Figuring

by Maria Popova

We sieve the world through the mesh of these certitudes, tautened by nature and culture, but every once in a while—whether by accident or conscious effort—the wire loosens and the kernel of a revolution slips through.

How many revolutions does the cog of culture make before a new truth about reality catches into gear?

the locus of possibility expands when the unimaginable is imagined and then made real through systematic effort.

The gap between intention and interpretation is always rife with wrongs, especially when writer and reader occupy vastly different strata of emotional maturity and intellectual sophistication.

but the sheer thrill of discovery—the ecstasy of having personally chipped a small fragment of knowledge from the immense monolith of the unknown,

“Medals are small things in the light of the stars,” she would later write. “There’s only one thing in the world of any real importance, and that is goodness.”

He is not handsome, but looks as the author of his books should look: a little strange and odd, as if not of this earth.

Who hasn’t fallen in love with an author in the pages of a beautiful book? And if that author, when befriended in the real world, proves to be endowed with the splendor of personhood that the writing intimates, who could resist falling in love with the whole person?

Your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s….It is a strange feeling—no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content—that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling. Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces.

in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves.

“Mrs. Somerville talks with all the readiness and clearness of a man, but with no other masculine characteristic,” Mitchell wrote. “She is very gentle and womanly…chatty and sociable, without the least pretence, or the least coldness.”

“Was there ever a woman without vanity? or a man either? only with this difference, that among gentlemen the commodity is generally styled ambition.”

One obtuse malediction came from the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who proclaimed that Somerville had never done anything original—a remark that the young sculptor Harriet Hosmer, herself a pathbreaker who opened up the figurative arts for women in the nineteenth century, would tear to shreds. In a letter defending Somerville, she scoffs: To the Carlyle mind, wherein women never played any conspicuous part, perhaps not, but no one, man or woman, ever possessed a clearer insight into complicated problems, or possessed a greater gift of rendering such problems clear to the mind of the student, one phase of originality, surely.

After reading it, the poet Lord Tennyson would famously proclaim: “It is inconceivable that the whole universe was merely created for us who live in this third-rate planet of a third-rate sun.”

Poetry has been as serious a thing for me as life itself; and life has been a very serious thing; there has been no playing at skittles for me at either. I never mistook pleasure as the final cause of poetry; nor leisure, for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work; not as mere hand and head work apart from the personal being, but as the completest expression of that being to which I could attain; and, as work, I offer it to the public, feeling its faultiness more deeply than any of my readers, because measured from the height of my aspiration, but feeling also the reverence and sincerity with which the work was done should protect it in the thoughts of the reverent and sincere.

A century later, Virginia Woolf would see in their fate a tragic testimony to how celebrity culture hollows creative culture: Passionate lovers, in curls and side-whiskers, oppressed, defiant, eloping—in this guise thousands of people must know and love the Brownings who have never read a line of their poetry. They have become two of the most conspicuous figures in that bright and animated company of authors who, thanks to our modern habit of writing memoirs and printing letters and sitting to be photographed, live in the flesh, not merely as of old in the word; are known by their hats, not merely by their poems. What damage the art of photography has inflicted upon the art of literature has yet to be reckoned.

In an environment like mine, what may have seemed too lofty or ambitious in my character was absolutely needed to keep the heart from breaking and enthusiasm from extinction.

I felt within myself great power, and generosity, and tenderness, but it seemed to me as if they were all unrecognized, and as if it was impossible that they should be used in life. I was only one-and-twenty; the past was worthless, the future hopeless; yet…my aspiration seemed very high.

Arline was dying. The letters went back and forth daily. In every single one of his, Richard told Arline that he loved her. “I have a serious affliction: loving you forever,” he wrote.

Nowhere would anyone grant that science and poetry can be united. They forgot that science arose from poetry, and did not see that when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

In science as in romance, the unknown is disrobed sheath by sheath as fervid fantasies imagine the possibilities conquerable by knowledge—fantasies that far outstrip the reality eventually revealed as knowledge progresses.

He insisted that the dreamer and the worker are naturally symbiotic in each of us and that it would be a mistake for society to sacrifice the poetic at the altar of the practicable and the profitable. “Do not throw up yr ideas, but realize them,” he wrote in his sermon notes. “The boy who never built a castle in the air will never build one on earth.”

But as much as Fuller may have wished to be a disembodied intellect, her mind was housed in a body she had to sustain.

spirited love of words, “the signs of our thoughts and feelings in all their minutest shades and variations.”

The Panic of 1837—America’s first major financial crisis—had just swept the nation and left it so dumbfounded that Emerson, mining science for his metaphor, likened all attempts to make sense of it to “learning geology the morning after an earthquake.”

“Words are events,” Ursula K. Le Guin would write a century and a half later, “they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”

Fuller was highly discriminating about her intimate relationships, but once she admitted another into the innermost chambers of her being, she demanded of them nothing less than everything—having tasted Goethe’s notion of “the All,” why salivate over mere fragments of feeling? But this boundless and all-consuming emotional intensity eventually repelled its objects—a parade of brilliant and beautiful men and women, none of whom could fully understand it, much less reciprocate it. Hers was a diamagnetic being, endowed with nonbinary magnetism yet repelling by both poles.

