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Maria Popova

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Figuring Kindle Edition

by Maria Popova (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.7 918 ratings

Editors' pick Best History

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Los Angeles Times Book PrizeWinner, 2019

Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries—beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement.

Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists—mostly women, mostly queer—whose public contribution have risen out of their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private relationships to change the way we understand, experience, and appreciate the universe. Among them are the astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in science; the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who did the same in art; the journalist and literary critic Margaret Fuller, who sparked the feminist movement; and the poet Emily Dickinson.

Emanating from these lives are larger questions about the measure of a good life and what it means to leave a lasting mark of betterment on an imperfect world: Are achievement and acclaim enough for happiness? Is genius? Is love? Weaving through the narrative is a set of peripheral figures—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman—and a tapestry of themes spanning music, feminism, the history of science, the rise and decline of religion, and how the intersection of astronomy, poetry, and Transcendentalist philosophy fomented the environmental movement.

Editorial Reviews

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“The polymathic Popova, presiding genius behind brainpickings.org, looks at some of the forgotten heroes of science, art, and culture . . . she peppers thoughtful, lucid consideration of acts of the imagination with stories that, if ever aired before, are too little known . . . Throughout her complex, consistently stimulating narrative, the author blends biography, cultural criticism, and journalism to forge elegant connections: Dickinson feeds onto Carson, who looks back to Mitchell, who looks forward to Popova herself, and with plenty of milestones along the way . . . A lyrical work of intellectual history, one that Popova's many followers will await eagerly and that deserves to win her many more.” —Kirkus Reviews [starred]

About the Author

MARIA POPOVA is a reader and a writer, and writes about what she reads on Brain Pickings (brainpickings.org), which is included in the Library of Congress's permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She hosts The Universe in Verse—an annual celebration of science through poetry—at the interdisciplinary cultural center Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. She grew up in Bulgaria immersed in music and mathematics.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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All of it—the rings of Saturn and my father’s wedding band, the underbelly of the clouds pinked by the rising sun, Einstein’s brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass that made the jar and each idea Einstein ever had, the shepherdess singing in the Rila mountains of my native Bulgaria and each one of her sheep, every hair on Chance’s velveteen dog ears and Marianne Moore’s red braid and the whiskers of Montaigne’s cat, every translucent fingernail on my friend Amanda’s newborn son, every stone with which Virginia Woolf filled her coat pockets before wading into the River Ouse to drown, every copper atom composing the disc that carried arias aboard the first human-made object to enter interstellar space and every oak splinter of the floorboards onto which Beethoven collapsed in the fit of fury that cost him his hearing, the wetness of every tear that has ever been wept over a grave and the yellow of the beak of every raven that has ever watched the weepers, every cell in Galileo’s fleshy finger and every molecule of gas and dust that made the moons of Jupiter to which it pointed, the Dipper of freckles constellating the olive firmament of a certain forearm I love and every axonal flutter of the tenderness with which I love her, all the facts and figments by which we are perpetually figuring and reconfiguring reality—it all banged into being 13.8 billion years ago from a single source, no louder than the opening note of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, no larger than the dot levitating over the small i, the I lowered from the pedestal of ego.

How can we know this and still succumb to the illusion of separateness, of otherness? This veneer must have been what the confluence of accidents and atoms known as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., saw through when he spoke of our “inescapable network of mutuality,” what Walt Whitman punctured when he wrote that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

One autumn morning, as I read a dead poet’s letters in my friend Wendy’s backyard in San Francisco, I glimpse a fragment of that atomic mutuality. Midsentence, my peripheral vision—that glory of instinct honed by millennia of evolution—pulls me toward a miraculous sight: a small, shimmering red leaf twirling in midair. It seems for a moment to be dancing its final descent. But no—it remains suspended there, six feet above ground, orbiting an invisible center by an invisible force. For an instant I can see how such imperceptible causalities could drive the human mind to superstition, could impel medieval villagers to seek explanation in magic and witchcraft. But then I step closer and notice a fine spider’s web glistening in the air above the leaf, conspiring with gravity in this spinning miracle.

