Consider the Snail
“In writing about snails, I wanted to write about slowness and strangeness, solitude and death, hibernation and estivation.”
SEPTEMBER 23, 2025
The arrondissements of Paris are shaped like a snail. Damien and Léo live in a corner of the 20th that I don’t know very well. In the taxi, an idea comes to me: I will write a book about not having the time to write a book about snails. The car stops and the driver turns to me: here we are, madame. Damien and Léo live above a bar called L’Escargot. At dinner we talk about synchronicities. I say we have to beware of them, they can make you crazy. They recommend I have a look at Jung on the subject. I don’t think I’ll have the time.
When I leave the dinner, I have a voice note from my friend Fleur who tells me she’s slipping under her weighted blanket. A little earlier, Léo was saying that when he slips into bed at night, he feels so relieved he can’t keep from crying out in joy. It’s the only place he feels safe. Léo is traumatized.
I wonder what a snail feels when it slips into its shell, a shelter so perfectly adapted to its body.
In writing about snails, I wanted to write about slowness and strangeness, solitude and death, hibernation and estivation. Estivating is like hibernating, except in summer. In the storehouse of a Parisian museum, researchers found snails that had been estivating there for thirty years. They were still alive.
I have hated summer ever since my sister died, on the twenty-second of June.
The snail’s shell can survive a crack, even a break, as long as it is located sufficiently far from the apex.
The calcium in the snail’s shell comes from bones and eggshells as they decompose in the earth. Snails live off death.
When I told my mother I was going to write a book about snails, she said: there are always snails in cemeteries, climbing up the tombs. I don’t think it’s true.
I thought I would write something funny. I don’t have the time to write a book about snails, it’s a funny hook. But for the moment it’s just a series of traumatic observations, and for that I’m sorry.
I’m writing this in the Notes app on my phone. When I type too quickly, my phone writes escalier [staircase] instead of escargot [snail]. Spiral snailcase.
So I have three videos of snails sliding across my hand. In the first, my son, who was then five years old, can be heard whispering escargot, lisping a bit on the /s/. The /g/ sounds like a /k/. The final /o/ is long and too open. It’s a complicated word, three syllables full of consonants. But it’s a word children say very early on, because of the many nursery rhymes we sing them at bedtime. Petit escargot porte sur son dos sa maisonnette. Aussitôt qu’il pleut il est tout heureux il sort sa tête. Little snail carries on his back his little house. When it begins to rain, he is so happy: out comes his head.
In the second, I moan happily as a snail caresses my finger, leaving its familiar trail. In the third, you can hear a bird singing on the first of May. Then the sound of the neighbor’s lawnmower. I swear and the video cuts out. The yellow snail with black stripes on my palm is not irritated by the noise. The snail is never irritable. I always am.
I’m typing on my phone, on the metro without a seat. What I write takes a different shape when I’m closer to the forest by my country house, where the snails climb the cement stairs, tracks shining behind them.
Snails have one foot. They also have one lung, one heart, and fifteen thousand teeth.
I wonder if the lines on the snail’s shell are linked to traumatic moments in its life, and if they take a particular form or color. Was the calcified ring forged during a particularly cold autumn, a hungry spring? Is it darker as a result? Lighter? Flimsier? Grittier?
If you cut off a snail’s foot, it grows back.
I look at the application which tracks my hormonal cycle. Your period will arrive in eleven days. That makes sense. We’re on the downward slope.
The app depicts my menstrual cycle as a circle. The days light up one by one to indicate where I am. It’s a spiral that’s been turning for twenty-seven years. The average menstrual cycle lasts twenty-seven days. Recently my own have been varying, as the app shows. One month twenty-six days, another thirty-one. Comparing menstrual cycles to the infinite spiral of passing time sounds nice but it’s not true. Perimenopause is the period before menopause during which disruptions to the hormonal cycle appear. It can last ten years. Most women have never heard of perimenopause.
They found a snail fossil that was 540 million years old. Snails appeared on earth 200 million years before the dinosaurs, and 500 million years before humans.
Snails move slowly. When it’s too hot they sleep. When it’s too cold, too. Snails are leftists, they know it’s better to work less to live better. The political and philosophical choices made by an animal that’s been around for 500 million years should really make us think.
To hate snails is to be afraid of alterity, to be wary of what is soft and wet. Snails are lumped in with the moon, with tenderness, with fragility. They are unwanted, disparaged, because they don’t fit the standards for virility: they aren’t stiff, hard, straight, sharp, quick. To hate snails is to be a bit of a fascist.
Snails are many things but they are not weak. Snails are strong. They can carry up to seventy times their weight on their backs. Snails are brave: they are physically incapable of retreating. Snails are clever. What better way to save time commuting than to carry your house on your back.
Your period will arrive in nine days.
It’s one of those long May weekends. The dream of the four-day workweek come true. The month of May resembles a post-work life; life slows down. The sky is blue and it’s 22 degrees out, an average temperature for the season. But something in the air alarms me. My father comes to meet me at Avignon train station, and from the window of his car I glimpse a river that has dried down to a thin rivulet of water, painfully wending its way around stones that have become too white.
