"The Signature of All Things"

Passing of a mother and coming of a mystic:

• Finally, she remembered. She opened her eyes and barked out a command that actually worked: “Smelling salts!” she cried. “Go! Find them! Bring them to me!” Quickly, the salts were produced. It took nearly less time to find them than it had taken Alma to name them.
• They were to wear these bands for the next six months. The tightness of the material around her arm made Alma feel like a girded tree.
• Alma saw no choice but to clean out this Augean stable, one piece of paper at a time. She cajoled her father to sit beside her
• She felt herself growing breathless. This was the entire world. This was bigger than a world. This was the firmament of the universe, as seen through one of William Herschel’s mighty telescopes. This was planetary and vast. These were ancient, unexplored galaxies,... Her life could be lived in generous miniature.
• Even so, the words she now spoke aloud sounded every bit like prayer: “Praise be the labors that lie before me,” she said. “Let us begin.”
• Dried moss was so perfectly designed for transport, in fact, that people had already been using it as packing material 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. St. Peter’s Basilica itself was built from the stuff, both created by and stained with the bodies of ancient moss colonies.

• You must tell me, Miss Whittaker—what mad genius took such pains to fabricate this garden according to strict Euclidian geometric ideals?”... “Who would not recognize them? It’s the golden ratio! We have double squares here, containing recurring nets of squares—and with the pathways bisecting the entire construction, we make several three-four-five triangles, as well. It’s so pleasing! I find it extraordinary that somebody would take the trouble to do this, and on such a magnificent scale. The boxwoods are perfect, too. They seem to serve as equation marks to all the conjugates.
• “Tell me, though, Miss Whittaker, what is it that you admire in mosses?” “Their dignity,” Alma replied without hesitation. “Also, their silence and intelligence.
• What’s more—and rather astonishingly—he spent another week burnishing the leaves of every individual orchid plant with banana peels, until they all shone like tea services polished by a loyal butler.
• “Possession by spirits, perhaps? A gathering of magic? An erasure of material boundaries? Inspiration, winged with fire?” He did not smile. He was quite serious.
• Nothing brought more goodness and assurance to Alma Whittaker’s life than the heartening certainty of material boundaries.
• The old cobbler had believed in something he called “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.
• For instance, I renamed all the colors! And I saw new colors, hidden colors. Did you know that there is a color called swissen, which is a sort of clear turquoise? Only moths can see it. It is the color of God’s purest anger.
• But this is a difference of our minds, dearest one. I wish to arrive at revelation on wings, while you advance steadily on foot, magnifying glass in hand. I am a smattering wanderer, seeking God within the outer contours, searching for a new way of knowing. You stand upon the ground, and consider the evidence inch by inch.... “I do have a dreadful love for understanding,” Alma admitted.
• “Precisely,” said Alma. “This would go a long way toward explaining the suffering of mankind and the random nature of our fates—as God adds and subtracts us, divides and erases us.”
• There is a Dutch word, uitwaaien, “to walk against the wind for pleasure.”
• “Imagination is gentle,” Jacob Boehme had written, “and it resembles water. But desire is rough and dry as a hunger.” Yet Alma felt both. She felt both the water and the hunger. She felt both the imagination and the desire.
• What Alma desperately wanted to know was how she could possibly present herself to Ambrose in the form of an orchid, like her sister, and not a mossy boulder, like herself. But such a thing cannot be taught.
• Dear Lord in heaven, they had misunderstood each other’s questions! They had supernaturally misunderstood each other’s questions. It had been the one and only categorical miracle of Alma Whittaker’s life, and she had misunderstood it. This was the worst jest she had ever heard.
• This person had arrived, he had illuminated her, he had ensorcelled her with notions of miracle and beauty, he had both understood and misunderstood her, he had married her, he had broken her heart, he had looked upon her with those sad and hopeless eyes, he had accepted his banishment, and now he was gone. What a stark and stunning thing was life—that such a cataclysm can enter and depart so quickly, and leave such wreckage behind!
• “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.”
• All is anguish. 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.
• remembered a line from Montaigne, something she had read years ago, which had always stayed with her, and which now felt horribly pertinent: “These are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.”
• She felt bisected and dislocated. She felt awash in curiosity, polished bright by anger.
• "You think they took me on the Resolution for my able navigating? I was a hairless little boy, Plum—a hairless little shaver from the land,
• but that one phrase of his struck Alma as so cogent and deliberate that she would always think of it as having been her father’s final words: You go find out.
• She simply needed to marry somebody—anybody—in order to remove herself from George’s prospects, with the hope, I must tell you, that George would then marry you.
• Her sister had forfeited love, only to go live her life in poverty and abnegation with a parsimonious scholar who was incapable of warmth or affection. She had forfeited love, only for brilliant George Hawkes to go live his life with a crazed little pretty wife who had never even read a book and who now resided in an asylum. She had forfeited love, only for Alma to go live her life in absolute loneliness—leaving Alma vulnerable in middle age to enthrallment by a man like Ambrose Pike, who was repelled by her desire, and who wished only to be an angel
• She had always thought herself to be a woman of dignity and worldly knowledge, but really she was a petulant and aging princess—more mutton than lamb, by this point—who had never risked anything of worth, and who had never traveled farther away from Philadelphia than a hospital for the insane in Trenton, New Jersey.