44 pages • 1-hour read
Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of war, graphic violence, and death.
Notre Dame
Notre Dame is a symbol of spiritual revelation, reflecting Goodall’s interest in Reconciling Faith, Morality, and Scientific Discovery. Goodall describes her experience visiting the Parisian cathedral in the opening pages of the Introduction. By placing this experience at the forefront of her personal account, Goodall is formally conveying the significance of it. Goodall identifies her time at Notre Dame as transformative, because she experienced something ineffable. While listening to the resident organist play Back’s Tocata and Fugue in D Minor, Goodall was overcome by emotion as the music seemed to enter and fill the entirety of her being. “That moment,” she remarks, “a suddenly captured moment of eternity, was perhaps the closest I have ever come to experiencing ecstasy, the ecstasy of the mystic” (xiii).
Goodall was particularly moved by the experience because it was unplanned and unexpected. She suddenly realized that she was a part of something greater. Surrounded by the beauty of the majestic cathedral and immersed in Bach’s music, Goodall felt suddenly able to “comprehend the whole inexorable progression of evolution” (xiv). This revelation reignited her old spiritual search. At the end of a period of hardship, Goodall found herself confronted with the divine.
Beech Tree
The beech tree Goodall loved as a child is a symbol of the natural world, and all it can offer. When Goodall was growing up at the Birches, she would spend hours climbing up to and sitting in the beech tree. Sometimes, Goodall did her homework in the tree. Other times, she would press her face “against the trunk and seem to feel the sap, the lifeblood of Beech, coursing below the rough bark” (20). Other times still, Goodall would climb the tree “simply to be by myself, to think” (21). The tree gave Goodall solace amidst her otherwise chaotic world. With WWII waging throughout Europe, Goodall found peace in the quiet of the beech’s branches. She could go there to contemplate the evil she would later encounter when she learned about the Holocaust and to muse on her understanding of God, too.
The tree foreshadows the deep relationship Goodall would form with the Gombe forest later in her life. Goodall’s childhood affection for the beech tree captures her innate appreciation for the environment and for living things. The images of Goodall sitting in the tree depict her in communion with nature—a relationship which Goodall later argues has been essential to her worldview.
Gombe National Park
Gombe National Park is a symbol of both discovery and healing. When Goodall first travels to and begins working in Gombe, she is overcome by the park’s beauty and eager to explore the place. Despite all of the dangers the Gombe held, Goodall was largely oblivious to them, more concerned with the possibility of finding and studying the chimpanzees. She remarks that the day she discovered the Peak and “heard chimps in the valley below” was “one of the most exciting periods of my life” (65). The Gombe opened Goodall to a whole new universe of experience. She lost herself to the forest, willingly letting go of her own concerns to devote her energies to studying the chimps and learning about the forest. Being in the Gombe helped Goodall apply herself to a new effort, from which she derived meaning and purpose.
Later in life, Goodall would discover the healing powers of spending time in the Gombe. When she had to leave the park to return to urban civilization for familial or vocational reasons, Goodall always found it hard to readjust. She particularly “found it harder to sense the presence of God” when she was away from the forest and “plunged into the developed world”—a problem Goodall asserts was due to the fact that she “had not learned, then, to keep the peace of the forest within” (85). Each time Goodall returned to the Gombe thereafter, she would rediscover this peace. She repeatedly depicts herself studying the natural world, lying in the forest, or watching the apes to recover her internal balance.
The Gombe had particular healing powers in the wake of Goodall’s second husband Derek Bryceson’s death. When Goodall returned to Gombe after Derek’s passing, she found a path to recovery: “In the forest, death is not hidden […] It is all around you all the time, a part of the endless cycle of life. […] These things brought a sense of perspective back into my life, and with it, peace” (169). Reimmersing herself in the natural movements of the forest and its inhabitants comforted Goodall and helped her to heal.
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