Figuring

by Maria Popova

Seventeen inches square. More than seventeen hundred poems.

see in it for the first time, feel in my bones, her deliberate turning away from the south of life and toward the west of Susan, her “Only Woman in the World,” the pole star by which she oriented her life.

“Emily, Whom not seeing, I still love.”

Emerging from the Abyss, and reentering it—that is Life, is it not, Dear? The tie between us is very fine, but a Hair never dissolves.

With the whole of her being, Emily Dickinson was in love with her dearest friend—and nearest, devastatingly so—for thirty-six years.

“Sue—forevermore!”

“I chose this single star / From out the wide night’s numbers.”

most valuable Dickinson property: Emily’s poems and letters.

We are different people in different situations, each of our dormant multitudes awakened by a particular circumstance, particular chemistry, particular stroke of chance; each true, each real—a composite Master of our being.

there is any indisputable evidence in the body of her letters—to Susan, to Kate Scott Anthon, to Otis Lord—it is that she loved frequently and ferociously,

fragments of truth cohere into a unified sense of meaning,

and the task of the artist is to bring that meaning

Transcendentalism—the ideology she herself had named, predicated on the patterned interconnectedness of being—would outlive her in turn, seeding some of the most formative ideals of the next century, among them the environmental conservation movement.

time Rachel Carson was

National Book Award for, the award citation read, enchanting

“Every thing I have done seems to me blank and suspicious,” he wrote in his journal. “I doubt whether my greatest thoughts, as I supposed them, are not shallow—and people will most likely laugh at me….I am filled with restlessness.—I am incomplete.”

greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must

knew when first I saw you,” Rachel would later tell Dorothy, “that I wanted to see much more of you—I loved you before you left Southport.”

The night before the Freemans were about to leave Southport Island for the winter, Carson couldn’t resist the impulse to see Dorothy one last time, and she walked through the woods to their house to seal the farewell with a kiss.

“Somehow,” she would tell Dorothy, “the sharing of beautiful and lovely things is so much more satisfying with you than it has ever been for me with anyone else.”

As you must know in your heart, there is such a simple answer for all the “whys” that are sprinkled through your letters: As why do I keep your letters? Why did I come to the head that last night? Why? Because I love you! Now I could go on and tell you some of the reasons why I do, but that would take quite a while, and I think the simple fact covers everything.

“it is not half so important to know as to feel.”

Yes, we were a little shy, weren’t we, especially at first—but it was rather sweet that way and perhaps as it should have been for the first time you and I were together!

staggering number of things they have had in common since long before they met:

wonder if I’ll ever get used to the fact that you think my thoughts before I’ve expressed

The concept of synchronicity is the product of a most improbable friendship—that

From this sandbox of physics and psychology emerged the birth of synchronicity—an ordering system for similarities and acausally connected events that the observer experiences as having a meaningful connection on the basis of his or her subjective situation, a meeting point of internal and external reality. The

Rachel assured Dorothy that she loved her not for any particular quality or particular service she was performing in her life, but for the very essence of her soul.

“After all,” she told Dorothy, “our brand of ‘craziness’ would be a little hard for anyone but us to understand.” Theirs was the kind of “craziness” that comes from veering from the convention-paved path into that liminal Uranian space where love exists beyond category, beyond the cultural and biological imperative, beyond what even the most precise and poetic language can hold.

beneath the bookshelf where Beston’s

How many books have been composed—are being composed—as love letters to someone’s Dorothy?

It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within. —

The defeat ultimately cost Spock and Richards $100,000, but their case established a model for citizen resistance against the government’s assault on nature.

had begun, of course, long before that, for every beginning is an arbitrary point stabbed into the continuum that binds all events and all ages.

with Dorothy a quote she felt captured it all perfectly—words that Carson, like many people, misattributed to Abraham Lincoln, but that were in fact the opening lines of a

was Carson again who officiated the marriage of ecology and ethics that had begun with the intellectual flirtations of the Transcendentalists.

“We can live without birds and animals, but, as the current market slump shows, we cannot live without business.” Eight

As for insects, isn’t it just like a woman to be scared to death of a few little bugs! As long as we have the H-bomb everything will be

Time would later vote Carson one of the one hundred most influential people of the twentieth century.)

are not being truly civilized if we concern ourselves only with the relation of man to man. What is important is the relation of man to all life. This has never been so tragically overlooked as in our present age, when through our technology we are waging war against the natural world….By acquiescing in needless destruction and suffering, our stature as human beings is diminished.

In writing about the sea I have learned the important truth that a writer’s subject is always far bigger and more important than the writer himself.

“For me,” she told Dorothy, thanking her for being in effect her life-partner, “either would have been a solitary experience without you.”

handwritten note from Albert Schweitzer, thanking

Trappist monk Thomas Merton. In January 1963, he sent Carson

program host concluded by pointing out the fundamental difference between Carson and her critics—their respective views, one rooted in humility and the other in arrogance, about humanity’s place in and relationship to nature.

Among the estimated ten to fifteen million viewers who witnessed Carson’s triumph on national television was John F. Kennedy.

Carson had course-corrected government by employing the art of literature in the service of socially wakeful science.

write of is the joy and fun and gladness we have shared—for these are the things I want you to remember—I want to live on in your memories of happiness. I shall write more of those things. But tonight I’m weary and must put out the light. Meanwhile, there is this word—and my love will always live.

Senator Ribicoff greeted Carson: “Miss Carson…we welcome you here. You are the lady who started all this. Will you please proceed.”

Carson would never live to see the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, nor its ban of DDT, both the direct result of her work.