The first snails, the ones whose fossils are over 500 million years old, lived in the sea. Land snails appeared 400 million years ago. In 100 million years, the snail went from a totally aquatic environment to a dry one. The function of the lungs had to be completely rethought, the shell considerably thickened, and it had to learn to produce a hydrating trail. It was a long and patient process, learning to stay wet outside of the water. But between now and 2030, when the planet will have warmed 1.5 degrees, the snail will not have enough time to adapt.
I pick flowers to dry and place in a book. Lauren, forty-two years old, with her child’s safety scissors and roll of scotch tape, is sticking forget-me-nots in a notebook that she proudly shows her mother. That’s funny, says her mother, I have a book of dried flowers you made with Julia the first summer we spent here. Julia was my sister.
I come upon a snail at the foot of the well, in my parents’ garden, beneath the ruffles of wisteria that cling to the branches of the plane tree. It’s gray and white, of average size, glistening with shiny slime around the opening of its shell, thickly glued to the rim. It’s the first live snail I’ve come across since I started writing a book about snails.
My father says that he collected all the pots adorning my sister’s grave to clean them. He hosed them down and replanted them. A little snail was hiding at the bottom of one. A cemetery snail, my mother insists.
I meet my friend Marie-Laetitia for dinner at a restaurant. I haven’t seen her for six months. We’ve been friends for forty years. We fall into each other’s arms, she’s changed jobs, I’m her son’s godmother, we exchange news about all our childhood friends and our aging parents. But before we can get to all that, we have to order. She scans the menu. I’m not very hungry, she says. Her gaze falls to the bottom left-hand side of the tri-fold menu: I think I’ll get the escargots. What! No way! I exclaim. She’s suddenly self-conscious. Does that offend you? Do you want me to get something else? No, I say, it’s just a crazy synchronicity. Over the course of the dinner, I tell her how hard I’ve been working to be less irritated by life and tear up at how understanding she is.
Your period will arrive in seven days.
Hedgehogs are the most ecological way of getting rid of snails. As early as 2015 group called Save the Hedgehogs was calling attention to the decline in the hedgehog population, 75 percent in the space of twenty years. Wiped out by pesticides and the destruction of their habitat. Hedgehogs will probably be completely extinct within a few years. The hedgehog first appeared 15 million years ago during the Miocene period, the time of the mammoths.
Your period will arrive in five days.
I have an appointment with the gynecologist because I am convinced I’m in perimenopause. The gynecologist is thirty minutes late. I sit and wait in a hallway. Women with newborns pass through; one of them is walking bow-legged and I know exactly what has just happened to her perineum. An animated video on a loop shows the laser operation to restore its tightness; in close-up, gloved fingers unhesitatingly part the lips of a hairless vulva. I am sitting beneath a speaker spitting out the static of a badly tuned radio. I feel like I’m going to cry. I hurry over to the receptionist, hands over my ears, face wrinkled into an expression suggesting a migraine, and I beg her please to turn off this atrocious noise, I’m sorry I have auditory sensitivities and panic attacks from PTSD I have a lot of trouble waiting I know it’s not your fault I’m so sorry thank you ok thank you so much sorry again really thank you so so much. I return to my seat and try to do some deep breathing exercises. The newborn cries: an alarm signal, it means he’s hungry. The young mother panics and rocks her tiny baby on her shoulder, begging him to be quiet. I order myself not to be that perimenopausal lady descending on the mother to inform her, pedantically, your baby is hungry. Luckily I’m being called in. The gynecologist opens the door to her office. At this precise moment, someone starts drilling on the floor above. It’s too much, I break down in tears sitting right there in front of her desk. She hands me a box of tissues. Fifteen minutes later, she inserts a long wand into my vagina to carry out an ultrasound of my ovaries, we’ll get to the bottom of this question of perimenopause right away. I look at the little screen with her as little white waves appear on a black background. She says: there’s enough in there to repopulate France. You’re not in perimenopause, you’re just in your forties.
I buy plastic reusable earplugs that come in an elegant little round box that attaches to my keychain.
Snails have no ears, they are completely deaf. That’s why they don’t care about the neighbor’s lawnmower. Snails use their senses of touch and smell to orient themselves. If you tap the ground less than fifty centimeters away from them, they retract into their shell, but only because of the way the air has moved.
Your period will arrive in three days.
I push the button marked 5. The elevator climbs, the doors open. I say aloud: what an idiot, I live on the 6th floor. The doors close. I push 6. The elevator climbs, the doors open. I don’t recognize the floor. I live on the 5th floor.
Disassociation is a psychological defense mechanism that allows us to disconnect from a situation which brings back traumatic memories. It’s a form of protection. A way of leaving the body. Of becoming an empty shell.
Summer has a heat, a flash, a stench, a roar that reactivates the traumatic memory. I hate the summer. I would like to estivate.
I have so little time to write that I’ve started taking voice notes.
Voice note, Porte de Clignancourt, 10.52 :
(sound of approaching metro) “Ivy is the vegetal equivalent of the snail, the pigeons that get crushed in the streets of Paris and driven over hundreds of times melt into the asphalt like the escargot’s slime into the ground.” (The recording ends with a belch of an engine.)
