Book Recommendation: Figuring by Maria Popova
Figuring by Maria Popova.
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“Some truths, like beauty, are best illuminated by the sidewise gleam of figuring, of meaning-making.” So begins the astonishing book Figuring, author Maria Popova’s lyrical quest to follow the glimmering threads linking science, art, love, and wonder throughout several centuries.
A snapshot from a chapter that shines light on Maria Mitchell, an American astronomer.
What does it mean to search for truth and meaning? And what do we do when we find them? Package them into satisfying equations—camouflage them in metaphor—ink them onto paper scraps passed over a back hedge. The larger-than-life figures in Popova’s book entwine their intellectual endeavors with the messy business of being human: sex, lies, ego, hopes, frailty, and desperate denial of mortality. Here there are no sterile ivory towers.
As I read, I recognize Dickenson, Emerson, Darwin, Galileo, Hawthorne, Whitman, Carson, and others. Popova points me toward thinkers that I’ve never encountered: Margaret Fuller, Maria Mitchell, Harriet Hosmer, and so many more men and women. Excitingly, Figuring is an invitation to consider “progress” in the light of “otherness”, from feminism to queer identity to a belief that the world—and our place in it—can be fundamentally different than it is in any variety of “today”.
💡 Popova’s own prose shines in this formidable tapestry. Her virtuosity as a writer neatly disproves the (entirely reasonable, IMO) hypothesis that the walls between science and art are insurmountable.
Clearly they are not: her descriptions of stars and sand and silent springs are as resonant to me as her passages about the deaths of children, of unrequited love, of the ultimate impermanence of the self. Each page delights me as a reader, challenges me as a scientist … and intimidates me as a writer!
If you’re looking for a quick and easy read, look elsewhere.
💡 But if you’re looking to nourish your soul while expanding your mind, pick up a copy of Figuring. Popova has the rare gift of being able to graft luminosity onto the sturdy trunk of scholarship.
It’s a gift worth sharing.
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