“Those who seem overladen with electricity frighten those around them.”

The richest relationships are often those that don’t fit neatly into the preconceived slots we have made for the archetypes we imagine would populate our lives—the friend, the lover, the parent, the sibling, the mentor, the muse. We meet people who belong to no single slot, who figure into multiple categories at different times and in different magnitudes. We then must either stretch ourselves to create new slots shaped after these singular relationships, enduring the growing pains of self-expansion, or petrify.

“People wish to be settled,” Emerson would write in one of his most famous essays, published just a few months later, “[but] only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”

Whatever we may mean by the word “love,” we earn the right to use it only by doing the hard work of knowing and being known.

A highly endowed man with good intellect & good conscience is a Man-woman & does not so much need the complement of Woman to his being, as another. Hence his relations to the sex are somewhat dislocated & unsatisfactory. He asks in Woman, sometimes the Woman, sometimes the Man.

This country…needs…no thin Idealist, no coarse Realist, but a man whose eye reads the heavens, while his feet step firmly on the ground, and his hands are strong and dexterous for the use of human implements…a man of universal sympathies, but self-possessed; a man who knows the region of emotion, though he is not its slave; a man to whom this world is no mere spectacle or fleeting shadow, but a great, solemn game, to be played with good heed, for its stakes are of eternal value, yet who, if his play be true, heeds not what he loses by the falsehood of others; a man who hives from the past, yet knows that its honey can but moderately avail him; whose comprehensive eye scans the present, neither infatuated by its golden lures, nor chilled by its many ventures; who possesses prescience, the gift which discerns tomorrow—when there is such a man for America, the thought which urges her on will be expressed.

a great writer, Fuller believed, ought not to assault the reader with artificial pontifications, but must instead reveal truth and meaning via fine thought channeled through beauty that invites “a natural surrender to the charm of facts.”

In writing, conversation should be folded many times thick. It is the height of art that, on the first perusal, plain common sense should appear; on the second, severe truth; and on a third, beauty; and, having these warrants for its depth and reality, we may then enjoy the beauty for evermore.

lecture titled “Is Polite Society Polite?” In it, she issued an indictment against a society that had become so drunk on ambition and outward achievement that it had come to mistake surface polish and posturing for the “inward grace of good feeling” that constitutes true kindness. A greater understanding of this distinction, she argued, “would save us from the vulgarity of worshipping rank and wealth.”

Language is not the content of thought but the vessel into which we pour the ambivalences and contradictions of our thinking, afloat on the current of time.

we have increasingly come to mistake the magnitude of a person’s arrogance and self-assertion for the measure of their merit:

She might have loved one man permanently, if she could have found one contemporary with her who could interest and command her throughout her range; but there was hardly any possibility of that, for such a person.

The relationships which suit you are those which develop and free your spirit, responding to the legitimate needs of your organism and leaving you free at all times.

Are we to despair or rejoice over the fact that even the greatest loves exist only “for a time”? The time scales are elastic, contracting and expanding with the depth and magnitude of each love, but they are always finite—like books, like lives, like the universe itself. The triumph of love is in the courage and integrity with which we inhabit the transcendent transience that binds two people for the time it binds them, before letting go with equal courage and integrity.

Questions of meaning are a function of human life, but they are not native to the universe itself—meaning is not what we find, but what we create with the lives we live and the seeds we plant and the organizing principles according to which we sculpt our personhood.

“Voluntarily to put it out of my power ever to be able to seize the chance of forming for myself a true and rich life would seem to me like suicide.”

“Who would be a goody that could be a genius?” Margaret Fuller had asked in Woman the year she left for Europe on the steamship alongside the newlywed Howes.

To the person undergoing it, any rapid ascent to new heights of experience can feel equally imperceptible from the interiority of the transformation.

Death, Darwin would imply, is not unjust but inherently natural—part of the impartial laws holding the universe together, mortality unshackled from morality and metaphysics, leaving no room for charges of blame and pleas for mercy.

How can a single person be both a stratospheric success and a failure bordering on the pathetic? Why do we seek narratives that move from less to more rather than from more to less, if the sum total is the same? Why do we consider it a failure when a long and loving relationship eventually grows troubled and ends, but celebrate romances bedeviled by innumerable obstacles that the lovers overcome before settling into a comfortable love? Why do we prefer the stories of lives that begin in poverty or obscurity and end in riches or fame to the stories of those that attain achievement early and end in poverty or oblivion?

Do not study for the sake of having acquirements to display, for the sake of being admired, for the sake of attracting attention [but for the] pleasure…derived from the feeling of energy that arises in the mind from the keen exercise of its powers in metaphysical, scientific or mathematical reasoning.

When we encounter a person of exceptional intellectual and creative vitality, their magnetism can disorient the compass needle of admiration and attraction—it becomes difficult, sometimes impossible, to tease apart the desire to be with from the desire to be like.

Hatty’s peculiarities will stand in the way of her success with people of society and the world, and I wish for her own sake that some of them were less decided and singular, but it is perhaps unreasonable to expect a person to be singular in their gifts and graces alone, and not to be equally unlike people in other matters.