"And they grow. For eighteen years, placid in their hollows, in their niches, lethargic in the slime, brushing past in a slow ceremony for nobody, splashing the air with a flick of the tail and a shimmering, incessantly devouring the juices of the depths, repeating for eighteen years the surreptitious sliding that takes them in a fraction of a second, for eighteen years, to the edible fragment, to the organic matter in suspension, solitary and somnolent or violently arranged to tear their prey to pieces and disband in a frenetic scattering, eels grow and change color, puberty assaults them like a whip and transforms them chromatically, the muddy mimetic yellow gives way bit by bit to mercury, at some moment the silver eel will reflect the first rays of morning sun with a quick flick of its back, the murky water of the depths allows a glimpse of the spindle-shaped mirrors that replicate and divide in a slow dance: the time has come to stop eating, ready for the final cycle, the silver eel waits immobile for the call of something that Mademoiselle Callamand considers, as does Professor Fontaine, a phenomenon of neuroendocrine interaction: suddenly, by night, at the same time, all rivers are downriver, all sources are to be fled, tense fins tear furiously at water's edge: Nietzsche, Nietzsche."

— Julio Cortázar, from From the Observatory, trans. Anne McLean (thanks wood s lot)