The Signature of All Things - Elizabeth Gilbert

This was for the most part a delightful read.  Alma is the only daughter of a self-made man of the late 1700's and early1800s.  He serves on a ship to atone for a crime and travels the world, picking up skills that allows him to make his fortune and build a plantation in Pennsylvania that provides medicinal plants, among other ventures.  Alma grows up in this privileged world, exploring their estate and becomes and expert in plants and horticulture, specifically the miniature world of mosses.

Her parents take in a beautiful orphan girl and declare they treat each other as sisters, a relationship that colors the rest of both of their lives.  The family story evolves against the scientific discoveries of the period, in particular Darwin's evolution of the species.  The title of the book refers to the belief that every thing that exists bears the signature of a creator.

Alma finds love, loses it, and strikes out on her own in the world, writing a parallel theory of life to Darwin's, based on her studies of mosses and her life experiences.  The story gets off on a tangent about two thirds of the way but winds up satisfactorily reflecting on the lives of women of the period, family relationships and the natural world.

Quotes:

"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."

"[reflecting on her theory of life] "For here was the hole in Alma's theory; she could not, for the life of her, understand the evolutionary advantages of altruism and self-sacrifice.  If the natural world was indeed the sphere of amoral and constant struggle for survival that it appeared to be, and if out-competing one's rivals was the key to  dominance, adaptation, and endurance--then what was one supposed to make [of these traits]? 

[discussing her dilemma with a spiritualist] "There is no evolutionary need, you see, for us to have such acute sensitivities of intellect and emotion.  There is no practical need for the minds that we have.  We don't need a mind that can invent religions or argue over our origins.  We don't need ethics, morality, dignity, or sacrifice.  We don't need affection or love, certainly not to the degree that we feel it.  If anything, our sensibilities can be a liability, for they can cause us to suffer distress.  So I do not believe that the process of natural selection gave us these minds--even though I do believe that it did give us these bodies, and most of our abilities.  We have them because there is a supreme intelligence in the universe, which wishes for communion with us...it wants union with us, more than anything."

"I know that just because people can hear each other across the divide does not mean they can necessarily understand each other."

"..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." 

Published: 2014  Read: 2019   Genre: Fiction