The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

whatever is true for mosses must be true for all living things.

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

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

sad, humans know this but do very little until point of no return eg pollution, population

The battle of nature is not marked by evil, but by this one mighty and indifferent natural law: that there are simply too many life forms, and not enough resources for all to survive.”

humans tend to think they can change laws of nature, or beat them

The only unforgivable crime is to cut short the experiment of one’s own life before its natural end. To do so is a weakness and a pity—for the experiment of life will cut itself off soon enough, in all our cases, and one may just as well have the courage and the curiosity to stay in the battle until one’s eventual and inevitable demise. Anything less than a fight for endurance is cowardly. Anything less than a fight for endurance is a refusal of the great covenant of life.”

hhmmm... I tend to disagree.... why continue with one's life if one does not want to live what's left of it? why is it cowardly to have the bravery to do as you truly want to do? The world has too many people, so why stay if one doesn't want to?

There were those who loved Tahiti because it felt to them like Eden—like the beginning of history—but Alma did not wish to live at the beginning of history; she wished to live within humanity’s most recent moment, at the cusp of invention and progress.

“No men in your room tonight, remember.” Not tonight, nor any other night, my dear, thought Alma. But thank you for even imagining it.

lol

Specifically, he accused her of fearing religious condemnation, should she make public her notions of continuous creation and species transmutation.

But Alma was hesitating not from fear of the church, but from a deep conviction that her theory was not quite yet scientifically incontrovertible.

For here was the hole in Alma’s theory: she could not, for the life of her, understand the evolutionary advantages of altruism and self-sacrifice.

Alma could answer that question from a moral standpoint (Because Prudence is kind and selfless), but she could not answer it from a biological one (Why do kindness and selflessness exist?).

Furthermore, there was nothing analogous to such extreme examples of human self-sacrifice in the rest of the natural world—not so far as she could see.

are there not examples of other animals exhibiting self-sacrifice?

Alma’s thesis was forty pages long, and On the Origin of Species was more than five hundred, but she knew without question that Darwin’s was by far the more readable work. Darwin’s book was artful. It was intimate. It was playful. It read like a novel.

“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.”

This life is a mystery, yes, and it is often a trial, but if one can find some facts within it, one should always do so—for knowledge is the most precious of all commodities.”