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...

How can we know this and still succumb to the illusion of separateness, of otherness? This veneer must have been what the confluence of accidents and atoms known as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., saw through when he spoke of our “inescapable network of mutuality,” what Walt Whitman punctured when he wrote that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

One autumn morning, as I read a dead poet’s letters in my friend Wendy’s backyard in San Francisco, I glimpse a fragment of that atomic mutuality. Midsentence, my peripheral vision—that glory of instinct honed by millennia of evolution—pulls me toward a miraculous sight: a small, shimmering red leaf twirling in midair. It seems for a moment to be dancing its final descent. But no—it remains suspended there, six feet above ground, orbiting an invisible center by an invisible force. For an instant I can see how such imperceptible causalities could drive the human mind to superstition, could impel medieval villagers to seek explanation i...

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 m...

We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding on to illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of...

History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.

Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of “biography” but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams. Lives interweave with other lives, and out of the tapestry arise hints at answers to questions that raze to the bone of life:

So much of the beauty, so much of what propels our pursuit of truth, stems from the invisible connections—between ideas, between disciplines, between the denizens of a particular time and a particular place, between the interior world of each pioneer and the mark they leave on the cave walls of culture, between faint figures who pass each other in the nocturne before the torchlight of a revolution lights the new day, with little more than a half-nod of kinship and a match to change hands.

Even the farthest seers can’t bend their gaze beyond their era’s horizon of possibility, but the horizon shifts with each incremental revolution as the human mind peers outward to take in nature, then turns inward to question its own givens. 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?

Kepler knew what we habitually forget—that the locus of possibility expands when the unimaginable is imagined and then made real through systematic effort. Centuries later, in a 1971 conversation with Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke about the future of space exploration, science fiction patron saint Ray Bradbury would capture this transmutation process perfectly: “It’s part of the nature of man to start with romance and build to a reality.”

But Mitchell would always remain unmoved by such recognition. “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.”

Over and over, Maria’s umbral brilliance would rise above the shadows cast by her society. “Mingle the starlight with your lives,” she would later tell her students at Vassar—America’s first class of women astronomers—“and you won’t be fretted by trifles.”

Comets of chance and tides of circumstance sculpt the shorelines of the self to make us who we are—we can no more claim all credit for our achievement than deflect all blame for our impediments, and it is often difficult to separate the elements of life that make for fortune from those that make for misfortune.

But truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning.

Meville in a letter to Hawthorne

“That visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength,” Audre Lorde would write a century after Mitchell and Melville.

The human heart is an ancient beast that roars and purrs with the same passions, whatever labels we may give them. We are so anxious to classify and categorize, both nature and human nature. It is a beautiful impulse—to contain the infinite in the finite, to wrest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb toward higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves. The labels we give to the loves of which we are capable—varied and vigorously transfigured from one kind into another and back again—can’t begin to contain the complexity of feeling that can flow between two hearts and the bodies that contain them.

“It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite,” Melville had written at the end of his amorous review of Hawthorne—a

Years later, Edgeworth would write admiringly of Somerville that “while her head is up among the stars, her feet are firm upon the earth.”

Months after the publication of Somerville’s Connexion, the English polymath William Whewell—then master of Trinity College, where Newton had once been a fellow, and previously pivotal in making Somerville’s Laplace book a requirement of the university’s higher mathematics curriculum—wrote a laudatory review of her work, in which he coined the word “scientist” to refer to her. The commonly used term up to that point—“man of science”—clearly couldn’t apply to a woman, nor to what Whewell considered “the peculiar illumination” of the female mind: the ability to synthesize ideas and connect seemingly disparate disciplines into a clear lens on reality. Because he couldn’t call her a physicist, a geologist, or a chemist—she had written with deep knowledge of all these disciplines and more—Whewell unified them all into “scientist.”

Whewell had published a creationist treatise dismissing the possibility of extraterrestrial life. 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.”

In reading some of Goethe’s sayings, so worshipped by his votaries, I came across this, “Live in the all.” That is to say, your separate identity is but a wretched one,—good; but get out of yourself, spread and expand yourself, and bring to yourself the tinglings of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods, that are felt in the planets Saturn and Venus, and the Fixed Stars. What nonsense! Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. “My dear boy,” Goethe says to him, “you are sorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must live in the all, and then you will be happy!” As with all great genius, there is an immense deal of flummery in Goethe, and in proportion to my own contact with him, a monstrous deal of it in me.

Melville

How astonishing and how touchingly human, then, that Feynman penned the letter Gleick found in the box forty-two years later—a letter to Arline dated October 1946, four hundred eighty-eight days after her death: D’Arline, I adore you, sweetheart. I know how much you like to hear that—but I don’t only write it because you like it—I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you. It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you—almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing. But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you. I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead—but I still want to comfort and take care of you—and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you—I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together—or learn Chinese—or getting a movie projector. Can’t I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the “idea-woman” and general instigator of all our wild adventures. When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have wo...

After her death, the prominent Unitarian minister, women’s rights advocate, and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson—the first to bring Emily Dickinson’s genius to light, and Fuller’s eventual biographer—would write that “there is probably no American author, save Emerson, who has planted so many germs of high thought in other minds.”

An early feminist and devout champion of equality, Higginson was a man who lived his convictions. At thirty, he broke down a courthouse door in an effort to free a fugitive slave. At forty, he served in the Civil War as colonel in the first federally authorized black battalion, after turning his home into a well-trodden stop on the Underground Railroad. At fifty, he was editor of the official journal of the American Woman Suffrage Association, which he had cofounded—a position he would hold for fourteen years. In his sixties, he became Margaret Fuller’s biographer, after having raised her sister’s maternally orphaned and paternally abandoned daughter, Margaret Fuller Channing.

