The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

He effortlessly comprehended these people—these industrious, tireless, ditch-digging, beer-drinking, straight-speaking, coin-counting Calvinists, who had been making order out of trade since the sixteenth century, and who slept peacefully every night of their lives with the certain knowledge that God wished for them to be rich.

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

It was a place of expansive, generative possibility—a veritable alluvial bed of potential growth.

A parent is inexcusable who does not personally teach her child to think.

“Plum, you must always carry enough gold on you to buy back your life in case of a kidnapping. Sew it into your hems, if you must, but never be without money!”

“Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy’s distraction.”

Beatrix believed that Alma’s homeliness and awkwardness rendered the girl immune to the dangers of, for heaven’s sake, sensuality.

and my investigations have shown that many human groupings across the world also do not subscribe to shame in regard to the sensual act.

This sense of recognition and familiarity both confused Alma and enticed her.

The Negro shows an overexpression of emotional senses, which accounts for his infamous absence of self-control. We see this demonstrated in his facial structure.

we are never permitted to rest upon the assumption that any fact is well known enough to evade the necessity of accurate documentation.”

Sin is innate, she heard. Grace is a mystery of God’s bequeathing.

Grace can be neither earned nor squandered, nor added to, nor diminished.

She had no interest in studying Divine Time, because she believed there was no way for a human mind to comprehend it. It was time outside of time. So she left it alone. Nonetheless, she sensed that it existed, and she suspected that it hovered in some kind of massive, infinite stasis.

There is only so long that a person can keep her enthusiasms locked away within her heart before she longs to share it with a fellow soul, and Alma had many decades of thoughts much overdue for sharing.

“Too many people turn away from small wonders, I find. There is so much more potency to be found in detail than in generalities, but most souls cannot train themselves to sit still for it.”

“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.

Argument is my lifelong bedfellow. What’s more, I believe in argument and I even love it. Argument is our most steadfast pathway toward truth, for it is the only proven arbalest against superstitious thinking, or lackadaisical axioms.”

Learning thru criticizing

Poorly matched pairings are thick as flies in this world.

Despair is a tedious business and quickly becomes repetitive,

Dutch was not a mellifluous language like French, or a powerful language like Greek, or a noble language like Latin, but it was as comforting as porridge to Alma.

There is grief below grief, she soon learned, just as there are strata below strata in the ocean floor—and even more strata below that, if one keeps digging.

Rumors are a precious currency that burn holes in the pocket and are always, eventually, spent. Yet no one had spoken a word.

she knew that the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died.

Put in the effort for something you feel is necessary for survival.

it was also true of every living entity on the planet, from the largest creation down to the humblest.

Her greatest strength was as a taxonomist, with a bottomless memory for species differentiation and a bludgeoningly relentless capacity for minutiae.

Alma believed that she now had a story to tell—an immense story. It was not a cheerful story, but it explained a good deal about the natural world. In fact, she believed, it explained everything.

The natural world was a place of punishing brutality, where species large and small competed against each other in order to survive. In this struggle for existence, the strong endured; the weak were eliminated.

Crisp takeaway of the novel

Alma hypothesized, and had come to believe, that the struggle for existence—when played out over vast periods of time—did not merely define life on earth; it had created life on earth. It had certainly created the staggering variety of life on earth. Struggle was the mechanism.

Individuals who managed to endure the trials of life generally did so because of some feature or mutation that made them more hardy, more clever, more inventive, or more resilient than others.

During the course of this never-ending battle for survival, the very design of species inevitably shifted.

Alma now believed that creation was continuous everywhere, at all levels of life—even at the microscopic level, even at the human level.

Ambrose had misread the world. He had wished for the world to be a paradise, when in fact it was a battlefield.

The real world is cruel

The trick at every turn was to endure the test of living for as long as possible. The odds of survival were punishingly slim, for the world was naught but a school of calamity and an endless burning furnace of tribulation. But those who survived the world shaped it—even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.

She needed none of this, for a vast comprehension of moss taxonomy already existed within her head, filling every corner of her cranium with well-remembered facts and details. She also had at her fingertips

Experiencing through life …far superior than learning theoretically

“The greater the crisis, it seems, the swifter the evolution.”

“All transformation appears to be motivated by desperation and emergency.”

“The beauty and variety of the natural world are merely the visible leg...

Evolution is a brutal mathematics, and the long road of time is littered with the fossilized remnants of incalculable failed experiments.”

One did the best one could, of course, and there was dignity to be found in stoicism, but truly there were times when the sadness of this world was scarcely to be endured, and the violence of love, Alma thought, was sometimes the most pitiless violence of all.

“I will tell you why we have these extraordinary minds and souls, Miss Whittaker,” he continued, as though he had not heard her. “We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, which wishes for communion with us. This supreme intelligence longs to be known. It calls out to us. It draws us close to its mystery, and it grants us these remarkable minds, in order that we try to reach for it. It wants us to find it. It wants union with us, more than anything.”

Mr. Darwin thought of that idea of yours—about our minds being excluded from the laws of evolution, and about a supreme intelligence guiding the universe.”

I believe that we are surrounded by a host of unseen friends and loved ones, now passed away, who exert an influence upon our lives, and who never abandon us.”

Saying that, I do wonder, Mr. Wallace, if your longing for the spirit world and an afterworld is not just a symptom of a continued human quest to feel . . . significant?

Not able eschew the material world

I do truly believe I am fortunate. I am fortunate because I have been able to spend my life in study of the world.