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All the names we have given the small, soft, slimy, dark animals that slither slowly around on the ground wherever it is moist – molluscs, lung snails, bladder snails, forest snails, nude snails – themselves have something moist and soft about them, it occurs to me, and every time I see a slug these days I am struck by how it inverts qualities that normally belong to the intimate human sphere and there express great beauty – nude is vulnerable, soft is arousing, lungs are the spirit of life, the forest is pure nature – for the slugs’ nakedness, the slugs’ softness, the slugs’ lungs and the slugs’ forest are instead repulsive, deeply undesirable and loathsome. That snails with their shells are less repulsive than slugs, as a turtle is less repulsive than a toad, would seem to indicate that it is the nakedness in itself that puts us off – and that sounds probable, for isn't the most repulsive thing about a rat its hairless tail? – and yet there are plenty of other animals that lack a clear distinction between their outer and inner body, for instance jellyfish or earthworms, which should therefore seem just as repulsive to us. Could it be because slugs resemble us more, are closer to us than jellyfish? Is it precisely that they have lungs, that they have a heart, that they have eyes which makes their nakedness seem so repulsive? To be sure, their eyes are of a very different and alien construction, placed as they are at the end of tentacles, one of two pairs, the upper pair being for the eyes, the lower pair for smells, like a kind of nose extension. What is it we see when they come slithering out after a rainy night, slowly and with heads raised? They resemble aged majesties, the rulers of the forest floor, emperors of rotted leaves and moist soil. But this striking dignity, which should make us venerate them, rather like the Egyptians venerated cats and Indians venerate cows, is entirely lost sight of due to the repulsiveness their nudity and slimy smoothness exude. Isn't there something almost provocative about them? Something counter to nature? They seem to belong to the interior, organs in a body, lungs, livers, hearts, which are all smooth and rounded and naked, without any distinction between inner and outer. Is that why they disgust us, because they look like little lungs creeping around by themselves, with antenna-like eyes, like little livers, like little hearts? Is this why they seem almost provocative, because they are counter to nature, and then they go creeping around like it was the most natural thing in the world, eating and reproducing, and everything has to happen so damned slowly, everything has to be so damned dignified – who the hell do slugs think they are? Millimetre after millimetre they slide along between the moist blades of grass, the wet ferns, across the soft moss, and live their lives in harmony with their abilities and limitations, as all living things do. When I was growing up all slugs were black, and they appeared after a downpour, as if from the bowels of the earth, suddenly they were everywhere, in the middle of the lawn, on the paths, even on the black asphalt roads of the housing development. It was said that it would start to rain if you stepped on a slug, so we took great care to avoid that. Still, sometimes it happened, sometimes inadvertently, other times deliberately: all children must have stepped on a slug at one time and seen its soft innards ooze out on the asphalt and the black blend with orange and white. Since then a new species of slug has invaded Scandinavia, so-called killer slugs, big brown slugs from Portugal or Spain which reproduce with amazing speed and cause great damage to gardens, since they gobble up everything they can find. One year the garden here was full of them, they were everywhere, as if they had rained from the sky. My mother-in-law used to gather the children around her and go slug-hunting. Armed with a bucket and sharp garden scissors they would walk across the grass, and when they found a slug they cut it into two and tossed the parts into the bucket. I couldn't watch, much less participate, it was too gruesome. But a raid like that, during which maybe twenty slugs were eliminated, was of no avail, a few days later there were just as many. At last, some time after my mother-in-law had gone home, I myself went out with a bucket and garden scissors. I knelt down in front of one of the brown slugs. It was as long as my long finger, thick as a sausage, with some sort of lengthwise grooves in its skin, and its broad foot, which reminded me of a belt, was beige. As I lifted it up it squirmed slowly in my grasp, and when I placed it between the blades of the sharp scissors its tentacles moved. I pushed the handles of the scissors together, and as the blades sliced into its body I heard it screaming, low and shrill.