You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey everybody, Emily Quankir. So a few months ago, my sister gave me this book. She

pressed it into my hands while we were on the DC Metro and said, you have to read this. So I read it.

The book, it's part memoir, part natural history, but surprisingly, it feels relevant right now

with so many people in self-quarantine or social distancing. It's almost like I have a better idea

of how to slow down and live in isolation because of this book, because this is a book about snails.

It's called The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, and it's author, Elizabeth Tova Bailey. She spent

years battling an autoimmune condition, the result of a viral infection that kept her bed ridden.

And one day, a visiting friend gave her a pot of violets and inside the pot was a snail.

There was unable to get out of bed, unable to even sit up, and there was this living creature from

the forest. Elizabeth didn't know what to do with this creature, but she started watching it.

It was quite curious about what was around it that made me curious about what it wanted to find

when it went off on an adventure. And the next morning, she noticed that there was a tiny hole

in an envelope. She had left beside the flower pot, the snail was hungry. So as she describes in

her book, she offered it some flower petals and listened closely. I could hear it eating.

The sound was of someone very small, munching celery continuously.

I watched, transfixed, is over the course of an hour. The snail meticulously ate an entire purple

petal for dinner. This snail was likely a neohelix albalabras or a white-lipped forest snail.

And the recording you just heard is of a neohelix snail eating a carrot.

The tiny intimate sound of the snail's eating gave me a distinct feeling of companionship and shared

space. It also pleased me that I could recycle the withered flowers by my bed to sustain a small creature

in need. The bond Elizabeth developed with this snail would help her through one of the most

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