Think, Again
Traversal by Maria Popova; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 608 pp., $36
Over the years, I’ve come to regard reading a challenging book as a test of self-selection. In the course of turning the pages, the question surfaces: “Am I the sort of person who should, can, or will finish this book?” I asked this several times as I worked through Maria Popova’s latest, the weighty and aptly titled Traversal—as in n. the crossing and mapping of a long and formidable range. Only those readers patient enough to witness the unfolding of a mind over time will complete the journey. It has been a long time since I was required to give a book as much sustained thought as this one. I was resentful at first (as a professional philosopher, I am supposed to be pretty good at this). But then as I proceeded through Popova’s thoughtful inquiry into the interconnectedness of scientific discovery and the human search for understanding, I began to remember the joys of thinking deeply, and finally to see my initial resistance as a function of our dysfunctionally impatient age.
I wasn’t always this impatient. I used to seek out situations that required the skill of sustained witnessing—for example, by choosing to do my dissertation on Charles Sanders Peirce’s existential graphs. Peirce, an American philosopher whom very few people still read, designed his graphs not merely as an explanation of ideas but as a demonstration of thought. Explanation and demonstration are very different. Peirce’s goal was an iconic, visual system in which the connections and transformations of premises could be seen and contemplated as the thought unfolds logically in real time. Popova requires similar preparation: The reader must be ready to visually and conceptually track the movement of ideas—the demonstration of Popova’s own Gestalt—as the narrative’s complexity accrues over time. If you want to read only the beginning and end of a book, this one will make absolutely no sense to you.
Thankfully, a seamless blend of philosophical grounding, historical narrative, and personal reflection underpins the entire work. Popova’s method, “figuring,” which she has honed in her essays for her online journal, The Marginalian, insists that meaning is extracted from how seemingly unrelated ideas and events often do relate to one another in the most intimate and constitutive ways. She treats history not as a chronological record of facts but as a continuous yet diverse landscape; Traversal is a philosophical and historical cartography of human meaning, a book that defines the limits and leaps of our consciousness against the backdrop of an indifferent cosmos. The result is a sprawling, often lyrical narrative that challenges the linear simplicity of traditional biography.
The book’s ambition is evident in its central questions: What makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? How do we safeguard our love of truth from our lust for power? Popova suggests a common answer that lies not in singular achievement but in the relational fabric of existence. She threads together the lives of visionaries—many of whom were marginalized or ahead of their time—predominantly from the 19th century: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, and Ruth Benedict. Their stories are linked by phenomena as grand as the Transit of Venus and as rigorously studied as the molecular structure of insulin.
The Romantics form one crucial node in Popova’s network. The drama of Shelley’s life and her creation of Frankenstein become a lens for exploring themes of abandonment, social conditioning, and the ethical responsibility of the creator. With Popova’s careful guidance, a reader comes to understand Shelley’s great thought experiment on what makes a monster in the context of the scientific enthusiasms and personal hypocrisies of her circle. This intellectual lineage extends to Whitman, who surfaces as a spiritual successor and the poet of the body and the soul. Whitman’s verse, which celebrates the completeness of being and the unity of the material and spiritual, offers a poetic counterpoint to the philosophical struggles of the Romantics. Popova highlights how Whitman’s most revolutionary concepts—like his embrace of same-sex love—were articulated through the then-popular pseudoscientific language of phrenology, specifically the concept of “adhesiveness.” Of Whitman, she writes, “Out of the language of a pseudoscience, he sculpted a new vocabulary of elemental personal truth.” Why this elision between the personal and the scientific? Perhaps because Popova is taking seriously, in a way that few writers have in the past century, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most cryptic, most important suggestion: “The ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim.”
Traversal extends to Douglass and Frances Wright, who embody the conviction that social justice is actually a commitment to sustained rationality. Wright’s establishment of the Hall of Science in New York stands as a historical emblem for Popova’s central contention: that the path to a just society requires a nonsectarian, scientific reckoning with reality and human nature. In The Marginalian, Popova, quoting Wright, insists that “our conception of matters of right and wrong hinges on how well or poorly we understand the ‘position we hold in this beautiful material world.’ ” The scientific discoveries Popova weaves in are not mere context but rather narrative drivers. The narrative is as much about Marie Tharp’s discovery of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge—physical proof of Alfred Wegener’s once-discredited theory of continental drift—as it is about the human persistence required for such a revolution. The discovery of a geologic truth is rendered as—not just as a metaphor for—the struggle to unearth a personal or cultural truth.
Similarly, the work of Hodgkin, who discovered the molecular structures of penicillin and insulin, is a meditation on a mind that thought in terms of maps. Popova uses Hodgkin’s scientific rigor and unflagging peace activism (she mounted an antinuclear campaign during the Cold War) to show how scientific genius can come hand in hand with abiding humanistic concerns. In Popova’s words: “It matters that [Hodgkin] read poetry and painted mosaics. It matters that she had a passion for ancient history and that she marched for ideals that would tesselate a more livable future. It mattered to her spirit, and it mattered to her body of work, and it matters to how the two converged to propel the traversal toward truth, scientific and humanistic.”
The strength of Popova’s book lies in its commitment to what she once described as “the mightiest realism we have.” Which is not to say that the “realism” of Traversal looks anything like the flatland realities that many Americans—even those who identify themselves as philosophers—usually regard as “real.” This realism resists the temptation to create easily digestible narratives about moments of great genius by acknowledging the untidy contingencies and tragedies that define, and sometimes mar, every human life. It is an invitation to engage in the enduring, complex, and sometimes heartbreaking task of “figuring” the world and one’s place within it. Ultimately, Traversal’s demanding structure reinforces its assertion that the most valuable truths are not simple, singular facts but complex, continuous spaces of resonance. Popova doesn’t offer easy answers; she compels the reader to inhabit the place of deep inquiry, proving that the most rewarding journeys are those that require us to slow down, absorb, and think with rare intention.
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