Figuring

by Maria Popova

We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding on to illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in sensical narratives. All the while, we mistake chance for choice, our labels and models of things for the things themselves, our records for our history. History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.

Facts crosshatch with other facts to shade in the nuances of a larger truth—not relativism, no, but the mightiest realism we have.

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.”

The difference between the fate of the sexes, Kepler suggests, is not in the heavens but in the earthly construction of gender as a function of culture. It was not his mother’s nature that made her ignorant, but the consequences of her social standing in a world that rendered its opportunities for intellectual illumination and self-actualization as fixed as the stars.

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.

He embraced certain values of the Quaker faith—abolition, education, and equal intellectual opportunities for the sexes. He insisted that his daughters receive the same basic education as his sons, and when one of his girls began exhibiting an aptitude for science greater than that of any of the others, he met her superior natural gifts with commensurate encouragement and opportunity for scholarship.