“What life is, we know not. What life does, we know well.”
–Lord Perceval
One thing Alma Whitaker and I share is our fascination towards mosses.
The land where my grandparents’ house was built on used to be uneven (due to its location—side of a hill). In order to build the house the land was flattened. As a result, the right and back yards of the house are walled with earth full of tiny plants that do not require much sunlight to survive and love humidity—and of course the walls are covered with mosses. As little kid, I used to imagine villages or magical kingdoms on these walls of mosses, and I told myself stories and adventures about the people in these kingdoms I’d created. I remember how carefree my thoughts were and how liberating it was, being able to create stories and lost in the fantastical world I’d created. By and by, time had forced me to move away from these magical walls of mosses, to grow up and become someone “useful” to the society. Like Andy from Toy Story, I left my toys and the magical walls of mosses, and got involved with the real world, carried away and lost in the streams of society. I became someone else.
Yet, as cliché as it sounds, somehow I found my way back to the magical walls of mosses through writing and reading, which I am pursuing now and will never let go again. Reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of all Things brought me back, exactly to the time when the walls of mosses was still magical to me. Not only that, the story showed me how art and sciences (just like my double major: Biological Sciences and English), or humanity and sciences are not far from each other, but rather overlapping with each other.
The meaning behind the title of Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel, The Signature of all Things is—“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…containing proof of our Creator’s love” (ch. 15). Now that the world is urbanized and is advancing everyday, little kids are most likely to be seen playing with their electronic tablets and video games; it’s easy to spot a group of people—even a family—bowing down to their phones in cafes (and dinner tables), instead of interacting and conversing like the scenes at the Whitaker dinner table. I am not saying that every human being on this planet is behaving in such anti-social manner, but the fact that it exists is merely sad.
Go back to nature. Look for the signatures, the clues of humanity’s betterment printed on them. Ask yourself, when was the last time you’ve stopped, and stared the sun, the blue skies, the stars, the trees and flowers, the birds, without being aware of time and all your worries in your workplace and in your life? And did you feel the Creator’s love? Me? Yes, a few minutes ago before I came back inside to write this up, I was outside at my parents’ front yard, sipping hot coffee, watching the morning sunray slowly drenched my mom’s orchids and listening to the birds singing good morning to each other. Stop, stare, listen, and feel.
“The greater the crisis, it seems, the swifter the evolution” (ch. 30).
The theory of evolution is one of the themes that significantly being explored in Gilbert’s novel, which is very ambitious and brilliant at the same time because she overlaps humanity, art, literature and science in one story—the story of Alma Whitaker. The “controversial” theory even to this date does not sound controversial at all in this novel, for she presented it from several point of views without taking any sides. One fascinating struggle Alma Whitaker faces with the natural selection theory is applying it to the evolution of human (not the evolution of monkey into human). She believed in striving for survival and only the fit the strongest survive, which is true and evident in our everyday lives (even she had experienced it herself). For instance, competitions in workplaces, in businesses, in schools, in relationships, power and so forth—we need certain things to survive (not to mention in today’s world—money is a “big” thing), but Alma couldn’t understand human’s self-sacrifice behaviors and altruism. The theory of evolution, or rather science cannot scientifically explain this in human beings. But I think, love can (again, this sounds cliché, but it’s true). One thing that animal and plants do not possess is the ability to reason, which consequently gives human the ability to feel and to love. Love contributes a large portion of our self-sacrifice behaviors and altruism—at least it motivates such behaviors. Yet to understand love is not as easy as saying the word love, for love is complex. It is more complicated than the theory of evolution, for love itself is evolving in time and places. But one thing I know to be true is that love liberates, like my love in writing and reading, and in loving the Creator of this world—it’s liberating like the gay and carefree sentiments I felt as a child, playing with the magical walls of mosses.