Figuring: Hats, a scientist, classification
For this week, I've selected three quotes from chapters 4 and 5 of Maria Popova's book, Figuring. True to her signature style visible in every article on her website, The Marginalian, Popova seamlessly intertwines art and science, along with stories about the remarkable individuals behind them, within the pages of this book.
Hats or poems
The Brownings would become so famous that their personal lives would eclipse their work in the eyes of the adoring public. A century later, Virginia Woolf would see in their fate a tragic testimony to how celebrity culture hollows creative culture:
Passionate lovers, in curls and side-whiskers, oppressed, defiant, eloping — in this guise thousands of people must know and love the Brownings who never read a line of their poetry. They have become two of the most conspicuous figures in the bright and animated company of authors who, thanks to our modern habit of writing memoirs, and printing letters and sitting to be photographed, live in the flesh, not merely as of old in the word; are known by their hats, not merely by their poems. What damage the art of photography has inflicted upon the art of literature has yet to be reckoned.
A scientist
Months after the publication of Somerville’s Connexion, the English polymath William Whewell — then master of Trinity College, where Newton had once been a fellow, and previously pivotal in making Somerville’s Laplace book a requirement of the university’s higher mathematics curriculum — wrote a laudatory review of her work, in which he coined the word “scientist” to refer to her. The commonly used term up to that point — “man of science” — clearly couldn’t apply to women, not to what Whewell considered “the peculiar illumination” of the female mind: the ability to synthesize ideas and connect seemingly disparate disciplines into a clear lens on reality. Because he couldn’t call her a physicist, a geologist, or a chemist — she had written with deep knowledge of all these disciplines and more — Whewell unified them all into “scientist”.
Classification
One thing is certain: The quotient of intimacy cannot be contained in a label like “Uranian” — or “queer,” or whatever comes next. The human heart is an ancient beast that roars and purrs with the same passions, whatever labels we may give them. We are so anxious to classify and categorize, both nature and human nature. It is a beautiful impulse — to contain the infinite in the finite, to wrest order from chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb toward higher truth. it is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the name for the things themselves. The labels we give to the loves of which we are capable — varied and vigorously transfigured from one kind to another and back again — can’t begin to contain the complexity of feeling that can flow between two hearts and the bodies that contain them.