Figuring

During the Renaissance, the Medicis were the richest family in Florence. They used this wealth to fund the world’s great artists. These geniuses were then free to work on their art while the works entered the Medici’s personal collection. On the internet, we can all be modern-day Medici’s, being patrons of the world’s great artists.

Maria Popova is a modern-day crowdfunded writer-philosopher, combining bits and pieces of the world to create something awesome. She gives almost all of her work away for free, receiving donations on her website Brain Pickings to support herself.

She writes like an overexuberant college student who can’t stop telling you about the amazing thing she found at the library over the weekend. She’s a daunting intellect who enjoys reading Nietche for fun, highlighter in hand, while running on a treadmill.

She’s most famous for her newsletter Brain Pickings, which she started in college. While working at an advertising firm while studying at the University of Pennsylvania, she put together a newsletter of worldly ideas. She started sending out some important and interesting things to a few friends, who forwarded it to other people, eventually picking up millions of visitors.

She’s been doing other projects as well like The Universe in Verse (a celebration of science and nature in poetry) and a children’s book. Her most encompassing project is her book Figuring, a fascinatingly dense book that I listened to each morning in 20-minute chunks. I needed to have a Kindle version as well so that I could highlight my favorite passages and read the poems more carefully. The audiobook kept me moving along while the Kindle version let me keep my favorite passages.

The book is a mix of poetry, history, and philosophy. It’s a book about the trailblazing women who managed to break into our male-dominated world. Much like her blog, Figuring has a ton of blockquotes, as if Popova can’t bear to transform the base work. When asked to list her sources, she says:

Every voracious reader knows that there is no Dewey system for the Babel of the mind. You walk amid the labyrinthine stacks and ideas leap at you like dust bunnies drawn from the motes that cover a great many different books read long ago. In a sense, I have brought every book I have ever read and every thought I have ever thought—that is, all of myself—to this project.

Popova, Maria. Figuring (p. 549). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Why did Popova call the book Figuring without even adding a subtitle? It’s a made-up word. Why not go for something that made more sense and was more straightforward. It’s because this is a book about her—about everything about her—and all of those things together, in a book, represent something more than can be represented in a single sentence. So defines the word early in the book:

Some truths, like beauty, are best illuminated by the sidewise gleam of figuring, of meaning-making. In the course of our figuring, orbits intersect, often unbeknownst to the bodies they carry—intersections mappable only from the distance of decades or centuries. Facts crosshatch with other facts to shade in the nuances of a larger truth—not relativism, no, but the mightiest realism we have.

Popova, Maria. Figuring (p. 4). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The question is how to pull off of this together. What is the “meaning of it all?” It should be a simple question that one should be able to answer, but much like the rest of the book, diving into “The All” is more complicated and rewarding. As Herman Melville wrote into a romantic letter to Nathanial Hawthorne as he was finishing Moby Dick:

In reading some of Goethe’s sayings, so worshipped by his votaries, I came across this, “Live in the all.” That is to say, your separate identity is but a wretched one,—good; but get out of yourself, spread and expand yourself, and bring to yourself the tinglings of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods, that are felt in the planets Saturn and Venus, and the Fixed Stars. What nonsense! Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. “My dear boy,” Goethe says to him, “you are sorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must live in the all, and then you will be happy!” As with all great genius, there is an immense deal of flummery in Goethe, and in proportion to my own contact with him, a monstrous deal of it in me.

Popova, Maria. Figuring (pp. 102-103). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

As much as this book is about the beauty and truth in the world, it’s also about the way society is structured. She tells the story of how Johannes Kepler, in his quest to explain science to the masses, had gotten his mother caught up in a trial as a witch. Kepler says that he’s not any smarter than his mother but that he wasn’t given the same advantages.

I know a woman who was born under almost the same aspects, with a temperament which was certainly very restless, but by which she not only has no advantage in book learning (that is not surprising in a woman) but also disturbs the whole of her town, and is the author of her own lamentable misfortune.

Popova, Maria. Figuring (p. 27). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

It’s easy for us to forget what things were like in the past. Johannes Kepler, while he was a Royal Astronomer was paid to read horoscopes for the king. Issac Newton was so obsessed with the occult that he made 7 colors of the rainbow, inserting the “color” indigo when there was no reason for it other than to have 7 rather than 6 colors. While these men were geniuses they weren’t perfect.

Our collective memory forgets how difficult it was for women. Take Maria (pronounced Mariah) Michell, the first female professor of Astronomy at Vasser. Mitchell was paid $800 a year compared to the $2,500 her male colleagues were making. Mitchell became world-famous for winning the King of Denmark’s prize for the discovery of a new comet. She became the first woman to be inducted into the American Academy of Sciences. On her certificate to cross out the word “Sir” and replace the word “Fellow” with “an Honorary Member” in pencil. And don’t think this is a watershed moment for the Academy. It would be almost 100 years before they inducted Margaret Mead as their second female member.

Even Google’s Knowledge Graph forgets that Mitchell never studied at a college. When you Google Maria Mitchell you get the following summary; however, when Mitchell was a young woman, there weren’t any schools accepting women. While she taught at Vasser, as the first professor of astronomy, the school, or any school for women, wasn’t around to educate her when she was college age.

It also makes me realize how women are historically seen in specific roles. For instance, I always thought of Florence Nightingale, as a nurse. However, she was equally prominent as a statistician. She created new ways of visualizing things like the Nightingale Rose diagram, an early form of data visualization that was used to fight epidemic diseases. This would have made my Nana, Florence Liebman, very excited.

Finally, this is a book that’s a series of tangents that are getting us closer to a larger truth, much like I wrote about in Fiction is the Lie That Tells the Truth. It’s fun intellectual candy that’s not necessarily “about” anything at all. Like Peter Salovey says in his recent commencement address at Yale:

In high school, I was always trying to figure out what a poem was “about”; I wanted to unlock the secret meaning. But Mr. Blaisdell would tell me, “Peter, what the poem is about is not always the most interesting question.” He encouraged me to appreciate beauty and occasionally put aside analysis; he pushed me to use different parts of my mind and my emotions.

Gifts from Our Teachers, Peter Salovey’s 2021 Commencement Address