Figuring

by Maria Popova

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.” Like any currency of value, the human imagination is a coin with two inseparable sides. It is our faculty of fancy that fills the disquieting gaps of the unknown with the tranquilizing certitudes of myth and superstition, that points to magic and witchcraft when common sense and reason fail to unveil causality. But that selfsame faculty is also what leads us to rise above accepted facts, above the limits of the possible established by custom and convention, and reach for new summits of previously unimagined truth.

Whether what happened next was the product of intentional malevolent manipulation or the unfortunate workings of ignorance is hard to tell. My own sense is that one aided the other, as those who stand to gain from the manipulation of truth often prey on those bereft of critical thinking.

Kepler was unconsoled by the decree—perhaps he knew that policy change and cultural change are hardly the same thing, existing on different time scales.

Comets have transfixed humanity since ancient times. With their unpredictable apparitions tickling our pattern-seeking propensity, our hunger for casual correlations, our primal tendency toward equating unpredictability and randomness with evil, they came to be seen as omens of drought, famine, and bloodshed. Long after astronomy stripped them of such superstitious enchantment, they have continued to exert a pull on the popular imagination.

Alarmed at the intensity of her attachment to Ida, Maria reasoned that rather than turning a single person into the center of gravity in our emotional universe, our attachments should be distributed among many people, each fulfilling a different need—one providing intellectual stimulation, another rendering us “more elastic and buoyant, more happy and radiating more happiness, because we know him,” another inspiring in us such “warmth of affection” that “our hearts grow as if in a summer feeling.”

How were Maria Mitchell and Ida Russell first drawn together? What happened between them? Why did Nathaniel Hawthorne ultimately repel the divine magnet of Melville’s love? Most probably, we’ll never know. Possibly, they themselves never fully did. It is almost banal to say, yet it needs to be said: No one ever knows, nor therefore has grounds to judge, what goes on between two people, often not even the people themselves, half-opaque as we are to ourselves. One thing is certain: The quotient of intimacy cannot be contained in a label like “Uranian”—or “queer,” or whatever comes next. 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 not uncommon to see persons who hold in youth opinions in advance of the age in which they live, but who at a certain period seem to crystallise, and lose the faculty of comprehending and accepting new ideas and theories; thus remaining at last as far behind, as they were once in advance of public opinion. Not so my mother, who was ever ready to hail joyfully any new idea or theory, and to give it honest attention, even if it were at variance with her former convictions. This quality she never lost, and it enabled her to sympathise with the younger generation of philosophers, as she had done with their predecessors, her own contemporaries.

In Carlyle’s “Titanic” and “anti-celestial” tirades—“he does not converse; only harangues”—Fuller saw the personal manifestation of a larger cultural epidemic—an aesthetic of haughtiness that has only intensified in the century and a half since, as we have increasingly come to mistake the magnitude of a person’s arrogance and self-assertion for the measure of their merit:

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? 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. “No amount of effort can save you from oblivion,” Kurt Cobain would write in his journal.

Few things are more wounding than the confounding moment of discovering an asymmetry of affections where mutuality had been presumed.

I am reminded of recent findings in embodied cognition—the study of how external physical parameters influence our interior states—indicating that large open spaces and rooms with high ceilings enhance creativity, and I find myself wondering whether there might be an embodied-cognition analogue to Kierkegaard’s assertion that “the more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.” Deliberate constraints, after all, are a mighty catalyst of creative breakthrough: