Figuring is one of those genre-defying reads that I find so hard to write about. Maria Popova, much-respected creator of the Brain Pickings blog, outlines her thesis (above) at the beginning of the book, and then she proceeds to illuminate the lives of pioneering thinkers (as it says in the book's description for Goodreads, “mostly women, mostly queer”), primarily by illustrating the ways in which these lives intersect with others (but don't call this a biography). Popova focusses on scientists and artists and the ways in which these two seemingly disparate disciplines interplay with each other – from Pythagorus' “music of the spheres”, through the Transcendentalists' melding of the two in the contemplation of nature, to Rachel Carson engaging the public in science with her poetic prose – and by circling back again and again to the same figures, she underlines the connectedness of everything (in human civilisation as in nature). And while this all adds up to an impressive and erudite aggregation, I also found it trying my patience: it felt too long, but I couldn't tell you what should have been cut out; I admire this book more than love it.
Popova mainly focusses on the astronomers Maria Mitchell and Caroline Herschel, mathematician Mary Somerville, the writer/critic Margaret Fuller, sculptor Harriet Hosmer, poet Emily Dickinson, and environmental crusader Rachel Carson. I have to admit that I was amazed at how little biographical information I knew about even the names on that list with which I was familiar: and especially the fluid and stymied sexuality that led so many of them to live out their lives in lonely frustration. Intersected into these main narratives are the influences of people such as Kepler, Pythagoras, Goethe, and Pauli; Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne (and who knew that Herman Melville was hopelessly in love with Hawthorne?), the Brownings and the Darwins and Charles Dickens; Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau. Really, too many names to recount them all. Mostly, though, these are stories of pioneering women who reached the pinnacle of their disciplines but were nonetheless denied access to the reins of power: denied the vote or publication, dismissed as “hysterical”, or literally denied entry to laboratories and observatories based solely on their sex. Yet, while the biographical information was the most interesting aspect of Figuring for me, Popova cautions against the adequacy of constructing a life from what a person leaves behind:
In lives like Emily Dickinson's – lives of tessellated emotional complexity encrypted in a private lexicon, throbbing in intensity bloodlet in symbol and metaphor – the inevitable blindspots of biography become eclipses. Because we bring our whole selves – our beliefs and our biases, our experience-sculpted curiosity and our limited knowledge – to all we do, each biographer is less an instrument of truth than an interpreter of meaning. And yet: Like a scientific theory, a biography is a map – one of many possible maps – to an objective external reality that may never be fully discernible or describable to the subjective observer but that is still best explored by mapping, by approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable.
And still, Popova takes many opportunities to try and illume the eclipses; to approximate the landscape of truth:
As Carson walked off the stage to a resounding ovation, she was stopped midstride by the sight of Dorothy standing quietly in the back of the lecture hall. With their eyes locked, Rachel approached her without a word, greeted her with an impulsive kiss, and whispered: “We didn't plan it this way, did we?” They went back to Carson's hotel for an hour – two bodies in physical space, behind a closed door, behind the curtain of partial records we mistake for history. All that survives of their relationship are the letters they exchanged while they were apart. But what transpired while they were together? The words that flowed between them, the torrents of touch, the glances each containing a galaxy of feeling, a universe of sentiment – unrecorded, unrecordable.
I have included large chunks of quotes here because Popova is an entrancing writer – better for me to allow her to speak for herself than try to describe her craft. Figuring is filled with declaratives which gave me pause at every turn, so here are a few examples:
• Language is not the content of thought but the vessel into which we pour the ambivalences and contradictions of our thinking, afloat on a current of time.
• The triumph of love is in the courage and integrity with which we inhabit the transcendent transience that binds two people for the time it binds them, before letting go with equal courage and integrity.
• We are never one thing, our slumbering potentialities stirred into being by situations in which chance and choice conspire to make us the people we are said to have been.
On the down side, I became annoyed by Popova's too deliberate links between everything and everyone; the following paragraph illustrative of the way in which she would introduce nearly every new thread:
Three nights before the Elizabeth sinks – as the deadly mycobacterium is weaving its way through Annie Darwin's body in England, as France is mourning the sudden loss of Louis Daguerre to a heart attack, as Emily Dickinson is beginning to fall in love with Susan Gilbert in Amherst, as Harriet Hosmer is dreaming up her sculpture Hesper, the Evening Star in Boston – John Adams Whipple uses Harvard's Great Refractor telescope to make the first daguerreotype of a star: Vega, the second brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, object of one of Galileo's most ingenious experiments supporting his proof of heliocentricity. “Nothing should surprise us any more, who see the miracle of stars,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in Aurora Leigh.
(Popova inserts herself into the figuring when she writes that she went searching for Margaret Fuller's tombstone “a million and a half hours after her death.” Ugh.) I appreciate that Popova was reaching for something beyond biography with this work, but in a way it was like listening to someone describe an afternoon she spent going down the Wikipedia rabbithole, clicking here and there as her interests dictated – the course of which doesn't necessarily follow what would have been interesting for me (and, therefore, the description of which isn't entirely interesting to me either). For instance: I was really enjoying the narrative of Rachel Carson's life – I would pick up a biography on her in a heartbeat – but when it got to the assassination of JFK (“sixteen hundred hours before King's assassination, 864, 353 after Lincoln's, and 72 after the Gettysburg speech he [JFK] didn't deliver”), Popova weaves in Whitman writing about the assassination of Lincoln (which leads to the chime between Lincoln calling Harriet Beecher Stowe “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war” and JFK greeting Carson as “the lady who started all this” [in reference to the environmental movement]), and then moves to how Jorge Luis Borges reacted to the news in his native Argentina, and how Leonard Bernstein dedicated a performance of Mahler's Second Symphony in tribute of JFK's memory, and how the news affected Catalan cellist and conductor Pablo Casals – and I just wanted to get back to Rachel Carson and the events of her life without all these tangents; nothing of Borges, Bernstein, or Casals figures anywhere else in the book and it cemented for me the feeling that much could have been excised for a tighter, more compelling read.
Still, I am left impressed with the working of Popova's mind and the skill with which she expresses herself. There was much I liked in this read, but again: this is a case of more admired than loved.
