The Signature of All Things

Unlike most women of a certain age, I have not read Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I did pick up this novel with a funny name by her, and would not have believed reading the first 100 pages how much I would come to love it.

Mixing up botanical exploration and study, 18th and 19 century shipping, a love (?) story, Tahitian religious history, mental health and abolition into a cohesive novel is no small feat. Gilbert somehow manages it. Alma Whittaker, the main character, is the daughter of a wealthy botanical shipping magnate, and a naturalist herself. A bryologist, to be exact. An expert in the study of mosses. How captivating, you say?

What I admire most about Elizabeth Gilbert and this epic 500 page tome, is her exquisite research detail, ability to keep the language and tone true to the time period, and the oftentimes hilarious, and all together quirky characters and dialogue. There is Retta Snow, the pinheaded and carefree neighbor and Ambrose Pike, the angelic, enigmatic hero, both of whom speak in the most original voice I probably ever heard in a book.

On page 229 we find out the meaning the strange title. It comes from the writings of a 17 century German cobbler who had mystical visions about plants. Jacob Boehme believed that God left clues for humanity in the natural world. That's why walnuts, shaped like brains, are helpful for headaches, and basil, shaped like the liver, can help with ailments of the liver. He called God's imprint "the signature of all things."

Alma develops a theory of the natural world simultaneously with one of the greatest scientists of all time, but hesitates to publish her results, which she calls "The Theory of Competitive Alteration." When the ultimate theory is actually published (we know it by another name) by someone else, she is at peace with it.

And here is the tie-in to Adam. Spoiler Alert. Ambrose Pike ends his life in Tahiti, for reasons unknown, however, Alma many years later comes to peace with it, too, in this way:

            Ambrose believed in such things [there is a supreme intelligence in the universe
            which wishes for communion with us...it wants us to find it. It wants union with
            us more than anything]. He longed for that union you mention, with the supreme
            intelligence. He died searching for that union.

And so the novel ends with a thoughtful debate about the greatest spiritual question of all time. What a satisfying ending to a magnificent story.