Maria Popova Weaves Together Stories of Human Ingenuity
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Version 0 of 1. FIGURING By Maria Popova In Maria Popova’s strange and lovely new book, “Figuring,” we learn about the precocious Maria Mitchell. In 1831, at the age of 12, she was peering through a telescope to count out the seconds of an eclipse. Night after night, as Popova tells it, the young girl “would point her steadfast instrument at the nocturne and sweep the skies with quiet systematic passion, searching for a new celestial object against the backdrop of familiar bodies.” Sixteen years later Mitchell became the first person to sight a new comet passing through our solar system. She went on to become America’s first professional woman astronomer, the first woman to join the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and, along with other firsts, a figure of immense power and genuine modesty. Mitchell also contributed poetry to her local literary club: There’s a deal to be learned in a midnight walkWhen 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. Mitchell, Popova writes, was probably in love with her friend Ida Russell, a famous beauty and Boston intellectual. (“Take me, lady, spurn me not; this blessing grant me,” Mitchell wrote. “To mingle yet my life with thine, and e’en be one with thee.”) Tragically, Russell died at 36, and though Mitchell lived long, she mingled her life with that of no one in particular. Despite its sorrows, her story is a pleasure to read. Popova uses the astronomer’s letters, essays and other writing to bring her strength of being and drive for knowledge to life in lyrical prose. Mitchell, though, is only one of the extraordinary characters in this ambitious, challenging and somewhat category-defying book. Beginning with Johannes Kepler in 1617 and ending with Rachel Carson in the 1960s, Popova explores the lives and ideas of a group of exceptional people. Mary Somerville, a Scottish astronomer, born in 1780, was also a mathematician, science writer, mother of four and lone female member of Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society. The incredible Caroline Herschel, who died in 1848, fled a life of domestic servitude in Germany to assist her scientist brother, William, in England. At 4 feet 3 inches, with one damaged eye from childhood typhus, Herschel brought William food, stoked his fire and fetched instruments. She also pounded and sieved manure to create the mold for a telescope’s mirror, and calculated the locations of 2,510 nebulae, while also discovering eight comets. There are poets, too, from the well-known Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson to less familiar writers, like the slightly terrifying Margaret Fuller, the first woman editor of a major New York newspaper. Roaming over four centuries, Popova traces the degrees of separation among her characters and the ways they walked into and out of one another’s lives. They corresponded, shared friends, pursued the same grand truths, and wrote books and poetry about one another’s work. They also lusted, and yearned, and fell in and out of love. As one was born, another was dying. As one became the first woman member of a fancy intellectual male enclave, so another became the second, a century or so later. Though the general structure of “Figuring” is chronological, it’s anything but linear. Generally it proceeds through a series of surprising links, fascinating diversions and sometimes dizzying associative drift. When the connections cohere, it’s like carefully constructed fiction. Mitchell leaves for Europe after the death of Russell, and there visits Somerville. The women have much in common, including naturally the legacy of Caroline Herschel, who died 10 years earlier. Popova quotes a delightful fan letter to Somerville from the famous Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth. It so happens that Edgeworth was the Maria (pronounced Ma-RYE-uh) for whom Mitchell was named. Popova regularly draws attention to poetry of the era, and the coincidence of subject and symbol can be captivating. Here inside Mitchell’s story is a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson. “I pass with yonder comet free, / Pass with the comet into space,” he wrote, months before Mitchell’s discovery. In fact, Emerson later visited Nantucket to look through Mitchell’s telescope. As did Melville, Thoreau and Frederick Douglass. Each winds in and out of the book. Sometimes the connections are intensely intimate. Mitchell’s European travel companions, for example, were Sophia Peabody and her husband, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Peabody, it appears, also had a passionate relationship with Ida Russell. It made Hawthorne jealous, though he himself shared a brief but consuming, erotic connection with Melville. Sometimes the crisscrossing of lives, loves and ideas is confusing but still true to life in its mess and its drama. Other connections point away from the story at hand but create a sense of immersion in the world in which these brilliant people wandered. Somerville tutored Ada Lovelace, the abandoned child of Lord Byron and writer of the world’s first computer program. In fact it was Somerville who first introduced Lovelace to the mathematician Charles Babbage, a meeting that resulted in the world’s first computer. At times, though, the detours are distracting. Popova quotes Caroline Herschel, by then an old lady bemoaning her mortality: “What a shocking idea it is to be decaying. Decaying!” It doesn’t matter how smart you are, Popova notes, death is the chilling and banal end that awaits us all. She then relays an extended anecdote about the genius physicist Richard Feynman and the death of his young wife in 1945. Feynman, too, yearned irrationally for some kind of afterlife. But neither Herschel’s lament nor Popova’s musings are in any way deepened by Feynman’s story, which only seems to throw off the book’s center of gravity. There is beautiful writing in “Figuring,” inspired by Popova’s obvious love for words. But sometimes it obscures her meaning, as when she suggests that Rachel Carson knew deep down she was dying: “She must have known, with the cellular awareness of a body frailing behind the denial-bolted portal of the conscious mind, that she would never return.” Over a decade ago Popova founded the very popular intellectual blog Brain Pickings. The site is drawn, she explains, from her “extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy and the various other tentacles of human thought and feeling.” This is also a fair description of much of “Figuring.” In both forms, Popova is intrigued by the convergences and contingencies of history, and she regularly calls out odd juxtapositions that evoke a sense of wonder. But you can have only so much marginalia in a book. Too much and the overall direction disintegrates, or at least becomes more like that of a blog — episodic and incidental — than a story. The marginalia in “Figuring” includes small, perplexing walk-ons. Maurice Sendak is invoked in a story about Margaret Fuller, the wisdom of Audre Lorde is brought in to explain something about Mitchell and Melville, and Ursula K. Le Guin is quoted to illustrate another Fuller story. “Words are events,” the Le Guin quote goes. “They do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer.” It is a pleasing and true sentiment. But “Figuring” didn’t need Le Guin’s version of it (or Sendak or Feynman or Lorde). Popova’s words do enough by themselves. |