The Signature of All Things

satisfactions of muscular labor and beautiful unfoldings.
    Alma even found that she had a talent for repairing books. Her experience in mounting plant specimens made her well adept at managing the materials in the binding closet—a tiny dark room with a hidden door just off the library, where Beatrix stored all the paper, fabrics, leather, wax, and glues needed to maintain and restore the fragile old editions. After a few months, in fact, Alma was doing so well at all these tasks that Beatrix put her daughter completely in charge of the White Acre library, both the catalogued and uncatalogued collections. Beatrix had grown too stout and too tired to climb up the library ladders anymore, and was tired of the job.
    Now, some people might have questioned whether a respectable and unmarried sixteen-year-old girl really ought to have been left without any supervision in the midst of an uncensored deluge of books, trusted to negotiate her way alone through such a vast flood of unconstrained ideas. Perhaps Beatrix thought she’d already completed her work with Alma, having successfully produced a young woman who appeared pragmatic and decent, and who would surely know how to resist corrupting ideas. Or perhaps Beatrix did not think through what sorts of books Alma might stumble upon when she opened those trunks. Or perhaps Beatrix believed that Alma’s homeliness and awkwardness rendered the girl immune to the dangers of, for heaven’s sake, sensuality . Or perhaps Beatrix (who was nearing fifty years old, and suffering from episodes of dizziness and distraction) was simply getting careless.
    One way or another, Alma Whittaker was left alone, and that is how she found the book.
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    S he would never know from whose library it had originated. Alma found the thing in an unmarked trunk, with an otherwise unremarkable collection, mostly medical in nature—some standard Galen, some recent translations of Hippocrates, nothing new or exciting. But in the midst of it all was a thick, sturdy, calfskin-bound volume called Cum Grano Salis , written by an anonymous author. Such a funny title: With a Grain of Salt .At first, Alma thought it was a treatise on cooking, something like the fifteenth-century Venetian reprint of the fourth-century De Re Coquinaria , that the White Acre library already contained. But a swift fanning of its pages revealed that this book was written in English, and contained no illustrations or lists meant for a cook. Alma opened to the first page, and what she read there made her mind jolt wildly.
    “It puzzles me,” wrote Anonymous, in his introduction, “that we are all bequeathed at birth with the most marvelous bodily pricks and holes, which the youngest child knows are objects of pure delight, but which we must pretend in the name of civilization are abominations—never to be touched, never to be shared, never to be enjoyed! Yet why should we not explore these gifts of the body, both in ourselves and in our fellows? It is only our minds that prevent us from such enchantments, only our artificial sense of ‘civilization’ that forbids such simple entertainments. My own mind, once locked within a prison of hard civility, has been stroked open for years by the most exquisite of physical pleasures. Indeed, I have found that carnal expression can be pursued as a fine art, if practiced with the same dedication as one might show to music, painting or literature.
    “What follows in these pages, respected reader, is an honest accounting of my lifetime of erotic adventure, which some may call foul , but which I have pursued happily—and I believe harmlessly—since my youth. If I were a religious man, trapped within the bondage of shame, I might call this book a confession . But I do not subscribe to sensual shame, and my investigations have shown that many human groupings across the world also do not subscribe to shame in regard to the sensual act . I have come to believe that an absence of such shame may be, indeed, our natural state as a humanspecies—a state that our civilization has sadly warped. For that reason, I do not confess my unusual history, but merely disclose it. I hope and trust that my disclosures will be read as a guide and a diversion, not only for gentlemen but also for venturous and educated ladies.”
    Alma closed the book. She knew this voice. She didn’t know the author personally, of course, but she recognized him as a type: an educated man of letters, of the sort who