"The Signature of All Things"

[fiefoe]

Tahiti:

• If you need to find water, follow a dog. If you are starving, eat insects before you waste your energy on hunting. Anything that a bird can eat, you can eat.
• She knew that soapsuds worked into fabric and dried overnight would waterproof clothing perfectly.
• The men took his death without any evident sign of grief, auctioning off his belongings among themselves.
• The Elliot herself seemed to scream in pain—her poor wooden soul beaten and whipped by the sea.
• She felt a deep bruise of absence for her father.
• In early April, they encountered a most alarming change of weather, which blackened the sky before their eyes, murdering the day in the middle of the afternoon.
• One of the spouts drew near enough that she could see the long strands of water spiraling upward from the ocean all the way into the sky, in one great swirling column. It was the most majestic thing she had ever seen, and the most holy, and the most awesome.
• One night they sailed through a diamond field of liquid phosphorescence. The ship churned up strange molecules of green and purple light as it moved, until it appeared that the Elliot was dragging a long glowing veil behind herself, wide across the sea.
• these were verdant and wild slopes—shockingly steep, alarmingly jagged, staggeringly high, blindingly green. Indeed, everything about the place was overdressed with green... endless flatness—an eerie and arbitrary cathedral, thrusting up from the center of the sea for no reason at all.
• The children moved like schools of fish, or flocks of birds, with every decision rendered in immediate, collective concurrence: Now we shall jump! Now we shall run! Now we shall beg! Now we shall mock!
• Having known palms only in greenhouses, Alma had never before heard palm trees. The sound of the wind through their fronds was like rustling silk.
• Then she stopped moving about and shouted, “Look at us! We are cleverly made! We are full of hinges!” “Hinges!” said the congregation. “But the hinges will rust! We will die! Only God remains!”
• “It is a queer path, I know, but the Tahitians made it,” said the Reverend Welles with a laugh. “They see nothing advantageous in making a straight path, for even the shortest distances! You will grow accustomed to such marvels
• Because time does not object to passing—not even in the strangest and most unfamiliar situations—time passed for Alma in Matavai Bay.
• To be stripped of all that was precious made for a kind of immediate penance. It made her feel somehow closer to Ambrose; Tahiti was where they had both come to lose everything.
• One of the first things Alma learned how to convey in Tahitian was an apology for her hair. She wondered if there was any place she could go in the world, ever, where her hair would not be considered a tragedy.
• You could not trust a sentence to mean the same thing on one side of the island as across it, or to mean the same thing today as it meant yesterday.
• She had never before seen children as free as Hiro, Makea, Papeiha, Tinomana, and the other Makea. Tiny lords of liberty, they were, and mirthful ones at that. Like some mythical blend of fish, bird, and monkey, they seemed equally at home in the water, in the trees, and on land. They hung from vines and swung into the river with fearless cheers. They paddled out to the reef on little wooden boards and then, incredibly, they stood up on those boards,
• They kept as pets a rotating menagerie of cats, dogs, parrots, and even eels (the eels were bricked up into watery pens in the river; at the sound of the boys’ whistles, they would raise their heads up eerily above the surface of the water, ready to be fed bits of fruit by hand). Sometimes the Hiro contingent ate their pets, skinning them and roasting them on a makeshift spit.
• It was as if there were a tide ebbing and flowing in and out of her house, depositing and withdrawing the flotsam of her old life. She had no alternative but to accept it, and to marvel, day after day, at what she found and lost, and then found and lost once more.
• “It is difficult to convert anyone,” he said, “who is less intrigued about your god than he is about your scissors! Ha-ha-ha! But how can you fault a body for wanting scissors, when he has never before seen them? Would not a pair of scissors seem a miracle, by comparison to a blade fashioned of shark’s teeth?”
• As I frequently said to my good wife, ‘Dear Edith, did we come all this great distance only to become Spaniards?’ If a man wants a dunking in the river, I shall give him a dunking in the river!
• “Does Sister Manu believe in the pô?” Alma asked. “Absolutely not,” said the Reverend Welles, imperturbable as always. “She is a perfect Christian, as you know. But she respects the pô, you see.”
• Taroa, the creator. Taroa, born in a seashell. Taroa lay silently for countless ages as the only thing living in the universe. The world was so empty that when he called out across the darkness, there was not even an echo. He nearly died of loneliness. Out of that inestimable solitude and emptiness, Taroa brought forth our world.
• The Hiro contingent were like mosses, Alma realized; they might dry out and go limp in the heat, but they could be revived instantly by a good soaking. Resurrection engines themselves, were these extraordinary children!
• The disintegration of the drawings felt like another death to Alma: now, even the phantom was gone.
• For the first time, she could understand what Tahitian music was truly meant to be, and why it needed hundreds of voices roaring and bellowing together in order to perform its function: to outsing the ocean... That’s what these people were doing now, in a crashing expression of veneration, both beautiful and dangerous.
• More than a few chickens, helpless in this tidal surge of celebration, followed the pig to its death.
• As for Tomorrow Morning, Alma thought ghoulishly, they could have made an armory’s worth of weaponry out of him—
• “That is another legacy of loss. Sometimes people here will cut off their fingertips as an expression of grief. This became easier to do when the Europeans brought us iron and steel.”
• The rauti knows the lineage of every man on this island, all the way back to the gods, and he chants out their courage for them. One could say it is a kind of sermon, but a violent one.”
• “But one knows when one is the favorite of our father, Alma, don’t we?” Tomorrow Morning asked, probing more gently. “It transfers to us a unique power, does it not? If the person of most consequence in the world has chosen to prefer us over all others, then we become accustomed to having what we wish for.
• For the first time in her life, it occurred to her that it must have been he, Henry, who had thrust the torch into her hands that night, entrusting her with fire, releasing her as a Promethean comet across the lawn, and across the wide open world. Nobody else would have had the authority to entrust a child with fire. Nobody else would have bestowed upon Alma the right to have a place.
• I told him to draw me as he would draw an orchid, in blameless nakedness. For what is the difference, in the eyes of God, between a naked man and a flower? This is what I told him. That is how I brought him near.”
• It was so bright in its verdure that the color nearly spoke, as though—smashing through the world of sight—it wanted to migrate into the world of sound.
• Goblin’s gold, dragon’s gold, elfin gold—Schistotega pennata was that rarest of cave mosses, that false gem that gleams like a cat’s eye from within the permanent twilight of geologic shade, that unearthly sparkling plant that needs but the briefest sliver of light each day to sparkle like glory forever,
• Then he poured himself into her mouth, and she received it like a dedicatory offering, like an almsgiving.