Figuring

by Maria Popova

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.”

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

How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism?

How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?

remained. Was it then, Plutarch asks, the same ship? There is no static, solid self. Throughout life, our habits, beliefs, and ideas evolve beyond recognition. Our physical and social environments change. Almost all of our cells are replaced. Yet we remain, to ourselves, “who” “we” “are.”

Even the farthest seers can’t bend their gaze beyond their era’s horizon of possibility,

but every once in a while—whether by accident or conscious effort—the wire loosens and the kernel of a revolution slips through.

the church was then the mass media, and the mass media were as unafraid of resorting to propaganda as they are today.

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

treatises on music, a subject that always enchanted Kepler as much as mathematics, perhaps because he never saw the two as separate.

“It’s part of the nature of man to start with romance and build to a reality.”

In Germany, some twenty-five thousand were killed.

“Through my effort God is being celebrated in astronomy,”

“Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader,” young Sylvia Plath

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.

wondered whether the price of any truth is to be capped at so great a personal cost.

But the seventy-five-year-old woman never recovered from the trauma of the trial and the bitter German winter spent in the unheated prison. On April 13, 1622, shortly after she was released, Katharina Kepler died, adding to her son’s litany of losses.

perhaps he knew that policy change and cultural change are hardly the same thing, existing on different time scales.

and that lunar gravity is responsible for earthly tides:

Isn’t it better, he wonders in another stroke of psychological genius, to illustrate the monstrosity of people’s ignorance by way of the ignorance of imaginary others?

poetry’s highest task is “to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.” This must

“The same, precisely the same conflicts have always stood as now, with slight shifting of scene & costume,” Ralph Waldo Emerson would write in his journal in the middle of the nineteenth century.

François Poullain de la Barre’s landmark assertion that “the mind has no sex.”

what had gotten his mother into all this trouble in the first place—her ignorant beliefs and behaviors taken for the work of evil spirits, her social marginalization as a widow—was the fact that she had never benefited from the education her son, as a man, had received.

The difference between the fate of the sexes, Kepler suggests, is not in the heavens but in the earthly construction of gender as a function of culture.

America’s first professional woman astronomer,

the ecstasy of having personally chipped a small fragment of knowledge from the immense monolith of the unknown, that elemental motive force of every sincere scientist.

her ego but for American

first woman elected, unanimously, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

pencil. It will be almost a century before the Academy admits the second woman—the anthropologist Margaret Mead.

“There’s only one thing in the world of any real importance, and that is goodness.”

“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.

have wondered whether Marie Curie, famed for her insistence on owning no more than her one black dress, which she wore both on her wedding day and daily at the lab, was aware of this slender thread of lineage to the cultural progenitor who paved the way for women in science.)

He saw the hunger for beauty as inseparable from the search for truth, both indelible pillars of the human spirit. Many years later, Maria would write in her journal:

The three “Portuguese” children became her first scholars, soon

the couple Charlotte Porter and Helen Archibald Clarke. (The latter signed her literary work H.C.P., effectively adopting her partner’s last name long before marriage equality.)

“Is there not something about the moon, some relation or reminder, which no poem or literature has yet caught?”

William’s sister, Caroline Herschel—the world’s first professional

As birthdays temper the delicious illusion of our own inevitability with the hard fact that we were once inconceivable, so comets remind us that the life of the universe operates on cycles independent of and far grander than our own lifespans.

Among them was Frederick Douglass, who delivered his very first public speech at the island’s temple of learning.

A cathedral is really an image of the whole soul of man; and a Greek temple, of his understanding only—of just decisions, serene, finished postulates, settled axioms. We need both.

for attending Fuller’s salons, Ida Russell was almost unbearably beautiful. The relationship that blossomed between the two women was so intimate that Hawthorne soon fumed with jealousy.

Hawthorne himself would be magnetized into a friendship of similar romantic intensity. On August 5, 1850, he met Herman Melville at a literary gathering in the Berkshires.

“A man of a deep and noble nature has seized me in this seclusion….His wild, witch voice rings through me,” Melville wrote of reading Hawthorne’s stories in a remote farmhouse nestled in the summer foliage of the New England countryside.

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?

In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth,—even though it be covertly, and by snatches.

“such touches…can not proceed from any common heart.” No, they bespeak “such a depth of tenderness, such a boundless sympathy with all forms of being, such an omnipresent love” that they render their author singular in his generation—as singular as the place he would come to occupy in Melville’s heart.

Punctuating the invisible log of all that was written but destroyed is all that was spoken but unwritten, all that was felt but unspoken.