The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

“To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.”

“Stones grow. Plants grow and live. Animals grow, live, and feel”).

(the new year will arrive one way or another, regardless of all that bell-ringing); the aristocracy (nobility should be based upon conduct, not upon inheritance); and overpraised children (good behavior should be expected, not rewarded).

ipse Voluptas—work is its own reward.

with plants, he never lost his head. He was always charitable and forgiving with plants. This made Alma sometimes long to be a plant.

and that those bottles sometimes contained danger (raised voices; banishment), but could also contain miracles—such as permission to sit on her father’s lap,

She watched tiger spiders dig deep tubes into the duff, and robins gather moss and mud from the river’s edge for their nests. She adopted a handsome little caterpillar (handsome by caterpillar standards), and rolled him into a leaf to take home as a friend, though she later accidentally murdered him by sitting on him. That was a severe blow, but one carried on. That

She went out in all weather, because delights could be found in all weather.

She learned that walking carefully in the mud to save one’s boots or the hems of one’s skirts never rewarded one’s search.

Soames was the best botanical collecting partner one could ever imagine, and Alma talked to him all day long. He would do absolutely anything for the girl, except move quickly. Only occasionally did he eat the specimens.

Alma learned to tell time by the opening and closing of flowers.

She had never before been entrusted with fire. The torch spit sparks and sent chunks of flaming tar spinning into the air behind her as she bolted across the cosmos—the only body in the heavens who was not held to a strict elliptical path. Nobody stopped her. She was a comet. She did not know that she was not flying.

Her story was an ugly one. There was an effort at White Acre to suppress it, but stories like this do not like to be suppressed,

The two women, acting as one, clutched Polly away from the mob, and kept her away from the mob. This was not a considered decision. Nor was it a gesture of charity, draped in a warm mantle of maternal kindness. No, this was an act of intuition, sprung from a deep and unspoken feminine knowledge of how the world functions.

Later in life, when Alma was a woman of science, she would better understand how the introduction of any new element into a controlled environment will alter that environment in manifold and unpredictable ways, but as a child, all she sensed was a hostile invasion and a premonition of doom.

A child’s intellect, Beatrix said, is an object of impressive elasticity,

She was beginning to realize something dreadful about herself, something that she had never before been given reason to contemplate: she herself was not a pretty thing.

“a prick-fed donkey”

She could take apart an argument the way a good soldier can dismantle his rifle—half asleep in the dark, and the thing still comes to pieces beautifully.

She also loved her microscope, which felt like a magical extension of her own right eye, enabling her to peer straight down the throat of the Creator Himself.

Eventually she was satisfied: young Dixon was a perfectly boring wizard of academics,

Alma was a girl possessed by a soaring enthusiasm for systems, sequence, pigeonholing, and indexes; botany provided ample opportunity to indulge in all these pleasures.

She wished that she lived in a botanical monastery or a botanical convent of sorts, surrounded by other devoted taxonomists, where no one interfered with one another’s studies, yet all shared their most exciting findings with each other. Even a botanical prison would be nice! (It did not occur to Alma that such places of intellectual asylum and walled isolation did exist in the world, to a point, and that they were called “universities.”

I never met a truly honorable woman who honked like a goose.”

Shyness, as I have told you many times, is simply another species of vanity. Banish it.”

It is not sufficient to be merely good, Prudence; you must also become clever. As a woman, of course, you will always have a heightened moral awareness over men, but if you do not sharpen your wits in defense of yourself, your morality will serve you little good.”

“Thank you for the pincushion,” Alma wrote to Prudence, in a short note of considered politeness. “I shall be certain to use it whenever I find myself in need of a pin.”

“Henry Whittaker, you weasel! Show me that famous daughter of yours I’ve been hearing so much about!”

“No, you bloody fool—that’s not what I meant! I want to see the pretty one!”

and Alma—the big tall one—is a right beast for botany.”

Some of our sheep have silken hair, some have coarse hair, and some have dense woolen curls. Surely, sir, you would not doubt that—despite their differences in coats—they are all sheep.

“I wonder,” Prudence said mildly, “what might have happened if you’d attempted to

abolitionist, then?” “He is.”

“Don’t dismay of it, Alma. It’s not everything to have a pleasing face. Plenty of women are loved who are not beauties. Think of your mother. She’s never been pretty a day of her life, yet she found a husband, didn’t she?

insouciance

from Beatrix at the beginning of their friendship, fearing the worst should the two ever encounter each other. But Retta was not easily hidden, and Beatrix was not easily deceived. It had taken less than a week, in fact, before Beatrix demanded of Alma one morning at breakfast, “Who is that child, with that parasol, who

It was like having a pretty bird in a cage in the corner, making occasional cooing noises, while Alma worked.

“Not unless one is a deer,” Alma said, laughing. “And a hungry deer at that.” “How lovely to be a deer,” Retta mused. “

“Autotrophic, Retta, means that they can make their own food.” “So I could never be a hornwort, I suppose,” Retta said, with a sad sigh.

Even Henry called Dick “a trained crocodile,” and had once said, “It’s difficult to say which is more dangerous—a trained crocodile or a wild one. One way or another, I would not leave my hand resting in his mouth for long, God bless him.”

“Smelling salts!”

There were snakes that could kill this way, with an embrace that only grew tighter and tighter until the breath stopped completely. Alma squeezed tighter. Retta made another small squeaking noise. Alma grasped harder still—so hard that she lifted Retta right from the floor.

Alma tormented herself by imagining—again and again—all the different ways she might have behaved on that day,

I will not pay him a wooden tooth for another shipment of black mold in a box, purporting to be a plant.

You do not notice the tribulations that occur all around you, to other people. Do not protest; it is true. I am not condemning you. I was as selfish as you, when I was your age. It is the custom of the young to be selfish. Now I am wiser.

nobody passes through this world without suffering—no matter what you may think of them and their supposed good fortune.”

“Well, child, you may do whatever you like with your suffering,” Hanneke said mildly. “It belongs to you. But I shall tell you what I do with mine. I grasp it by the small hairs, I cast it to the ground, and I grind it under the heel of my boot. I suggest you learn to do the same.”

She made an effort to turn her sorrows into a gritty powder that could be kicked into the ditch.

It was no longer joyful, the habit in the binding closet, but it made her feel somewhat unleashed.

Free hours created too much opportunity for examining the disappointments she was meant to be grinding under her boot heel.