The polymathic Popova, presiding genius behindbrainpickings.org, looks at some of the forgotten heroes of science, art, andculture.“There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives,” writes theauthor at the outset. She closes with the realization that while we individualsmay die, the beauty of our lives and work, if meaningful, will endure: “Whatwill survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.' In between, shepeppers thoughtful, lucid consideration of acts of the imagination with storiesthat, if ever aired before, are too little known. Who would have rememberedthat of all the details of the pioneering astronomer Johannes Kepler’s life,one was racing across Germany to come to the aid of his widowed mother, who hadbeen charged with witchcraft? The incident ably frames Kepler’s breaking out ofa world governed by superstition, “a world in which God is mightier thannature, the Devil realer and more omnipresent than gravity,” and into aradical, entirely different world governed by science. That world saw manyrevolutions and advances ahead of the general population, as when, in 1865,Vassar College appointed as its first professor of astronomy a woman, MariaMitchell, who combined a brilliant command of science with a yearning forpoetry. So it was with Rachel Carson, the great ecologist, whose love for awoman lasted across a life burdened with terrible illness, and Emily Dickinson,who might have been happier had her own love for a woman been realized.
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Figuring by Maria Popova available in Hardcover on Powells.com, also read synopsis and reviews. Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the. Mar 13, 2019 In Maria Popova’s strange and lovely new book, “Figuring,” we learn about the precocious Maria Mitchell. In 1831, at the age of 12, she was peering through a telescope to count out the.
The polymathic Popova, presiding genius behindbrainpickings.org, looks at some of the forgotten heroes of science, art, andculture.“There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives,” writes theauthor at the outset. She closes with the realization that while we individualsmay die, the beauty of our lives and work, if meaningful, will endure: “Whatwill survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.' In between, shepeppers thoughtful, lucid consideration of acts of the imagination with storiesthat, if ever aired before, are too little known. Who would have rememberedthat of all the details of the pioneering astronomer Johannes Kepler’s life,one was racing across Germany to come to the aid of his widowed mother, who hadbeen charged with witchcraft?
The incident ably frames Kepler’s breaking out ofa world governed by superstition, “a world in which God is mightier thannature, the Devil realer and more omnipresent than gravity,” and into aradical, entirely different world governed by science. That world saw manyrevolutions and advances ahead of the general population, as when, in 1865,Vassar College appointed as its first professor of astronomy a woman, MariaMitchell, who combined a brilliant command of science with a yearning forpoetry. So it was with Rachel Carson, the great ecologist, whose love for awoman lasted across a life burdened with terrible illness, and Emily Dickinson,who might have been happier had her own love for a woman been realized.
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