Recommended book | "Travel of the Eel": not only do the science of eel, but also talk about the philosophy of life

The Journey of the Eel, a book that is difficult to categorize.

If it is a popular science work on eels, readers can clearly read the childhood memories of "me" and my father, biographies of eels-related characters, and a strong sense of existential philosophy.

If you classify it as philosophy or literature, you can't ignore the informative and vivid knowledge of the "eel" creature.

So when I want to introduce this book, I can only say that this is a good-looking book that can satisfy all kinds of reading tastes.

The author Patrick Svensson was born in Sweden in 1972. He has a background in journalism and worked as an art and culture reporter for the "South Sweden Daily". Therefore, his writing techniques are mostly narrative and not obscure, and almost every reader can understand it. Reading the meaning of his writing, but not superficial, always brings intriguing sense.

For example, he mentions that all eels are born in the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, explaining the ambiguity with a romantic and moving metaphor when describing the "ambiguity" of their location:

It (the Sargasso Sea) is located a little northeast of Cuba and the Bahamas, east of the North American coast, but it is in constant flux. The Sargasso Sea is like a dream, you can't tell exactly when you're in and out of it. You only know that you have been there before.

When talking about his childhood memories of catching eels with his father, he jumped out of the memory content itself and expressed his views on the widespread existence of "memory". He said:

Memory is deceiving, it sifts and chooses what to keep. When we search our memory for a scene from the past, we are completely uncertain whether we remembered the most important or relevant content, but we remembered what we expected.

Even when he wrote the biography of the scientists who had studied eels, he was able to use his imagination boldly to conjecture and comment on the inner activities of scientists on the basis of summarizing the facts. For example, he commented on Freud, who had tried to find the eel testicles but failed miserably (the one we know well), and believed that the mystery of the eel caused Freud to turn to the field of psychology:

The eel deceived it, which may have caused Sigmund Freud to later leave the field of pure natural sciences and devote himself to the more complex and unquantifiable psychoanalysis... The man who would later determine the entire 20th century A man with a view of sex and sexuality, a man who has reached an unprecedented depth to the inner mechanism of human beings, has not been able to find sexual organs in eels. He wanted to understand the sexual behavior of a certain fish, but at best he found out about the sexual behavior of humans themselves.

In Patrick Swensson's narration, there is not only an accurate summary of scientific and historical facts, but also his rational and emotional views on all these facts. This is the most valuable part of this book.

After all, in the 21st century, we can obtain massive and rich factual knowledge through search engines, as well as a large number of superficial and rigid opinions, but wisdom and insights full of personal experience are often buried in it and difficult to find.

This book "Travel of the Eel" is a window for "linking new students and hitting sparks" with eel knowledge.

For more than two thousand years, eels have been a mystery. Aristotle firmly believed that it had no gender, and Freud's attempts to find its genitals were repeatedly frustrated. No one has ever seen an eel mate.

European eels are born in the Sargasso Sea, an ocean of indeterminate boundaries, and then travel to European shores, where they swim to live in rivers and streams. After decades of peaceful life, when the biological clock strikes, it will complete its final metamorphosis and embark on the long journey back to the Sargasso Sea, where it will reproduce and die. If it can't set off, it seems to wait for eternity and never reproduce.

Svensson sighed quite lyrically, the eel's life has been waiting and enduring, for a final goal. But this process is extremely lonely. They need to live in the silted black mud for decades, "searching for their place in the world alone, without inheritance, and existing in this world alone."

To a certain extent, modern people are like eels. While breaking the myths of history, religion, family and other myths to regain freedom, the dilemma about freedom has also emerged.

We have become free individuals alone, which forces us to go from a goal to a series of meanings, always chasing lonely and exhausted in this world. But we are too impatient, too impatient, too afraid of aging, too eager for change, too easily frustrated by the psychedelic delirium that lies ahead.

For modern people who are afraid of stagnation and boredom, this book "The Eel's Journey" may have some useful revelations.