![]() ![]() ![]() I was consumed by the era in which Emily Dickinson lived - the turmoil she endured in extreme isolation, the art she produced out of this turmoil, the fierce love she nurtured for some in her life. The maps she draws are splendid, evocative, poetic, and they almost always transport you seamlessly to the particular time in history that she points our compass to. Lives are lived in parallel, and perpendicular, fathomed nonlinearly, figured not in the straight graphs of “biography” but in many-sided, many-splendored diagrams. 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. Facts crosshatch with other facts to shade in the nuances of a larger truth - not relativism, no, but the mightiest realism we have. 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. ![]() In the introductory chapter “0," Popova deliberates on the infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, and how meaning-making or “figuring” actually imbues that beauty into our lives. I should start off with the things that were so delightful in Figuring (and there are so many!) - and her prose is easily one of the top contenders. ![]()
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