Figuring

by Maria Popova

the cultural acrobatics of nuanced appreciation without idolatry.

What invigorated Maria Mitchell that evening, and what would drive her for the remaining decades of her life, was not the king’s medal, nor the luster of worldwide recognition, but the sheer thrill of discovery—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.

These are questions impossible to answer without acknowledging what human hubris it is to call one thing accident and another luck in a universe insentient to any of our hopes and fears, to our categories of good and bad. The human mind seems unwilling to wrap itself and its prosthetic of language around the notion of pure impartial probability. We imbue even the word chance with a constellation of subjective meanings—chance as serendipity’s accomplice, chance as free will’s counterpoint, chance as love’s other name or a dog’s only.

a dual streak of integrity and insurgency.

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.

Beauty magnetizes curiosity and wonder, beckoning us to discover—in the literal sense, to uncover and unconceal—what lies beneath the surface of the human label. What we recognize as beauty may be a language for encoding truth, a memetic mechanism for transmitting it, as native to the universe as mathematics—the one perceived by the optical eye, the other by the mind’s eye.

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.

It 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. Not so a feeling—feelings coalesce out of the vapors that escape from the deepest groundwaters of our unreasoned and unreasonable being, and whatever rainbows they may scatter for a moment when touched with the light of another, they diffuse and evaporate just as readily, just as mysteriously.