Neither the spider has planned for the leaf nor the leaf for the spider—and yet there they are, an accidental pendulum propelled by the same forces that cradle the moons of Jupiter in orbit, animated into this ephemeral early-morning splendor by eternal cosmic laws impervious to beauty and indifferent to meaning, yet replete with both to the bewildered human consciousness beholding it.

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 on to 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 the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.

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. We slice through the simultaneity by being everything at once: our first names and our last names, our loneliness and our society, our bold ambition and our blind hope, our unrequited and part-requited loves. Lives are lived in parallel and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of “biography” but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams. Lives interweave with other lives, and out of the tapestry arise hints at answers to questions that raze to the bone of life: What are the building blocks of character, of contentment, of lasting achievement? How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism? Does genius suffice for happiness, does distinction, does love? Two Nobel Prizes don’t seem to recompense the melancholy radiating from every photograph of the woman in the black laboratory dress. Is success a guarantee of fulfillment, or merely a promise as precarious as a marital vow? How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?

There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

So much of the beauty, so much of what propels our pursuit of truth, stems from the invisible connections—between ideas, between disciplines, between the denizens of a particular time and a particular place, between the interior world of each pioneer and the mark they leave on the cave walls of culture, between faint figures who pass each other in the nocturne before the torchlight of a revolution lights the new day, with little more than a half-nod of kinship and a match to change hands.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07D6BPV9B
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (February 5, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 5, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 5.6 MB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 554 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1786897261

Best Sellers Rank: #155,439 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #14 in History of Biology & Nature
- #52 in History of LGBTQ+ & Gender Studies
- #165 in LGBTQ+ Biographies (Books)

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4.7 918 ratings

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Maria Popova

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Maria Popova is a reader and a writer, and writes about what she reads on Brain Pickings (brainpickings.org), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She is the creator and host of The Universe in Verse—an annual charitable celebration of science and the natural world through poetry.

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Customers find the writing style engaging and thought-provoking. They describe the book as an enjoyable read with a creative approach to learning about diverse topics. Readers praise the author's brilliant thinking and love for her subjects. They consider the book worth the price and well worth the time spent reading it. The book is described as well-crafted and in excellent condition when received.

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46 customers mention "Writing style"39 positive7 negative

Customers find the writing style engaging and poetic. They appreciate the author's gentle approach to humanizing historical artists through a discussion of their private lives. The book is described as well-written, enjoyable, and thoughtful. Readers praise the author's gift and consider it a true work of art.

"...But then, really I loved all the chapters and how beautiful she wove this amazing and huge story through the centuries and the specific lives of..." Read more

"...But, the beautiful way the author humanizes them through a gentle (and extended) discussion of their private lives and loves is a sheer delight...." Read more

"...And the theme of beauty is within Maria Popova’s gorgeous writing. Very gorgeous, inspiring, and a sense that every word is infused with profound..." Read more

"...Thank you Maria for this true work of art!" Read more

35 customers mention "Thought provoking"35 positive0 negative

Customers find the book thought-provoking and inspiring. They appreciate the creative approach to learning about diverse topics. Readers mention that the book provides great information about historical figures in an easy-to-understand manner. The book weaves together various threads of history, philosophy, and the struggle of women for success.

"...and literature, and social activism, and personal relationships that are every bit as entangled and rife with longing and suffering, and..." Read more

"...There is a refreshing alignment of science with art, in that science is essentially organic art- that is if we judge art to be what inspires...." Read more

"Fascinating melding of history of science, philosophy, and struggle of women to achieve success in science...." Read more

"...The book also covers literary greats and Popova shows how these individuals are part of communities that support and sometimes thwart their efforts...." Read more

21 customers mention "Enjoyment"21 positive0 negative

Customers find the book engaging and enjoyable to read. They say it's satisfying and riveting, making their heads spin.

