FIGURING

The polymathic Popova, presiding genius behind
brainpickings.org, looks at some of the forgotten heroes of science, art, and
culture.

“There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives,” writes the
author at the outset. She closes with the realization that while we individuals
may die, the beauty of our lives and work, if meaningful, will endure: “What
will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.” In between, she
peppers thoughtful, lucid consideration of acts of the imagination with stories
that, if ever aired before, are too little known. Who would have remembered
that of all the details of the pioneering astronomer Johannes Kepler’s life,
one was racing across Germany to come to the aid of his widowed mother, who had
been charged with witchcraft? The incident ably frames Kepler’s breaking out of
a world governed by superstition, “a world in which God is mightier than
nature, the Devil realer and more omnipresent than gravity,” and into a
radical, entirely different world governed by science. That world saw many
revolutions and advances ahead of the general population, as when, in 1865,
Vassar College appointed as its first professor of astronomy a woman, Maria
Mitchell, who combined a brilliant command of science with a yearning for
poetry. So it was with Rachel Carson, the great ecologist, whose love for a
woman lasted across a life burdened with terrible illness, and Emily Dickinson,
who might have been happier had her own love for a woman been realized. (As it
was, Popova notes, the world was ready for Dickinson: A book of her poems
published four years after her death sold 500 copies on the first day of
publication.) Throughout her complex, consistently stimulating narrative, the
author blends biography, cultural criticism, and journalism to forge elegant
connections: Dickinson feeds in to Carson, who looks back to Mitchell, who looks
forward to Popova herself, and with plenty of milestones along the way: Kepler,
Goethe, Pauli, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne….

A lyrical work of intellectual history, one that Popova’s many
followers will await eagerly and that deserves to win her many more.