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She was already planning her library, her garden, and—it would appear—her fortune.
Nobody stopped her. She was a comet. She did not know that she was not flying.
“I wonder,” Prudence said mildly, “what might have happened if you’d attempted to pour knowledge into the skull of a living Negro, rather than water into the skull of a dead one?”
Any place that one could not leave was not large—particularly if one was a naturalist!
She need not be idle. She need not be unhappy. Perhaps she need not even be lonely. She had a task.
“But what would you like to do?”
“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.”
She had been sanguine. Contented. By all measures, it had been a good life.
“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. This is why so many medicinal plants resembled the diseases they were meant to cure, or the organs they were able to treat. 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,
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“Only imagine what we could learn, Alma, if we could unshackle ourselves from argument.”
What a stark and stunning thing was life—that such a cataclysm can enter and depart so quickly, and leave such wreckage behind!
“You see, I have never felt the need to invent a world beyond this world, for this world has always seemed large and beautiful enough for me.
