Sea spiders

Sea spiders are small marine creatures whose anatomy becomes a puzzle for young Hans Reiter as he walks to school. Their imagined, unrecognized hands give him an image of a body and a capacity that exist before their possessor understands them.

Anatomy and Reiter’s Attention

On the route to school in the Town of Chattering Girls, Reiter imagines the landscape transformed into marine life. Among the forms occupying this imagined underwater world are sea spiders: their bodies are so tiny, he knows, that the stomach does not fit inside and instead extends into the legs. The legs, by contrast, seem enormous and mysterious to him.

The detail that holds his attention is the sea spider’s extra pair of appendages near its head. Infinitely smaller than its eight legs and apparently useless, they strike Reiter not as legs but as hands. He imagines them as the result of a long evolutionary process: the creature has developed two arms and hands, yet has not learned that it possesses them.

An Unrecognized Capacity

Reiter turns the observation into a question about the duration of unawareness. How long, he wonders, could the sea spider remain unconscious of its hands? His answer, spoken aloud in his own childish, halting pronunciation, stretches across a thousand, two thousand, perhaps ten thousand years: a very, very long time.

The image is therefore more than a curious piece of animal anatomy. In Reiter’s mind, the appendages make visible a possibility that precedes recognition: a capacity may already belong to a creature even when it cannot name or use that capacity. The sea spider’s small hands become an enigma because they look purposeful to the observer but remain unknown to the animal.

Place in Reiter’s Schooldays

The thought accompanies Reiter on his walk to school, just as his imagination repeatedly converts the path into a descent toward the bottom of the sea. The story says that he is always late, his mind elsewhere. Sea spiders belong to this wandering mental world, where ordinary terrain becomes an underwater landscape and an anatomical observation expands into a question about awareness and time.