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I imagine a hundred and fifty years alone in the dark as an endless, sleepless night. The kind of night when you can feel each second being added to the one before, like a slow, interminable jigsaw puzzle. I try to imagine the impatience of a night like that, being so utterly aware of the passing of time and yet so utterly unable to speed it up in the slightest.
To the eel, things are, it would seem, different. An animal probably doesn't experience tedium the same way humans do. An animal doesn't have a concrete notion of time, of seconds turning into minutes and years and whole lifetimes. Perhaps boredom doesn't make eels impatient.
But there's a different kind of impatience, which may be relevant. It's the one we feel when we are forced to endure lack of fulfillment. The impatience at being stopped from doing what you set out to do.
That's what I think about when I think about the Brantevik Eel. Even if it lived to a hundred and fifty, no matter how long it managed to postpone death, there wasn't enough time for it to make its predestined journey and complete its existence. It overcame every obstacle, survived everyone around it; it managed to draw out its long and hopeless life - from birth to passing - for a century and a half. Yet even so, it never got to go home to the Sargasso Sea. Circumstances trapped it in a life of endless waiting.
From this we can learn that time is unreliable company and that no matter how slowly the seconds tick by, life is over in the blink of an eye: we are born with a home and a heritage and we do everything we can to free ourselves from this fate, and maybe we even succeed, but soon enough, we realize we have no choice but to travel back to where we came from, and if we can't get there, we're never really finished, and there we are, in the light of our sudden epiphany, feeling like we've lived our whole lives at the bottom of a dark well, with no idea who we really are, and then suddenly, one day, it's too late.
- The Gospel Of The Eels (Patrik Svensson)

Description
I imagine a hundred and fifty years alone in the dark as an endless, sleepless night. The kind of night when you can feel each second being added to the one before, like a slow, interminable jigsaw puzzle. I try to imagine the impatience of a night like that, being so utterly aware of the passing of time and yet so utterly unable to speed it up in the slightest.
To the eel, things are, it would seem, different. An animal probably doesn't experience tedium the same way humans do. An animal doesn't have a concrete notion of time, of seconds turning into minutes and years and whole lifetimes. Perhaps boredom doesn't make eels impatient.
But there's a different kind of impatience, which may be relevant. It's the one we feel when we are forced to endure lack of fulfillment. The impatience at being stopped from doing what you set out to do.
That's what I think about when I think about the Brantevik Eel. Even if it lived to a hundred and fifty, no matter how long it managed to postpone death, there wasn't enough time for it to make its predestined journey and complete its existence. It overcame every obstacle, survived everyone around it; it managed to draw out its long and hopeless life - from birth to passing - for a century and a half. Yet even so, it never got to go home to the Sargasso Sea. Circumstances trapped it in a life of endless waiting.
From this we can learn that time is unreliable company and that no matter how slowly the seconds tick by, life is over in the blink of an eye: we are born with a home and a heritage and we do everything we can to free ourselves from this fate, and maybe we even succeed, but soon enough, we realize we have no choice but to travel back to where we came from, and if we can't get there, we're never really finished, and there we are, in the light of our sudden epiphany, feeling like we've lived our whole lives at the bottom of a dark well, with no idea who we really are, and then suddenly, one day, it's too late.
- The Gospel Of The Eels (Patrik Svensson)