Figuring

by Maria Popova

Sylvia Plath would write to her mother three centuries later. But interpretation invariably reveals more about the interpreter than about the interpreted. 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. The

Interpretation between writer and reader

Herschel would become the first woman awarded the gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society—the era’s most respected scientific establishment. It would be another 168 years before another woman received it: Vera Rubin.

Like holidays, comets—icy clumps of soot and stardust shed by the eternal

as emissaries of the ephemeral—serve as anchors of periodicity by which to moor ourselves to the uncertain flow of existence and space out segments of being along the fleeting interlude of life.

Comets...

There’s a deal to be learned in a midnight walk When you take it all alone. If a gentleman’s with you, it’s talk, talk, talk. You’ve no eyes and mind of your own.

Being alone...

its use much as our wisdom teeth survived evolution.

...?...

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.

Theme of the book... Transformational experiences... Transformational thought.

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

Randomness...