There is a particular species of land snail, Eremina desertorum. I learned of its existence while scrolling through Instagram—my light-tipped arms have adapted so well to scrolling, here in the cable’s effluvia!—through a slideshow of screenshots of a Wikipedia article. I was arrested by the woodcut on the first slide: an unprepossessing but lively terrestrial mollusk, stalked eyes questing forward, dragging its swirled, calciferous husk on its back. The hand that drew that image understood limitations. It knew the weight and texture of dismal, inescapable context. I felt, however distantly, the family resemblance between myself and this mollusk: a stir of pitying recognition.

In 1846, someone at the British Museum glued a presumably-dead specimen of E. desertorum to an index card, mouth down; four years on, in 1850, it proved to be alive. It lived another two years in the museum, not on an index card but in a glass jar, sustained by cabbage leaves. Grant Allen, a Canadian science writer, socialist, and early Darwin supporter who also penned numerous novels, including two under a feminine pseudonym and one work of proto-science-fiction, wrote in 1889 that “the Museum authorities accordingly ordered our friend a warm bath (who shall say hereafter that science is unfeeling!), upon which the grateful snail, waking up at the touch of the familiar moisture, put his head cautiously out of his shell.” Allen, at least as quoted on Wikipedia, did not disclose the means by which the snail was determined to be yet living. I imagined it this way: a curator, bored, scanning through a flat-lay case of mollusks in search of something else. An errant movement, a coil of shell displaced, a stain. A manicured hand lifting the card up to the light.

Did the others believe him—and it was, almost certainly, a him—when he first went into the laboratory or the common room, holding the card with its unlikely estivator out before him like a burning torch? Did they draw its bath to humor him, expecting only to watch the paper dissolve in clumps around a dead shell? I like to think there was a moment, congruent with the peeping of those four tiny eyes, when snickers turned to gasps and then to congratulations. I like to think he returned, perhaps once or twice a month, to visit the snail and poke an extra cabbage leaf down into its jar, murmuring: I knew you could do it all along, oh you little trickster, you fabled sleeper, you sweet.

The same Wikipedia article discloses the fates of an additional forty snails who were, following these events, sealed together in a tin box in 1904. It is unclear whether these snails, too, were E. desertorum specimens, or whether they represented a grab-bag of unlucky gastropods; it seems excessive, even for a bunch of earnest and self-important Edwardians, to acquire forty of the same type of snail for this purpose when they originated in such a distant clime. (E. desertorum is native to Egypt—Victorian and Edwardian Brits, while no strangers to enthusiastic Egyptian looting in the interest of stocking their museums, typically preferred to mail home richer spoils.) At any rate, someone opened up the box again in 1912, to discover that ten of the snails were still alive.

I did not know how I should feel about this, aside from my usual discomfited fascination with terrestrial ways. Was I supposed to be encouraged by a survival rate of twenty-five percent after eight years in the dry, metal-bounded dark? Or simply to marvel that evolution would so favor passivity, that the fittest snails in the box were those who could draw nearest to death, sleep so profoundly, that they brushed against its edges and perhaps tasted of its nature, without becoming definitively ensnared? These snails, too, might have been awakened with a bath and an offering of cabbage, but no one described them as “grateful.”

I found, after some reflection, that I was envious of the snails. That I was ashamed of my envy—that of course it was unconscionable to imagine any living being shut away in a metal box for nearly a decade to see if it could survive—that my envy and my shame grew in proportion to each other. This is the fantasy: that I will go to sleep, and sleep for a very long time, so long that when I wake up, everything will be somehow improved. I will be improved, made into a different squid altogether; perhaps that squid will have problems, but they won’t be my problems. It’s not a new fantasy, nor is it only mine: think of the glass coffin, the cryo pod, the plinth on the isle of Avalon. Think of a nameless Otessa Moshfegh heroine, the one who cannot grieve her dead parents while awake (or even understand that grieving is what she’s after) and spends a year sedating herself, sleeping through her grief and awakening as the new person she desired to become in the first place. (So what if, as with all enduring fantasies, the cost is built-in and inescapable? Loss of context, loss of beloveds, loss of a kingdom, loss of choice.)

The fantasy rests on something true: stasis can be survival; giving the appearance of death can be the most effective way to live your life; under certain circumstances, the only way forward is to submit utterly to the demands of your environment. These are the real things. They are, by all accounts, painful and difficult in the extreme. Who wouldn’t want to sleep through all that?

I suspected, for no good reason, that E. desertorum’s illustrator knew this. Annie Newman Waterhouse, known to her publisher and to the scientific community as “A.N. Waterhouse,” is remembered today as having produced a large number of woodcuts, based on another artist’s initial drawings, for the tripartite Samuel Pickworth tome A Manual of the Mollusca (1851). She taught wood engraving to “ladies only” at Marlborough House in the earlier 1850s, during its brief stint as the host of what would later become the Royal College of Art. She was married to a clerk in the office of Woods, Forests, and Land Revenues; she had one sister, two zoologically minded brothers, and no children; she lived to be eighty-two. It is reasonable to suppose that her illustrations were more numerous and less credited than what has remained on the record—nineteenth-century publishers often did not attach attributions to images, and an illustrator’s name might be retained only on private financial records. She probably had what I would term a good life, in that she was skilled at what she did and allowed to keep on doing it. Still, one wonders how she felt about her zoological brothers and her forest-managing husband. What happened to her engraving courses, and to the ladies who undertook them, when the future Royal College of Art moved to South Kensington in 1857? The image I have of this event is patently ridiculous: a troupe of well-dressed Victorian women filing out into the manse’s grounds in lush end-of-day sunlight, forlorn, subdued, each carrying a block of wood as a souvenir.