More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Each sentence was a crowded village of capital letters and small letters, living side by side in tight misery, crawling up on one another as though trying to escape the page.
How her father came to be in possession of such great wealth is a story worth telling here, while we wait for the girl to grow up and catch our interest again.
He was raised in two small rooms with a floor of beaten earth, with an almost adequate roof, with a meal on the hearth nearly every day, with a mother who did not drink and a father who did not beat his family—by comparison to many families of the day, in other words, a nearly genteel existence.
Henry wanted nothing to do with slavery—not because he found it morally abhorrent, but because he regarded it as financially inefficient, untidy, and expensive, and controlled by some of the most unsavory middlemen on earth.
Everyone was welcome in Philadelphia, absolutely everyone—except, of course, the Jews.
“To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.”
Beatrix corrected him dryly. “Mr. Whittaker has many principles. Just not the best variety of them.”
A parent is inexcusable who does not personally teach her child to think.
“At no moment in history has a bright young girl with plenty of food and a good constitution perished from too much learning.”
(nobility should be based upon conduct, not upon inheritance);
overpraised children (good behavior should be expected, not rewarded).
Alma’s mother was a woman of many gifts, but the gift of comfort was not among them.
Beatrix Whittaker frequently said, any child who was old enough to walk, speak, and reason ought to be able—without any assistance whatsoever—to comfort herself.
the two of them resembled a perfect little robin’s egg and a big homely pinecone, suddenly and inexplicably sharing the same nest.
For Alma, to read something once was to have ownership of it forever.
Oh I wish for that!
Shyness, as I have told you many times, is simply another species of vanity. Banish it.”
The year 1816 would later be remembered as The Year Without a Summer—not only at White Acre, but across much of the world. Volcanic eruptions in Indonesia filled Earth’s atmosphere with ash and darkness, bringing drought to North America and freezing famine to most of Europe and Asia.
“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.”
Alma realized, she would never learn everything about mosses—for she could tell already that there was simply too much of the stuff in the world; they were everywhere, and they were profoundly varied.
She had a task. She would learn mosses.
Moss eats stone; scarcely anything, in return, eats moss.
Moss dines upon boulders, slowly but devastatingly, in a meal that lasts for centuries.
Over time, this mix of moss and mineral will itself turn into travertine marble.
Within that hard, creamy-white marble surface, one will forever see veins of blue, green, and gray—the traces of the antediluvian moss settlements.
Moss grows where nothing else can grow. It grows on bricks. It grows on tree bark and roofing slate. It grows in the Arctic Circle and in the balmiest tropics; it also grows on the fur of sloths, on the backs of snails, on decaying human bones.
Moss has the temerity to begin luring the forest back to life.
A single clump of mosses can lie dormant and dry for forty years at a stretch, and then vault back again into life with a mere soaking of water.
She had no interest in studying Divine Time, because she believed there was no way for a human mind to comprehend it.
somewhere between Geological Time and Human Time, Alma posited, there was something else—Moss Time.
Moss Time was blindingly fast, for mosses could make progress in a thousand years that a stone could not dream of accomplishing in a million.
Poets wrote odes to nature, even as nature vanished before their eyes.
She had been sanguine. Contented. By all measures, it had been a good life. She could never return to that life now.
after reading Jacob Boehme, I wanted to meet the divine even more intimately. That is why I gave up everything in the world, including sustenance.”
“But how does one bear it?” Alma begged. “Through the dignified performance of one’s duties,” Hanneke said. “Be not afraid to work, child. There you will find consolation. If you are healthy enough to weep, you are healthy enough to work.”
Everywhere you turn there is sorrow. If you do not see sorrow at first glance, look more carefully. You will soon enough see it.”
One thing was certain: Human Time was the saddest, maddest, most devastating variety of time that had ever existed. She tried her best to ignore it. Nevertheless, the days passed by.
Alma accepted and admired the Lord as the designer and prime mover of the universe, but to her mind He was a daunting, distant, and even pitiless figure. Any being who could create a world of such acute suffering was not the being to approach for solace from the tribulations of that world.
makes sense! lol
Anything that a bird can eat, you can eat.
interesting Are there not some berries, etc that birds can eat but that are poisonous to humans?
soapsuds worked into fabric and dried overnight would waterproof clothing perfectly.
Still they saw no whales. The men were disappointed. They were bored and restless. The seas were hunted to depletion.
humans were quick to do that
“I wish I had a Tahitian’s memory,” the Reverend Welles went on. “Then one would have no need for papers! What we keep in libraries, they keep in their minds.
Captain Cook had estimated the Tahitian population at two hundred thousand souls in 1772, it had plunged to some eight thousand by 1815.
She also knew this: if she had to kill somebody in order to save her own life, she would do so unhesitatingly.
the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died.
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.
Struggle was the mechanism. Struggle was the explanation behind all the most troublesome biological mysteries: species differentiation, species extinction, and species transmutation. Struggle explained everything.
Alma now believed that creation was continuous everywhere, at all levels of life—even at the microscopic level, even at the human level.
Extinction and transmutation had been occurring since the dawn of life, were still occurring now, and would continue to occur until the end of time—and if that did not constitute “continuous creation,” then Alma did not know what did.
She was afraid to slow down and write more carefully, for she feared she might tumble over, lose her nerve, or—worse!—lose her idea.
such a familiar feeling!
