Figuring

by Maria Popova

Three centuries later, Walt Whitman would observe how beholden the mind is to the body, “how behind the tally of genius and morals stands the stomach, and gives a sort of casting vote.”

The scientific proof was too complex, too cumbersome, too abstract to persuade even his peers, much less the scientifically illiterate public; it wasn’t data that would dismantle their celestial parochialism, but storytelling. Three centuries before the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms,”

Denise Levertov—the only woman of the fifteen—would state that poetry’s highest task is “to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.”

There’s a deal to be learned in a midnight walk When you take it all alone. If a gentleman’s with you, it’s talk, talk, talk. You’ve no eyes and mind of your own.

Somerville possessed the defining mark of the great scientist and the great human being—the ability to hold one’s opinions with firm but unfisted fingers, remaining receptive to novel theories and willing to change one’s mind in light of new evidence.

They have become two of the most conspicuous figures in that bright and animated company of authors who, thanks to our modern habit of writing memoirs and printing letters and sitting to be photographed, live in the flesh, not merely as of old in the word; are known by their hats, not merely by their poems. What damage the art of photography has inflicted upon the art of literature has yet to be reckoned.

With time and distance, she has also realized that what she had felt for Romney in the first place was not love but worship—of his noble character, of his kindness to her—and worship is only a simulacrum of love.

But she also perceives that he had been right to question her immature ideals—art cannot be some lofty chandelier dangling above life but must draw its light from the plane of living.

Better as a quotation than as an asserted platitude

her public success was wormed by her private sorrow at her father’s rejection.

Wormed

Like worship, admiration is only counterfeit love.

Many years later, she would write in response to the frequent criticism of her uncommon drive, often mistaken for arrogance, as women’s confident resolve tends to be:

Like M's story from TILT

“Nothing more widely distinguishes man from man than energy of will,” she writes in a six-page essay, positing that a conquering will is composed of imagination, perseverance, and “enthusiastic confidence in the future.”

flummery

To dismiss this longing for unremitting life as mere foolishness would be to take for granted the privileges of our own era—a privilege afforded by the men and women who have labored in labs to make our flesh a little more impervious, but only a little, to the ceaseless forces of decay that drive the universe.

He insisted that the dreamer and the worker are naturally symbiotic in each of us

“The boy who never built a castle in the air will never build one on earth.”

Despite her disappointing experience with the girls in her class, Fuller was not ready to relinquish her conviction that conversation was indeed what best loosened the ligaments of thought and trained the mind to leap. “Words are events,” Ursula K. Le Guin would write a century and a half later, “they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”

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.

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.

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.

“I know not how again to wander and grope, seeking my place in another Soul.”

“One writes not with the hand but with the whole person,” Virginia Woolf—who was in many ways Fuller’s twentieth-century counterpart—would observe.

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.

Risorgimento,

Every quark of every atom of every cell in your body had been replaced since the time of your first conscious memory, your first word, your first kiss. In the act of living, you come to dream different dreams, value different values, love different loves. In a sense, you are reborn with each new experience. What, then, made Margaret “the same” person as the girl who long ago had asked into the stormy skies: “How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean?”

Questions of meaning are a function of human life, but they are not native to the universe itself—meaning is not what we find, but what we create with the lives we live and the seeds we plant and the organizing principles according to which we sculpt our personhood.

In trying to justify to others her choice to be with a partner so unlike her previous infatuations, Fuller is continually revising her own understanding of love, of character, of herself. “You are intellect. I am life,” she had stormed at Waldo on the eighth anniversary of their meeting.

Bruised again and again in the hesitant hands of almost-lovers who met her longing for “fulness of being” with only half of themselves, people whose hearts thrashed about in the self-erected cages of intellectual ambition, she at last comes to recognize that the most exalted qualities of character—those that make for “the life, the life!”—are not of the mind but of the heart and spirit: integrity, unaffected kindness, constancy of affection.

[The Brownings] have the prettiest little baby; it is so fat and laughing and violet eyed; it looks as if was created fresh after a flood, and could not be the child of two people who had written books and such thoughtful sad books too.

Babies seem amazed at one another,

Einstein went on to develop this insight into his now-famous elevator thought experiment, demonstrating that any measurement of the laws of physics within a small contained space such as an elevator could not discern whether the elevator is static, cradled in a strong gravitational field, or rapidly accelerating upward across space—when the frames of reference are mutually accelerating, any general theory of relativity would implicitly also be a theory of gravity. To the person undergoing it, any rapid ascent to new heights of experience can feel equally imperceptible from the interiority of the transformation.

On May 17—six days before Fuller’s fortieth birthday—the trio boarded the Elizabeth along with the ship’s crew and four other mammals: the captain’s young wife; Fuller’s old Brook Farm friend, homebound at last; a young Italian woman determined to make a life for herself in New York; and a goat.

Mann delivered an electrifying commencement address in which he exhorted graduates: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” (A century and a half later, the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson would choose these words of Mann’s for his epitaph.)

But her insight holds true—the easier it becomes to convey a message in a certain medium, the less selective we grow about what that message contains, and soon we are conveying the trifles and banalities of our day-to-day life, simply because it is effortless to fill the page (or feed, or screen, or whatever medium comes next).

Email retains something over wshatsapp. The statement message

Annie Jump Cannon,

Hatty to those who love her—slices through changing altitudinal zones of vegetation up the five hundred feet of elevation above the river,

How can a single person be both a stratospheric success and a failure bordering on the pathetic? Why do we seek narratives that move from less to more rather than from more to less, if the sum total is the same?

Nice

When we encounter a person of exceptional intellectual and creative vitality, their magnetism can disorient the compass needle of admiration and attraction—it becomes difficult, sometimes impossible, to tease apart the desire to be with from the desire to be like.

The problem of the poet is to do the impossible . . . to unite the wildest freedom with the hardest precision. . . . Dante was free imagination, all wings, yet he wrote like Euclid.

“a love that burns through veils will burn through masks.”

We must not make bargains with the heart, as we would with the butcher for his meat. Our business is to give what we have to give

“An everlasting yes breathes from the life, from the work of the artist. Nature echoes it, and leaves to society the work of saying no, if it will.”

Like Oatmeal

sybarite

Others leap into being with the jolt of an alarm sounded by a particular event or person who has entered our lives at a particular moment—rarely anticipated, almost never convenient, always transformational. On those rare, momentous mornings, one looks in the bathroom mirror and greets—sometimes grudgingly, sometimes gleefully—the gladsome stranger of oneself.

Yes

“We both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour,” she wrote, “which keeps Believing nimble.”

I am reminded of recent findings in embodied cognition—the study of how external physical parameters influence our interior states—indicating that large open spaces and rooms with high ceilings enhance creativity,

Of course Thoreau had the whole idea in a sentence—“If thou art a writer, write as if thy time were short, for it is indeed short, at the longest.”

Carson had always loved the opening lines of William Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence”: To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.

“To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men.”

“I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars,” the Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska would write many seasons later.