The Signature of All Things

longing for, spectral illusions or uncanny hallucinations, he did not reveal this, either. There appeared no evidence of a distempered reason.
    Whenever Ambrose glanced up and caught her looking at him, he would merely smile. He was so guileless, so gentle and unsuspecting. He did not seem wary of being watched. He did not appear anxious to hide anything. He did not seem to regret what he had shared with Alma. If anything, his deportment toward her was only warmer. He was only more appreciative, more encouraging, and more helpful than before. His good temperament was ever so fixed. He was patient with Henry, with Hanneke, with everyone. At times he appeared fatigued, but that was to be expected, for he worked hard. He worked as hard as Alma did. Naturally he would be fatigued at times. But otherwise he was much the same as before: her dear, unguarded friend. Nor was he seized by excessive religiosity, not so far as Alma could tell. Aside from his dutiful appearances with Alma at church every Sunday, she never even saw him in prayer. In every way, he appeared a good man at peace.
    Alma’s imagination, on the other hand, had been raked up and kindled by their discussion during the journey home from Trenton. She could not put any of it into sense, and she longed for a cogent answer to this puzzle: Was Ambrose Pike mad? And if Ambrose Pike was not mad, then what was he?She had trouble swallowing marvels and miracles, but she had equal trouble regarding her dear friend as a bedlamite. So what had he seen, during his episode? She herself had never met the divine, nor had she ever longed to meet it. She had lived her life committed to a comprehension of the real, the material. Once, while having a tooth pulled under the influence of ether, Alma had seen dancing stars inside her mind—but this, she had known even at the time, was the normal effect of the drug upon one’s wits, and it did not cause her to ascend into the gearworks of heaven. But Ambrose had not been under the influence of ether or any other substance during his visions. His madness had been . . . clearheaded madness.
    In the weeks following her conversation with Ambrose, Alma often woke in the night and crept down to the library to read the volumes of Jacob Boehme. She had not studied the old German cobbler since her youth, and she tried now to approach the texts with respect and an open mind. Sheknew that Milton had read Boehme, and that Newton had admired him. If such luminaries had found wisdom in these words—and if someone as extraordinary as Ambrose had been so stirred by them—then why not Alma?
    But she found nothing in the texts that aroused her to a state of mystery or wonder. To Alma, Boehme’s writings were full of extinct principles, both opaque and occultist. He was of the old mind, the medieval mind, distracted by alchemy and bezoars. He believed that precious stones and metals were imbued with power and divine virtue. He saw the cross of God hidden in a slice of cabbage. Everything in the world, he believed, was an embodied revelation of eternal potency and divine love. Each piece of nature was a verbum fiat —a spoken word of God, a created utterance, a marvel made flesh. He believed that roses did not symbolize love, but in fact were love: love made literal. He was both apocalyptic and utopian. This world must soon end, he said, and humanity must reach an Edenic state, where all men would become male virgins, and life would be joy and play. Yet God’s wisdom, he insisted, was female.
    Boehme wrote, “The wisdom of God is an eternal virgin—not a wife, but rather chastity and purity without flaw, who stands as an image of God. . . . She is the wisdom of miracles without number. In her, the Holy Spirit beholds the image of the angels. . . . Although she give the body to all the fruits, she is not the corporeality of the fruits, but rather the gracefulness and beauty within them.”
    None of this made sense to Alma. A good deal of it irritated her. It certainly did not make her long to stop eating, or studying, or speaking, or to give up the pleasures of the body and live upon sunlight and rain. On the contrary, Boehme’s writing made her long for her microscope, for her mosses, for the comforts of the palpable and the concrete. Why was the material world not sufficient for people such as Jacob Boehme? Was it not wonderful enough, what one could see and touch and know to be real?
    “True life stands in the fire,” Boehme