With “The Signature Of All Things” Elizabeth Gilbert gave us the tale of a woman’s life, which is beautifully written, an intellectual pleasure and an adventure full of scientific knowledge and spiritual findings quite useful for our own lives. The book’s main character Alma is a botanist, a scientist, which in itself is still quite unusual in her day and age; the tale starts with Alma’s birth in 1800.
Homely Alma dissects the world with her brilliant mind, but she can’t escape the beauty of the idea of all things bearing a signature beyond science, which beautiful Ambrose introduces into her life, a man so unlike her that their love starts taking on the form of a mystical communion.
And when – on page 242, you come upon Ambrose saying what immensities “the storehouses of the human mind” are holding, once opened, you might want to consult the German original “Von der Geburt und der Bezeichnung aller Wesen” (also called “De Signatura Rerum” i.e. “The Signature Of All Things”) by renaissance mysticist Jacob Böhme * amongst books by Paracelsus and Agrippa in the storehouses of the Internet.
* the English version of this site about Böhme is strongly abbreviated – I find this refreshing and befitting; after all, “Philosophus Teutonicus” Böhme wrote in German, even when in his time all philosophers wrote in Latin [aartikel]0670024856.left[/aartikel]
By the way, the indication that the selfsame author wrote “Eat, Pray, Love” made me almost put back the book … and I’m not alone in this.
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