I’m a big fan of Maria Popova’s blog, Brain Pickings, described by its author as “an inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness, spanning art, science, design, history, philosophy, and more.” Popova is who I’d want to be in another life, even though she’s half my age. Her brilliance and depth of reading is extraordinary. She’s been writing Brain Pickings for 13 years now and has accumulated a vast library of articles on books, people, and more. So, I was very excited when I heard that she was writing a book. That book, Figuring (paid link), came out earlier this year, and I’ve just finished reading it. I would sit on my porch in the late afternoon and savour ten pages or so at a time. It took me a couple of months and I didn’t want it to end.

What’s it about?

Figuring explores the lives of several people over the past four centuries – artists, writers, and scientists. Most are women who were remarkable in every way – including astronomer Maria Mitchell, sculptor Harriet Hosmer, writer Margaret Fuller, poet Emily Dickinson, amd scientist Rachel Carson. They pushed the boundaries of society at the time and stayed true to themselves. Popova writes in the introduction to the book,

“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 onto 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 of the shipwrecks of judgement and chance.”

Figuring is about making meaning of the way lives intersect and continue to inspire in retrospect.

I was fascinated to learn that Margaret Fuller’s travelogue, Summer on the Lakes, inspired Thoreau’s Walden. And that her book, Woman, was one of the first to make a case for the empowerment of women. And that she had an intellectually intimate relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Popova compares Fuller to the writer and critic, Rebecca Solnit, another of my favourite writers today.

Photographer Julia Margaret Cameron is also featured briefly. Did you know that she didn’t take up photography until she was 50? Cameron went on to become one of the finest portraitists of her day, photographing Charles Darwin, Robert Browning, and Alfred Tennyson.

I enjoyed reading about all of the women and men featured in the book, but especially Emily Dickinson and Rachel Carson, two women who combine my love for solitude, reading, and nature. Dickinson was a true original by design. She withdrew from the world and made little effort to be published. In fact, she asked that her poems be destroyed upon her death. Luckily for us, those wishes were not kept by her family. Dickinson didn’t want her writing compromised in any way and had no desire for fame or recognition.

“Dickinson shut the door and latched it for the remaining 24 years of her life. She alone would achieve what all the Transcendentalists had attempted and failed at – a purification of being by deliberate removal from the bustling commonplaces of society.”

Rachel Carson was an unassuming marine biologist with a love for poetry.

By the time she died, at the age of 56, Carson had introduced the world to the world ‘ecology,’ and launched the modern day environmental movement with her powerfully poetic book, Silent Spring (paid link).This book was responsible for the banning of the insecticide DDT. In a talk called “A Statement of Belief,” Carson said,

“I am not afraid of being thought a sentimentalist when I say that I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever you destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth.”

I happened to have a copy of Silent Spring on my bookshelf and hadn’t yet read it. So, after I finished Figuring, it was next on my list. Maybe I needed to wait for this particular time in my life to fully appreciate its mastery. While the book specifically explains how insecticides, particularly DDT, affect every aspect of the natural world, it’s also a beautiful illustration of how life is interconnected in every single way. It still has a lot to teach us today. Ironically, Carson was dying of cancer as she finished the book and died not long after it was published.

Now, I have ‘t even mentioned the many important relationships that each of these pioneers had and how their lives interweaved. But those stories are just as interesting and show how our chance relationships help shape and inform who we are. I hope I’ve got you thinking about reading this book. You won’t regret it.

The New York Times Review of Figuring

What have you read this summer that’s expanded your view of the world?