"...The people feel very alive and real -- as if they were alive today, but also as if I had time-travelled back and could eaves-drop and witness the..." Read more

"...intersection of science and poetry, this book delivers page after page of delight...." Read more

"...It doesn’t. It’s the smoothest read. It feels graciously offered." Read more

"...Written from a perspective that is insightful, lively, informal, and engaging!" Read more

6 customers mention "Pacing"5 positive1 negative

Customers appreciate the book's pacing. They find the author's thoughts brilliant and admirable. The book demonstrates her love for her subjects and ideas.

"...a sense that every word is infused with profound respect and love for her subjects and for the ideas...." Read more

"...Successfully connects the dots between a host of admirable women, their work, their legacies, including two of my secular saints, Emily Dickinson..." Read more

"Well-written; brilliant thoughts by a brilliant person." Read more

"Omg Maria Popova is brilliant!" Read more

6 customers mention "Value for money"6 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's value for money. They say the first sentence is worth the price and well worth reading.

"...almost all female, were unknown to me and that alone was worth the price of admission...." Read more

"...finished yet, but I feel compelled to fan the flames of this incredible offering...." Read more

"...The introduction alone is worth the cost of the book. I’m constantly transported and deeply reflective after reading one paragraph of her writing...." Read more

"The first sentence alone is worth the price of this beautiful work of art. I read it over and over, and then typed it up and sent it to a friend...." Read more

5 customers mention "Sturdiness"5 positive0 negative

Customers find the book well-crafted and in excellent condition. They say the prose is masterfully woven and interconnected.

"Book was in fine shape" Read more

"...of some remarkable women who overcome immense obstacles are masterfully woven and interconnected in a book that explores multiple domains of science..." Read more

"This was such a spectacular book: Popova’s prose is so well crafted and considered - but moreso the overarching theme, her poking away at the..." Read more

"Book in excellent condition. Arrived as promised" Read more

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Gayle Markow
Gorgeous writing, amazing history!
Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2020
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I am reading this book slowly. Well, yes, I am a slow reader, but also, this book is SO rich, it deserves to be savored. I've underlined at least half of it. It makes being awake with insomnia at 3 in the morning totally worth it. First of all, Maria Popova's sentences are gorgeous, sometimes jaw-droppingly so. They astonish me. Second of all there's so much history of scientific discovery and discoverers (and so many of them women!!) and literature, and social activism, and personal relationships that are every bit as entangled and rife with longing and suffering, and occasionally happy fulfillment as any going on today. The people feel very alive and real -- as if they were alive today, but also as if I had time-travelled back and could eaves-drop and witness the goings-on. Maria creates a sense of perspective regardingh historical change, especially regarding women's rights, gay rights, and scientific understandings. She deals brilliantly with the topic of "beauty". This book sent me to further investigate all kinds of people and science, and to buy several more books related to the people and topics she explores (including Rachel Carson's book "The Sea Around Us", and a book called "The Bluest of Blues" about Anna Atkins photographs of algae.It made me want to study astronomy. As the daughter, sister, and mother of photographers, and as a photographer myself, I loved the chapter on photography the most. But then, really I loved all the chapters and how beautiful she wove this amazing and huge story through the centuries and the specific lives of people. I love how she wove the relationship between science and literature, infusing both with the central element of beauty. I would have to say that "Figuring" is my favorite book EVER. I still have about 100 pages to go, but am in no hurry to finish, so I'm taking my time.

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John P. Quirke
An Absolute Gem of a Read
Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2024
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Written as an exploration of the (very real) intersection of science and poetry, this book delivers page after page of delight. The scientists, almost all female, were unknown to me and that alone was worth the price of admission. But, the beautiful way the author humanizes them through a gentle (and extended) discussion of their private lives and loves is a sheer delight. Maria Popova demonstrates a clear-eyed reverence for each of her subjects as she delivers on exposing the interconnectedness of the wonders of the heart and the cosmos.

A book that is in a category all its own, and beautifully so.

