Figuring

by Maria Popova

All of it—the rings of Saturn and my father’s wedding band, the underbelly of the clouds pinked by the rising sun, Einstein’s brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass that made the jar and each idea Einstein ever had, the shepherdess singing in the Rila mountains of my native Bulgaria and each one of her sheep, every hair on Chance’s velveteen dog ears and Marianne Moore’s red braid and the whiskers of Montaigne’s cat, every translucent fingernail on my friend Amanda’s newborn son, every stone with which Virginia Woolf filled her coat pockets before wading into the River Ouse to drown, every copper atom composing the disc that carried arias aboard the first human-made object to enter interstellar space and every oak splinter of the floorboards onto which Beethoven collapsed in the fit of fury that cost him his hearing, the wetness of every tear that has ever been wept over a grave and the yellow of the beak of every raven that has ever watched the weepers, every cell in Galileo’s fleshy finger and every molecule of gas and dust that made the moons of Jupiter to which it pointed, the Dipper of freckles constellating the olive firmament of a certain forearm I love and every axonal flutter of the tenderness with which I love her, all the facts and figments by which we are perpetually figuring and reconfiguring reality—it all banged into being 13.8 billion years ago from a single source, no louder than the opening note of Beethoven’s Fift...

Neither the spider has planned for the leaf nor the leaf for the spider—and yet there they are, an accidental pendulum propelled by the same forces that cradle the moons of Jupiter in orbit, animated into this ephemeral early-morning splendor by eternal cosmic laws impervious to beauty and indifferent to meaning, yet replete with both to the bewildered human consciousness beholding it.

We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins.

Some truths, like beauty, are best illuminated by the sidewise gleam of figuring, of meaning-making.

We slice through the simultaneity by being everything at once: our first names and our last names, our loneliness and our society, our bold ambition and our blind hope, our unrequited and part-requited loves.

Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of “biography” but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams.

There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

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.

This is the paradox of transformative experience: Because our imagination is bounded by our existing templates of how the world as we know it works, we fail to anticipate the greatest transformations—the events and encounters so unmoored from the familiar that they transfigure our map of reality and propel us into a wholly novel mode of being. This is as true of civilizations—the ancient Greeks could never have fathomed the miraculous cascade of inventions that let me read Plato on a digital tablet via wireless Internet aboard an airplane—as it is of our individual imaginations.

What makes a person “the same” person across life’s tectonic upheavals of circumstance and character? Amid the chaos and decay toward which the universe inclines, we grasp for stability and permanence by trying to carve out a solid sense of self in our blink of existence. But there is no solidity. Every quark of every atom of every cell in your body had been replaced since the time of your first conscious memory, your first word, your first kiss. In the act of living, you come to dream different dreams, value different values, love different loves. In a sense, you are reborn with each new experience.

“Who would be a goody that could be a genius?”

Few things elate more than the discovery of new chambers of one’s own heart.

Under the light of what she had once called in a love letter “that best fact, the Moon,” she reverenced the shimmering undulance as nothing less than “holy.”

So desperate was Sophia for a cure, and so hopeful in her desperation—for hope is how we only ever survive despair—that she wrote fondly of her leeches as “incomparable, lovely, gentle, delicate, tender, considerate, generous, fine, disinterested, excellent, dear, elegant, knowing, graceful, active, lively, animated, beautiful” creatures, providers of “the very quietest, easiest way of freeing oneself from pain that can be thought of.”

Never be afraid to love. Surrender yourself to its sway, & even if it tears your earthly fibres to tatters, it will strengthen the heavenly ones. Such love is the only proof of Immortality.

A decade later, in a letter of consolation to his sister upon the loss of her husband, Dickens would write that while grief never fully leaves, “a real earnest strenuous endeavour to recover the lost tone of spirit” is necessary if one is to go on with life—observing that in “a determined effort to settle the thoughts, to parcel out the day, to find occupation regularly or to make it, to be up and doing something, are chiefly to be found the mere mechanical means which must come to the aid of the best mental efforts.” The strategy seems almost banal. But anyone who has lived through loss will recognize in it the essential banality of survival—we come unmoored, then buoy ourselves up with the flimsiest of lifeboats, cobbled together out of any plank and rope we can grasp.

the chronic malady of the polymathic mind: distraction by competing intellectual enthusiasms.

Photography, born out of a scientific battle against the ephemerality of light and shadow, grew into an art contesting the impermanence of existence itself.

