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.”

There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

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.”

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

Newton would later refine Kepler’s three laws of motion with his formidable calculus and richer understanding of the underlying force as the foundation of Newtonian gravity. In a quarter millennium, the mathematician Katherine Johnson would draw on these laws in computing the trajectory that lands Apollo 11 on the Moon. They would guide the Voyager spacecraft, the first human-made object to sail into interstellar space.

Some questions: Where does it live, that place of permission that lets a person chart a new terrain of possibility, that makes her dare to believe she can be something other than what her culture tells her she is, and then become what she believes she can? How does something emerge from nothing? It is a question baffling enough to ask about the universe, but simply obtuse to consider about the self—there is no such thing as a self-made person.

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.

Absolute independence of spirit is an illusion. We are porous to the ideas and judgments of those we elect into our inner circle—a

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.

No one ever knows, nor therefore has grounds to judge, what goes on between two people, often not even the people themselves, half-opaque as we are to ourselves. One thing is certain: The quotient of intimacy cannot be contained in a label like “Uranian”—or “queer,” or whatever comes next. The human heart is an ancient beast that roars and purrs with the same passions, whatever labels we may give them.

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. 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.

“It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all sub...

The woman who does her work better than ever woman did before helps all woman kind, not only now, but in all the future, she moves the race no matter if it is only a differential movement, it is growth.

The richest relationships are often those that don’t fit neatly into the preconceived slots we have made for the archetypes we imagine would populate our lives—the friend, the lover, the parent, the sibling, the mentor, the muse. We meet people who belong to no single slot, who figure into multiple categories at different times and in different magnitudes. We then must either stretch ourselves to create new slots shaped after these singular relationships, enduring the growing pains of self-expansion, or petrify.

The measure of intimacy is not the quotient of friction between skin and skin, but something else entirely—something of the love and trust, the joy and ease that flow between two people as they inhabit that private world

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 reigning monarch of the universe.

Whatever time it is when you read this, please know my arms are figuratively about you. So close your eyes and know that you are loved.

BY GENIUS BELONGING TO THE WORLD. It strikes me, this existential ecology, as the simplest, most perfect measure of an actualized life—far fuller than fame and success, more generous than personal love and its greedy affinities, more precise than happiness and its confused aims.

Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, every poem and statue and symphony we’ve ever known—an entropic spectacle insentient to questions of blame and mercy, devoid of why. In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the “heavenly breezes” Kepler had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a symphonic civilization that long ago made love and war and mathematics on a distant blue dot. But until that day comes, nothing once created ever fully leaves us. Seeds are planted and come abloom generations, centuries, civilizations later, migrating across coteries and countries and continents. Meanwhile, people live and people die—in peace as war rages on, in poverty and disrepute as latent fame awaits, with much that never meets its more, in shipwrecked love. I will die. You will die. The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us. What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.