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Carrie E. Ruggieri
Beautiful
Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2019
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I’ve never felt more grateful for the existence of a writer. This book is about science, humanity,love, ideas, beauty. There is a refreshing alignment of science with art, in that science is essentially organic art- that is if we judge art to be what inspires. And, it’s about the precious vulnerable smallness we get to feel when astounded by the wonder of the big sky of the anatomy of a daffodil or the upending of love. Maria Popova brings the scientist’s of wonder to life, especially women scientists, who are otherwise unknown (zest least to me). Maria Popova is a scientist of human hearts. She she holds out, with great care, for us to see, what is sweet and tender in the hearts of these greatest of minds. By humanizing their greatness, she lets us see the beautiful in every human, in myself. A main theme is beauty - the people she writes of are driven to genius when awestruck by beauty. And the theme of beauty is within Maria Popova’s gorgeous writing. Very gorgeous, inspiring, and a sense that every word is infused with profound respect and love for her subjects and for the ideas. You’d figure a book about science, poetry, history, love, and everything else human, would get bogged down. It doesn’t. It’s the smoothest read. It feels graciously offered.

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67 people found this helpful

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Albertine
Unique perspective on science, history, and philosophy
Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2024
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Fascinating melding of history of science, philosophy, and struggle of women to achieve success in science.
Written from a perspective that is insightful, lively, informal, and engaging!

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Madeleine Eve
Well worth the year it took me to read it
Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2020
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I took my time with this book. I was reading others at the same time. The book chronicles accomplished women and several men from the last four or so centuries. I thought the book was about women scientists and it is. The book also covers literary greats and Popova shows how these individuals are part of communities that support and sometimes thwart their efforts. I really liked the Emily Dickinson and Rachel Carson portions. Popova brought a personal touch to their stories that went deeper than I had been aware of. A good read.

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David Duckworth
The best book I've ever read
Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2024
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Figuring is the book that I think of probably at least once a week. The figures that Figuring figures are captivating and too often forgotten by history--at least in the way they deserve to be remembered. Popova walks this line carefully, trying not to ascribe modern moral judgment while still following a postmodernist stance of thinking about these figures as dynamic human beings. She paints these people as human and flawed but also beautiful in a way we rarely get to think about scientists and writers. As a queer woman in science, Popova brought tears to my eyes numerous times throughout my read, realizing the incredible history I'm standing on. Her form itself evoked the motivations and brilliance and human fallibility of each character as an art. Particular for me was her portrayal of Margaret Fuller. I read this part during an especially challenging time in my life, and this put a lot into perspective for me. I just gifted this book to another queer scientist friend and she's having similar realizations with each story. Thank you Maria for this true work of art!

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4 people found this helpful

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Dominique Courreges
Arrived in time
Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2025
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Everything ok

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James Wilson
As advertised
Reviewed in the United States on November 23, 2024
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Book was in fine shape

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Juan Zapata
Excelente libro, Entrega a tiempo...
Reviewed in Mexico on July 15, 2024
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Excelente libro y entregado a tiempo, pero llego un poco doblado de una esquina de pasta y unas 20 páginas. es funcional, pero le demerita en lo cosmético ya que lo compre para regalar.

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Alex
bueno
Reviewed in Spain on November 13, 2024
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El libro no pesa, eso me gusta... En cuanto al contenido, ya mucho lo conocía porque seguía a la autora desde hacía años, aún así quería el libro y tenerlo a mano ...y no leer en una pantalla.