“Expression is everything in a daguerreotype,” he writes in a Lady’s Almanac article. “All else,—the hair—jewelry—lace-work—drapery or dress, and attitude, are only aids to expression. It must at least be comfortable, and ought to be amiable.”

The Victorian age killed the art of letter writing by kindness: it was only too easy to catch the post. A lady sitting down at her desk a hundred years before had not only certain ideals of logic and restraint before her, but the knowledge that a letter which cost so much money to send and excited so much interest to receive was worth time and trouble. With Ruskin and Carlyle in power, a penny post to stimulate, a gardener, a gardener’s boy, and a galloping donkey to catch up the overflow of inspiration, restraint was unnecessary and emotion more to a lady’s credit, perhaps, than common sense. Thus to dip into the private letters of the Victorian age is to be immersed in the joys and sorrows of enormous families, to share their whooping coughs and colds and misadventures, day by day, indeed hour by hour.

But her insight holds true—the easier it becomes to convey a message in a certain medium, the less selective we grow about what that message contains, and soon we are conveying the trifles and banalities of our day-to-day life, simply because it is effortless to fill the page (or feed, or screen, or whatever medium comes next).

Letters about lunch items have been supplanted by Instagram photographs of lunch items, to which we apply the ready-made filters that have purported to supplant the artistry of light, shadow, and composition. The art of photography, too, is being killed by kindness.

Lest we judge Payne too harshly for not pushing forth with her data, may we not forget that Galileo, too, recanted his revolutionary findings under the pressures of his time. His era’s men of the cloth were now men of Ivy League regalia, but they were still men in positions of power who bulldozed and bullied any challenge to their authority.

When the pioneering astrophotographers of John Adams Whipple’s generation began pointing one end of the telescope at the cosmos and affixing the other to the camera, we could behold for the first time images of stars that lived billions of light-years away, billions of years ago, long dead by the time their light—the universe’s merchant of time and conquistador of space—reached the lens.

We say that photographs “immortalize,” and yet they do the very opposite. Every photograph razes us on our ephemeral temporality by forcing us to contemplate a moment—an unrepeatable fragment of existence—that once was and never again will be.

lesbian—a word that wouldn’t come into popular use until more than a century later. We are always trapped by the lexicon of the present in narrating the past, so let it be a shorthand for the complex and confusing ecosystem of emotional and physical relations that the women-loving women of Hosmer’s time navigated.

In Greek mythology, Hesper, the evening star, is the nocturnal counterpart to Phosphor, the morning star. Pythagoras was the first to realize that the two were simply different apparitions of the same “wandering star”—the planet Venus—determined by its orbit.

Everybody is being married but myself….Even if so inclined, an artist has no business to marry. For a man, it may be well enough, but for a woman, on whom matrimonial duties and cares weigh more heavily, it is a moral wrong, I think, for she must either neglect her profession or her family, becoming neither a good wife and mother nor a good artist. My ambition is to become the latter, so I wage eternal feud with the consolidating knot.

Ambition is disfigured into arrogance when it becomes unmoored from self-awareness, from a realistic assessment of one’s competences.

“We are the only poets,” Emily told Susan, “and everyone else is prose.”

“Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God,” Mitchell wrote in her journal in Dickinson’s thirty-fifth year.

Again and again, she would tell all the truth but tell it slant, unmooring the gender of her love objects from the pronouns that befit their biology.

Botany was the back door through which Victorian women entered the scientific establishment formally closed to them.

That summer, Emily Dickinson cut off her auburn hair.

“If I read a book which makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me,” she told him, “I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

Mabel recorded her dynamic sex life in her diary, using a set of symbols to mark lovemaking and her orgasms. (In his own diary, the virgin Hans Christian Andersen used a Christian cross to mark his self-pleasuring.)

Perhaps Lavinia wasn’t afflicted with some singular selfishness but simply with the common ignorance of how impotent genius is without ambition.

Memory and motive are the two edges of the blade by which we slice experience out of events and carve out history—personal, political, civilizational—from the trunk of life.

The stated mission of the Golden Record was to serve as a message from humanity to some other civilization that might surmount the towering improbability of finding it adrift amid the cosmic infinitude and having the necessary technology and consciousness to decode its contents. Eclipsing this sweetly naïve aspiration is the unstated aim of the project, an endeavor far more poetic than scientific—to mirror what is best and truest of humanity back to us, at a moment when we seemed to have forgotten that we share this small, improbable planet.

For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.

Writing couldn’t have been a mere “passion”—it must have been for her, as it is for many of us who write, redemption, self-salvation, a lifeline.

If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.