The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

and he recalled the advice of a sage Portuguese sailor who had told him, years before, “To be prosperous and happy in life, Henry, it is simple. Pick one woman, pick it well, and surrender.”

“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.”

She kept herself occupied, but she was not occupied enough. Within a year, she sensed an encroaching lethargy that frightened her severely. She longed for some sort of employment or enterprise that would provide vent for her considerable intellectual energies. At first, her father’s commercial matters were helpful in this regard, as the work filled her days with daunting piles of responsibilities, but soon enough Alma’s efficiency became her enemy. She carried out her tasks for the Whittaker Company too well and too quickly. Soon, having learned everything she needed to know about botanical importing and exporting, she was able to complete Henry’s work for him in the matter of four or five hours a day. This was simply not enough hours. This left far too many remaining hours free, and free hours were dangerous. Free hours created too much opportunity for examining the disappointments she was meant to be grinding under her boot heel.

“Yes. As I see. Poor creature. I have such sympathy for the mad. Whenever I am around them, I feel it straight to my soul. I think anyone who claims never to have felt insane is lying.”

“What a grim view! I wish you did not consider our lives so bleakly. On the whole of things, Alma, I still see more wonder in the world than suffering.” “I know you do,” said Alma, “and that is why I worry for you. You are an idealist, which means that you are destined to be disappointed, and perhaps even wounded. You seek a gospel of benevolence and miracle, which leaves no room for the sorrows of existence. You are like William Paley, arguing that the perfection of every design in the universe is proof of God’s love for us.

I shall tell you this: 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. I am certain of this, for I have witnessed it myself. When I swung myself into the fire as a young man, I saw that the storehouses of the human mind are rarely ever fully opened. When we open them, nothing remains unrevealed. When we cease all argument and debate—both internal and external—our true questions can be heard and answered. That is the powerful mover. That is the book of nature, written neither in Greek nor in Latin. That is the gathering of magic, and it is a gathering that, I have always believed and wished, can be shared.” “You

conduct.” She had been made a fool by Ambrose and his supercelestial thoughts, by his grand dreams, his false innocence, his pretense at godliness, his noble talk of communion with the divine—and look where he had ended up! In a louche paradise, with a willing catamite, and a fine upstanding cock! “You duplicitous son of a whore,” she said aloud.

Storms came in irregularly timed onslaughts. One could hear the storms building from far across the sea—steady roaring gales from the southwest that grew louder and louder, like an oncoming train. If the storm promised to be unusually severe, sea urchins would crawl out of the bay, seeking higher, safer ground. Sometimes they took shelter in Alma’s house: another reason to watch where she stepped. Rain came like a spray of arrows. The river at the other end of the beach churned with mud, and the surface of the bay boiled and spat. As the storm grew heavier, Alma would watch as her world closed in on her. Fog and darkness would approach from the sea. First the horizon would disappear, then the island of Moorea in the distance would vanish, then the reef was gone, then the beach, and then she and Roger would be all alone in the mist. The world was now as small as Alma’s tiny and not particularly waterproof house. The wind blew sideways, the thunder bellowed frightfully, and the rain attacked with full force.

Eyes open, mouth open, nose streaming blood into Matavai Bay, immobilized and helpless underwater, Alma realized she was about to die. Shockingly, she relaxed. It was not so bad, she thought. It would be so easy, in fact. Death—so feared and so dodged—was, once you faced it, the simplest thing going. In order to die, one merely had to stop attempting to live.

had not been put on this earth to drown in five feet of water. She also knew this: if she had to kill somebody in order to save her own life, she would do so unhesitatingly. Lastly, she knew one other thing, and this was the most important realization of all: she knew that the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died.

a man whom God had blessed fourfold with genius, originality, beauty, and grace—but who simply did not have the gift of endurance. Ambrose had misread the world. He had wished for the world to be a paradise, when in fact it was a battlefield.

Moreover, as Alma well knew, it was not always the most beautiful, brilliant, original, or graceful who survived the struggle for existence; sometimes it was the most ruthless, or the most lucky, or maybe just the most stubborn.

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.

“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...

“This life is a tentative and difficult experiment. Sometimes there will be victory after suffering—but nothing is promised. The most precious or beautiful individual may not be the most resilient.

“Those who are ill-prepared to endure the battle for survival should perhaps never have attempted living in the first place. 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.”

I believe that life cannot be survived—that is evident!—but if one is lucky, life can be endured for quite a long while. If one is both lucky and stubborn, life can sometimes even be enjoyed.”

“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. I have wondered why it is not large and beautiful enough for others—why they must dream up new and marvelous spheres, or long to live elsewhere, beyond this dominion . . . but that is not my business. We are all different, I suppose. All I ever