I died for beauty, but was scarce Adjusted in the tomb, When one who died for truth was lain In an adjoining room. He questioned softly why I failed? “For beauty,” I replied. “And I for truth,—the two are one; We brethren are,” he said. And so, as kinsmen met a night, We talked between the rooms, Until the moss had reached our lips, And covered up our names.

Dickinson

This is the common tragedy: All attempts at coercing love—whether by the aggressive demands of jealousy or by the tearful pleadings of self-martyrdom—are as effective as coaxing a tortoise out of its shell with a stick: the more you poke, the more she retreats.

feelings coalesce out of the vapors that escape from the deepest groundwaters of our unreasoned and unreasonable being, and whatever rainbows they may scatter for a moment when touched with the light of another, they diffuse and evaporate just as readily, just as mysteriously.

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.

This false notion of the body as the testing ground for intimacy has long warped our understanding of what constitutes a romantic relationship. The measure of intimacy is not the quotient of friction between skin and skin, but something else entirely—something of the love and trust, the joy and ease that flow between two people as they inhabit that private world walled off from everything and everyone else.

And yet, although he experienced himself as an individual, he had somehow conceded to the union of marriage and wedded a human bride—one who had grown to depend on him for her emotional well-being, which Waldo now experienced as a dead weight. He called it a “Mezentian marriage”—a grim allusion to the Roman myth of the cruel King Mezentius, known for tying men face-to-face with corpses and leaving them to die.

Schopenhauer would limn this central paradox of intimacy in the philosophical allegory of the porcupine dilemma: In the cold of winter, a covenant of porcupines huddle together seeking warmth. As they draw close, they begin wounding each other with their quills. Warmed but maimed, they instinctually draw apart, only to find themselves shivering and longing for the heat of other bodies again. Eventually, they discover that unwounding warmth lies in the right span of space—close enough to share in a greater collective temperature, but not so close as to inflict the pricks of proximity.

Emerson would give his most direct and unreserved account of his cascading admiration for Margaret—admiration not flourished to impress, as his public commemoration of her after her death would be—in the unadorned candor of his journal: A pure and purifying mind, self-purifying also, full of faith in men and inspiring it. Unable to find any companion great enough to receive the rich effusions of her thought, so that her riches are still unknown and seem unknowable….All natures seem poor beside one so rich, which pours a stream of amber over all objects, clean and unclean, that lie in its path….Beside her friendship, other friendships seem trade, and by the firmness with which she threads her upward path, all mortals are convinced that another road exists than that which their feet have trod.

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.

Mine is a great nature as yet in many regions an untrodden wild, full of wild beasts and reptiles not yet tamed and classed, but also of rare butterflies, exquisite and grand vegetations respondent to the sun and stars. Its dynamics reveal not yet their concords—as yet it energizes more than harmonizes.

Margaret Fuller

What is so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling? How beautiful, on their approach to this beating heart, the steps and forms of the gifted and the true! The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter, and no night; all tragedies, all ennuis vanish; all duties even; nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons.

Emerson

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.

Thoreau

The tree cannot come to flower till its root be free from the cankering worm, and its whole growth open to air and light. While any one is base, none can be entirely free and noble.

Margaret Fuller

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.

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal—that is your success.

Thoreau

I mourned that I never should have a thorough experience of life, never know the full riches of my being; I was proud that I was to test myself in the sternest way, that I was always to return to myself, to be my own priest, pupil, parent, child, husband, and wife….A sister I have truly been to many,—a brother to more,—a fostering nurse to, oh how many! The bridal hour of many a spirit, when first it was wed, I have shared, but said adieu before the wine was poured out at the banquet. And there is one I always love in my poetic hour, as the lily looks up to the star from amid the waters; and another whom I visit as the bee visits the flower, when I crave sympathy. Yet…all is well; all has helped me to decipher the great poem of the universe.

Margaret Fuller

One of the greatest betrayals of our illusion of permanence, one of the sharpest daggers of loss, is the retroactive recognition of lasts—the last time you sat across from a person you now know you will never see again, the last touch of a hand, the last carefree laugh over something spoken in the secret language that binds two people in intimacy—lasts the finality of which we can never comprehend in the moment, lasts we experience with sundering shock in hindsight.

We never know we go—when we are going We jest and shut the door— Fate following behind us bolts it And we accost no more.

Dickinson

(Fuller would have appreciated Chopin’s remark that “Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars, [whereas] Beethoven challenges the universe.”)

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.

But every once in a while, pure chance intercedes to remind us that whatever structures of control we may put into place, however much we may mistake the illusion of choice for the fact of choice, randomness is the reigning monarch of the universe.

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.

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. To look at a daguerreotype is to confront the fact of your own mortality in the countenance of a person long dead, a person who once inhabited a fleeting moment—alive with dreams and desperations—just as you now inhabit this one.

Pinned above the main desk area at the observatory is an archival photograph of Annie Jump Cannon examining one of the photographic plates with a magnifying glass. I take out my smartphone—a disembodied computer of Venus, mundane proof of Einstein’s relativity, instant access to more knowledge than Newton ever knew—and take a photograph of a photograph of a photograph.

We long for perpetual motion out of the same impetus—a stubborn refusal to recognize that cessation is the ultimate nature of all things, and that any dynamism, wherever in time it may fall, however briefly, is cause for celebration.