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Jason D.
A bright comet of a book
Reviewed in Canada on May 22, 2019
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For the last few weeks I have been savouring Maria Popova’s Figuring — a bright comet of a book, spiralling through intersecting orbits of lives, loves, and letters.
From the opening sentence — a page-long masterpiece of cosmic and personal images — I knew that I would be transformed by these pages. Popova reaches out into the eternal depths of the universe, and finds there abundant refractions of the fleeting depths of the human soul.
Popova juxtaposes the lives of her subjects in a way that is at times disorienting. There is order here, but it is not the imposed order of human thought. It is rather the order of nature: her stories grow forward through time while also reaching out in tangled vines and loops, revealing the influences and connections — the fractal echoes — that we might ignore in our more traditional addictions to straight lines and oversimplified causes and effects.
If there is a rainbowing motif here, it is the motif of connection — of the way that each moment is a constellation of points of light, how every self is a tree planted deep within the soil of the past, both cosmic and individual.
From inspiration to genius to grief, Popova reveals the beauty inherent in humanity’s striving for meaning.
Her sentences are often layered poems in themselves. She writes: “In lives like Emily Dickinson’s — lives of tessellated emotional complexity encrypted in a private lexicon, throbbing with intensity bloodlet in symbol and metaphor — the inevitable blind spots of biography become eclipses.” That sentence is a miniature model of the book as a whole: It is a self-aware exploration of the inner lives of people, filtered through the lenses of language and stars.
On death, Popova gives us magnificent clarity: “On a planet orbiting one of the two hundred billion stars in [the galaxy], a thinking, feeling creature was facing the fate of all matter — the atoms that had given it life were about to retreat into stardust.” From Kepler to Dickenson to Carson, Popova guides us to see them as passionate souls, but also as atoms briefly coalescing in time and space to move the human spirit forward.
Toward the end of the book, Popova presents an excerpt from a letter from Rachel Carson to her soulmate, Dorothy Freeman, in which Carson reflects on writing The Edge of the Sea:
“If I’m satisfied with this [writing] now, it’s at least partly due to an evening of Beethoven last night. Some little bits of his marvellous creativeness seems to seep through into my brain cells when I listen to him.”
I might say the same about Popova herself. Reading her, with her branches of interconnected stories, and her sensitive and melodious phrases, elevates our minds so that we become able to transmute the ordinary moments of life into notes in the eternal symphony. This is a book to read in the way we listen to Beethoven, or savour a sunset. It will awe you. It will inspire you. It will give you a new perspective from which to peer at the web of human achievement — and at the meaning of your own fragile time as a conscious constellation of stardust.

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Chaitanya Sethi
A superb work of non-fiction
Reviewed in India on August 19, 2020
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How do I even begin to summarize Figuring? When I finished reading it, I sat in silence and thought about all the people who were part of the book. I am writing this after taking nearly half a day just to collect my thoughts and feelings. Figuring talks of people whom I had seen mainly as a product of their intellect, their identity restricted to their achievements, and others, of whom I had no idea. Figuring traces the stories of a handful of people- a cast of artists, writers and scientists - mostly women, mostly queer, as Maria herself writes on the back cover. It starts off with Johannes Kepler, famed for the discovery of the planetary motion, and weaves it way to the 20th century to Rachel Carson, catalyst behind the environment movement. In between, we read about Maria Mitchell, an astronomer, Margaret Fuller, a journalist and critic, Harriet Hosmer, a sculptor, and Emily Dickinson, prominent poet.

It’s clear to see that this book is a labour of love. Just to conceptualize this would have taken so much effort, I can’t even fathom what it took to bring this to fruition. But I’m so glad Maria did it. I have never read anything like this before. A compliment that was directed to Rachel Carson must also be used for Maria – “Books like yours are not written to order; they grow on the writer”.

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Flavia Maria Soare
Amazing book, wished I got the Hardcover Edition
Reviewed in Germany on April 20, 2020
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This book is amazing even from the Contents page - which is in verse! The only downside is that the publisher issued this Paperback in such a poor quality of the binding and cover that the book was already deformed when it arrived. I hope subsequent editions will do justice to this incredible book.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Excelente libro, Entrega a tiempo...

5.0 out of 5 stars bueno

5.0 out of 5 stars A bright comet of a book

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb work of non-fiction

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing book, wished I got the Hardcover Edition

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Excelente libro, Entrega a tiempo...

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A bright comet of a book

A superb work of non-fiction

Amazing book, wished I got the Hardcover Edition