Figuring

by Maria Popova

Virginia Woolf would perform a similar gesture with her groundbreaking, gender-bending novel Orlando, inspired by her lover Vita Sackville-West and later described by Vita’s son as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.” On

My dear Hawthorne, the atmospheric skepticisms steal into me now, and make me doubtful of my sanity in writing you thus. But, believe me, I am not mad, most noble Festus! But truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning.

The intensity proved too concussing for Hawthorne—he pulled away from the divine magnet.

To have known him, to have loved him, After loneness long; And then to be estranged in life, And neither in the wrong; And now for death to set his seal— Ease me, a little ease, my song! By wintry hills his hermit-mound The sheeted snow-drifts drape, And houseless there the snow-bird flits Beneath the fir-tree’s crape: Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine That hid the shyest grape.

“the great radical dualism” of gender and her insistence that “there is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”

The isolation and alienation of experiencing oneself as “other” stems from precisely these veils of visibility, eclipsing from view the many others who are also sorrowing with kindred sorrows and conflicted with kindred conflicts, also refugees from their own nature.

The human heart is an ancient beast that roars and purrs with the same passions, whatever labels we may give them.

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.

Thoreau, a year older than Mitchell and drunk on Transcendentalist grandiosity, writes in his own journal: “My life partakes of infinity.” It takes a great sobriety of spirit to fathom one’s depths—and one’s limits.

James Baldwin—himself

The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.

celebrity culture hollows creative culture:

love—“the same love we shall feel when we are angels.”

attraction was no one-sided fantasy. Anna enveloped Margaret

“It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man,” Margaret would later write, “for it is the same love which angels feel [and] is regulated by the same law as that of love between persons of different sexes.”

By magnet drawn up to thee I seem.

There it is again, the divine magnet that charged

“There is no terror like that of being known.”

abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson—the

She reasoned that because women’s opinions were dismissed by default, they never properly learned the tools of critical thinking that would allow them to transfigure “impressions into thoughts.” Instead, she believed the mind could be trained to “need no

from rouge or candlelight to brave the light of the world.”

Virginia Woolf subverted the millennia-old cultural rhetoric of

preside, one male, one female,” making her case for the androgynous mind as the best possible mind, “resonant and porous…naturally creative, incandescent and undivided,” Fuller denounced the dualism of gender and insisted that “there is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” The boundary, she argued far ahead of Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir in her groundbreaking Woman in the Nineteenth Century, is indeed porous, so that a kind of ongoing transmutation takes place: “Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid” as male and female “are perpetually passing into one another.”

this boundless and all-consuming emotional intensity eventually repelled its objects—a

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. It was all over.

takes a rare courage to recognize that feelings are the most perishable of our possessions, even more so than opinions, for an opinion—that is, a real opinion, which is qualitatively different from a fleeting impression or a borrowed stance—is arrived at via a well-reasoned argument with oneself.

They called this unexampled journal The Dial—the

To hold space for complexity, to resist the violence of containing and classifying what transcends familiar labels, takes patience and a certain kind of moral courage, which Waldo seemed unable—or unwilling—to conjure up.

This false notion of the body as the testing ground for intimacy has long warped our understanding of what constitutes a romantic relationship.

paradox, of course, is that there is always something irresistibly vitalizing about our irresolvable passions, about that which we can never fully possess nor can fully possess us—some potent antidote to the wearying monotony of our settled possessions.

tell me that I am cold or unkind, and in my most flowing state I become a cake of ice.

Ask me what I think of you & me,—& I am put to confusion.

But he exhorts her not to incite any more relationship conversations:

Do not expect it of me again for a very long time.

However divided we may feel within ourselves, it is the sum total of our warring fractions that makes us who we are—fragmentary but indivisible.

love letters to Nathan were a rare and delicate interlacing of passion and intellect: “There is no time for books and no poem like the poem we can make for ourselves.”

have felt, these last four days, a desire for you that amounted almost to anguish.”

happened, such a crowd of objects come

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. Emily Dickinson, the poet laureate of loss, knew this well:

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.

Such are the simple mechanics of human psychology’s feedback loop: The great determinant of how much we like another person is how much we believe they like us. As generosity of interpretation begets generosity of interpretation, Carlyle wrote to Emerson after reading Fuller’s newly published Woman:

however much we may mistake the illusion of choice for the fact of choice, randomness is the reigning monarch of the universe.

“Genius,” Emily Dickinson herself would later write, “is the ignition of affection—not intellect, as is supposed,—the exaltation of devotion, and in proportion to our capacity for that, is our experience of genius.”

would sit dressed in white and erupt the truth—her truth, and the human truth—as she saw and understood it, encoded in a symbolic language as complex and powerful as mathematics.

To own a Susan of my own Is of itself a Bliss— Whatever Realm I forfeit, Lord, Continue me in this!

Dear Susie—I send you a little air— The “Music of the Spheres”

“no interest in the all-important subject” of “becom[ing] a Christian.”

“Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God,” Mitchell

how she experienced life itself—and certainly for how she experienced love, with its parallel promise of exaltation and annihilation, its tonic and its tribulation.