Figuring - Maria Popova

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Résumé :
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.

Biographie:
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.

Sommaire:
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1 only the dreamer wakes
2 to find dismooned among the stardust
3 what is lost and what is gained
4 of the infinite in the finite
5 to figure and transfigure
6 the much that calls for more
7 to brave the light of the world
8 that which exhausts and exalts
9 merely the beautiful
10 divided, indivisible
11 between sinew and spirit
12 between art and life
13 the banality of survival
14 shadowing the light of immortality
15 to gaze and turn away
16 from romance to reason
17 from terror to transcendence
18 unmastering
19 the heart's circumference
20 bound by neither mind nor matter
21 in the darkness of being
22 searching for totality
23 into the unfathomed
24 where splendor dwells
25 to live and to vanish
26 between the scale of atoms and the scale of worlds
27 between the time of monarchs and the time of stars
28 tracing the thread of being
29 from shoreless seeds to stardust
acknowledgments
bibliography
index