Your period will arrive tomorrow.
Snails do not die by suicide. When it is too hot or too cold, when they are tired, they go back into their shells and wait for it to pass.
I read a pharmacology article which looks at therapeutic uses of the helix (what snails were originally called) since antiquity. At the beginning, snails inspired a form of belief. Their sacredness, as well as the relationship between their spiral and the cycle of life made our ancestors believe they were endowed with healing powers. Hippocrates and Pliny prescribed dried and powdered snails to relieve the pains of childbirth. Over the centuries, they appear in numerous remedies, poultices and spells. Everyone knows that snail slime was a choice ingredient in witch’s potions. It is said to be able to soothe phthisis, anthrax and tuberculosis. It is often recommended to be blended with donkey milk. More recently, medical research has discovered that mollusk secretions contain a painkiller more powerful than morphine. We knew before we understood. First it was magic, and then it was science.
It's not true that I don’t have any time. There are occasional moments when my physical presence is not required anywhere, by anyone. So I curl up on the couch and don’t do much of anything, CBD, THC, I no longer keep an eye on the time. I can barely drag myself to the garden to drink my morning coffee. Later it’s too hot, I’m all red, I sneeze. Half-naked and a little bit high, lounging in front of my cold fireplace, I look at the ceiling, I doze off, I read scientific articles about snails and I scribble in my notebook.
My favorite article is by a botanist who’s trying to find a way to describe the act of catching snails in nature. We can’t say we pick them, they’re not a plant, we can’t say hunting them, there are no guns, we can’t say fishing, there’s no water. The botanist teaches me that at one time in Burgundy, they said courir les escargots (running the snails). How strange to think of snails in terms of running. It has to do with the idea that you have to be ready to go at any moment, because the window is short. You have to hurry to catch them, right after the rain stops and before the summer starts. Except that in 1979, a law was passed specifying that snails could only be caught after the first of July, so as not to interfere with their reproductive period. Whereas escargot enthusiasts in Burgundy believe the best period to be between April and June — between hibernation and estivation. According to rural tradition, the snail is a symbol for the return of spring. They are gathered at the same time as daffodils, morels, frogs and lily of the valley. The fancy pants bureaucrats have never run the snails.
The botanist explains that running the snails echoes the concept of the running snail, which is the opposite of the operculum snail. Snails have two moods. In the spring, they get around at five meters per hour, shagging left and right, gorging themselves on belladonna and dandelions. That’s the running snail. In certain regions, they prefer the operculum snail, which is to say the summering snail, or wintering snail, curled up in its shell, cut off from the outside world by a calcium skin with unbeatable properties of insulation. They can be found in this state, for instance, at the bottom of a hole in a stone wall.
Your next period will arrive on the 29th of June.
I keep empty snail shells on my bookshelves. None of them had a ten thousand copy print run.
Snails turn their experiences into monuments, their knowledge into spatial layouts, their vagaries into architecture, their lives into works of art.
Cry, smoke, have a migraine, shut myself up in the dark, long for death, cancel on people, get angry, feel regretful, miss deadlines, cry, smoke, have a migraine, shut myself up in the dark, etc. It’s a necessary cycle. A way of allowing ourselves the time and space to be vulnerable. No one else will assign us this time. We should be able to estivate.
I had a crazy idea. As a kind of theatrical, ritualistic gesture, I wanted to end this text by taking a train to the south to visit my sister’s gravestone, to see if a snail might be climbing it. I didn’t count on the body worn out from irritability.
I hesitate to include a snail in this text. I could do it — through intellectual dishonesty, artistic license. Out of love for my mother. But I just can’t bring myself to do it — that day, I saw a butterfly.
That said, there may be a shell among the pebbles on her grave. And a nice big fat one summering under the oleander.
In Provence, in the summertime, tiny white snails accumulate in their hundreds atop the wooden posts. They call them caragouilles (theba pisana), they’re a kind of white garden snail. My mother sends me a picture of these clusters of shells in the evening sun. Not because it’s sad, just because it’s nice.
A few days later, unrelatedly, my father sends me an article: caragouilles cluster atop the wooden posts when it’s hot because they are trying to catch the dewdrops at dawn.
Good chance of fertility today.
I wake up at 6:30 a.m. to birdsong, the willow rustles, a beetle clings to a wilting iris, a turtledove cries atop a chestnut tree, there is the slight burn from a stinging nettle along my calf, the compost has to be emptied, the mint to be replanted, the spiderwebs removed from the gate, drink a large glass of water, breathe, eat, shower.
Dark blue dragonflies gently beat all four of their wings. I see them. Children laugh in the garden next door. I hear them. The scent of honeysuckle, lime blossom and star jasmine. I smell them. St John’s Wort grows in the forest. I gather some. The solstice is past, it’s over, everything is going to be alright. Slow down.
✺ Excerpted from Courir l’escargot.
Collection Bestial. Collection fondée par Isabelle Sorente et Clara Dupont-Monod.
Lauren Bastide – Courir l’escargot.
© 2023, éditions Jean-Claude Lattès.
PHOTO: via Unsplash
