The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

“I would like never to travel again. I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent—and working at a pace so slow—that I would be able to hear myself living.”

‘Growing vanilla in Tahiti will be easier than farting in your sleep.’”

“Then you are nothing but a useless little orchid-sketcher, aren’t you?” Henry snapped.

I have wasted thirty-five acres of fine lowland in Tahiti, growing an infertile variety of vanilla vines for the past fifteen years. Alma, write a letter to Dick Yancey tonight, and tell him to yank up the entire lot of vines and feed it to the pigs. Tell him to replace it with yams. Tell Yancey, too, that if he ever finds that little shit of a Frenchman, he can feed him to the pigs!”

ebullient.

Alma may have been asleep only moments earlier, but still her mind was a fearfully well-trained machine of botanical calculation, which is why she instantly heard the abacus beads in her brain begin clicking toward an understanding.

He was weary and homesick. And yet he had no home. The man needed a home. He needed to rest. He needed a place to work, to make the paintings and prints he was born to make, and to hear himself living.

She felt overcome with a wild necessity to keep this person at White Acre forever. What a thing to decide, after knowing him less than a day! But she felt ten years younger today than she had felt the day before. This had been the most illuminating Saturday Alma had spent in decades—or perhaps even since childhood—and Ambrose Pike was the source of the illumination.

Wild creatures belong in wild places. The kit was taken from Alma’s hands, not to be seen again. Well, she would not lose this fox. And Beatrix was not here anymore to prevent it.

insouciance.

“I am not playing a game.” The old housekeeper shrugged. “As you insist,” she said, in deliberately accentuated English. “You are the mistress of this house.”

incursion

“What’s next, Ambrose?” Alma teased. “Shall we now comb out the hair of every fern on the property?” “I do not think the ferns would object,” he said.

disquisitions,

She had been sanguine. Contented. By all measures, it had been a good life. She could never return to that life now.

demurred.

a spell,

She was still a pretty thing, but mostly, by now, she was just a thing. She

laudanum.

“Do you know a song?” “I know many, Alma. But I don’t know her song.”

trepidation

erasure

cesspool

The old cobbler had believed in something he called “the signature of all things”—namely, that God had hidden clues for humanity’s betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code, Boehme claimed, containing proof of our Creator’s love.

Basil, with its liver-shaped leaves, is the obvious ministration for ailments of the liver. The celandine herb, which produces a yellow sap, can be used to treat the yellow discoloration brought on by jaundice. Walnuts, shaped like brains, are helpful for headaches.

“And yet Boehme said that God had pressed Himself into the world, and had left marks there for us to discover.”

I wished to become a plant. Sometimes I think that—just for a very short while, driven by faith—I became a plant.

imprimatur

raiment.

condemn

stalwart.”

bezoars.

gall

‘the lilies of the field’ itself is a mistranslation. It would not have been lilies that Christ discussed in his Sermon on the Mount. There are only two varieties of lily native to Palestine, and both are exceedingly rare. They would not have flowered in such abundance as to have ever filled a meadow. They

“And Adam and Eve’s apple?” he probed. She felt like a fool, but she could not stop herself. “It was either an apricot or a quince,” she said. “More likely an apricot, because quince is not so sweet as to have attracted a young woman’s desire.

“What a marvel is your mind. This sort of dangerous reasoning, by the way, is precisely what God feared would happen, if a woman were allowed to eat from the tree of knowledge. You are a cautionary example to all womankind! You must cease at once all this intelligence and immediately take up the mandolin, or mending, or some other useless activity!”

calibrated.

deity

marplot,

assail

arbalest

lackadaisical

axi...

the whole sphere of air that surrounds us, Alma, is alive with invisible attractions—electric, magnetic, fiery and thoughtful. There is a universal sympathy all around us. There is a hidden means of knowing.

“No,” he said. “We cannot. It is too large and too loud in here, with all these dead old men arguing around us. Take me somewhere hidden and quiet, and let us listen to each other. I

She told herself that these were the reasons she took him there. They may even have been true.

uitwaaien, “to walk against the wind for

pleasure.” That is what this felt like. Without moving

We share something else between us—something more immediate, more cherishing. That has been evident to me from the beginning, and I pray it has been evident to you.

Ambrose did not precisely ask for Alma’s hand—for in his mind, apparently, she had already given it to him. She could not deny that this was true. She would have given him anything. She loved him so deeply that it pained her. She was only just confessing this to herself. To lose him now would be an amputation.