This Twitter thread about the life of sperm whales is a beautifully written and scary delight

This classic Twitter thread, posted in 2017 by author Nate Crowley, has lasting power and is still regularly retweeted to this day. It’s not hard to see why. It’s a beautifully written and imagined description of the utterly alien subaquatic life of the sperm whale.

See what you think…

1.

Having a think about sperm whales this morning. Specifically, how they routinely make one of the most nightmarish journeys imaginable as part of the ordinary business of living.

— Regular Frog (@FrogCroakley) December 9, 2017

2.

For a start, imagine living in a world with no edges – no floor, no ceiling, no walls, and barely ever something large or tangible enough to even bump into. Just water.

— Regular Frog (@FrogCroakley) December 9, 2017

3.

And then, when you need to eat, you raise the back end of your body and you begin swimming down. Just… down. Into a place so prepostrously hostile to airbreathing life that it scares us just to think about.

— Regular Frog (@FrogCroakley) December 9, 2017

4.

But they just angle their big, battering-ram heads down and plough into it. Until the light vanishes and the temperature plunges and every space inside them crinkles into dense, wet nothing with the pressure.

— Regular Frog (@FrogCroakley) December 9, 2017

5.

They can spend ninety minutes down there. Ninety minutes in the gelid, crushing blackness, their every muscle dense as wood and black with myoglobin – a sixty tonne sarcophagus keeping a mammal's brain alive.

— Regular Frog (@FrogCroakley) December 9, 2017

6.

And then they fight. They hunt out creatures we can only comprehend through tired references to old horror stories, and they rip them apart. Arms as long as trees lash out as they die, hooked suckers carving scars that will never leave.

— Regular Frog (@FrogCroakley) December 9, 2017

7.

But the whales crush the monsters in jaws longer than you are tall, gulping down mounds of frigid, ammoniac jelly in a slurry of icy brine and marine snow. They have broken into hell and they have eaten the demons.

— Regular Frog (@FrogCroakley) December 9, 2017

8.

And then they make their way slowly back into the light. Back to where the sun snakes through the water, and to the sound of birds. And there they roll, grey bodies scored with years and years of scars, nudging and bumping each other.

— Regular Frog (@FrogCroakley) December 9, 2017

9.

And so they go on. Not because they are brave, or curious, or pioneering – but because evolution has simultaneously damned them to daily katabasis, and given them the monstrous power to overcome it.

— Regular Frog (@FrogCroakley) December 9, 2017

10.

Anyway, that's what I'm thinking about.

— Regular Frog (@FrogCroakley) December 9, 2017

An idle thought transformed into a truly beautiful and thought-provoking Twitter thread that will stand the test of time. Other Twitter users were equally as impressed…

I know this is years old, but I just wanted to tell you that I still show my research students this every year to prove to them how beautiful their ideas can be. My continued thanks for this gift.

— Neil S. Oatsvall (@DctrNO) August 23, 2020