness isolates; the isolated become invisible; the invisible become forgotten. But the snail....the snail kept my spirit from evaporating.
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While illness keeps me always aware of my mortality, I realize that what matters most is not that I survive, nor even that my species survives, but that life itself continues to evolve.
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What majesty is in a creeping Snail, what reflection, what earnestness, what timidity and yet at the same time what firm confidence!
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I liked the sound of the word 'snail' every time I said it; the word was as small and simple as the creature itself.
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I find that nothing is quite as I remember; in my absence, the world has changed.
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Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties... 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.
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In terms of size, mammals are an anomaly, as the vast majority of the world's existing species are snail-sized or smaller. It's almost as if, regardless of your kingdom, the smaller your size & the earlier your place on the tree of life, the more critical is your niche on Earth: snails & worms create soil, & blue-green algae create oxygen; mammals seem comparatively dispensable, the result of the random path of evolution over a luxurious amount of time.
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There is a certain depth of illness that is piercing in its isolation: the only rule of existence is uncertainty, and the only movement is the passage of time. One cannot bear to live through another loss of function, and sometimes friends and family cannot bear to watch. An unspoken, unbridgeable divide may widen. Even if you are still who you were, you cannot actually fully be who you are.
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Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties.
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One has to respect the preferences of another creature, no matter its size, and I did so gladly.
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I wrote to one of my doctors: I could never have guessed what would get me through this past year - a woodland snail and its offspring; I honestly don't think I would have made it otherwise. Watching another creature go about its life...somehow gave me, the watcher, purpose too. If life mattered to the snail and the snail mattered to me, it meant something in my life mattered, so I kept on...
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As the snail's world grew more familiar, my own human world became less so; my species was so large, so rushed, and so confusing.
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While illness keeps me always aware of my mortality, I realize that what matters most is not that I survive, nor even that my species survives, but that life itself continues to evolve. As the Holocene mass extinction rushes on, which species will be left? And what new creatures will evolve that we cannot now imagine - for what creature could ever have imagined us?
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They would worry about wearing me out, but I could also see that I was a reminder of all they feared: chance, uncertainty, loss and the sharp edge of mortality.
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Those of us with illnesses are the holders of the silent fears of those with good health.