Found this in my book cupboard with no idea how it got there. A fat 500+ page 2019 paperback from apparently a proper British publisher, but presentationally austere.
Quoted is the NY Times calling the book “category-defying.” The back cover says it “explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures.” The first page holds one long lush lyrical sentence, extending into the second, full of enigmatic imagery.
Soon though we’re on to Kepler, and I think, “Okay now!” Because Johannes Kepler is one of my heroes. A man of science set on proving a big theory — only to prove himself wrong. Yet he had the intellectual courage to go with the facts — giving us the true laws of planetary motion.
But the chapter mainly concerns Kepler’s elderly mother. No, not portraying an indomitable woman raising her son to achievement. Rather just a very ordinary woman. But accused of witchcraft — in 1617, serious business indeed. Very few like her escaped being burned at the stake.
Kepler returns to his home town to defend her (at no small risk to himself). The indictment is long. But he undertakes to factually expose as lies every line of it. And, against all odds, he prevails.
Gosh we could use him in today’s America.
This is a stunning book. Popova writes beautifully, insightfully, engagingly. Relating not just the bare facts about her subjects but plumbing their depths. Their inner lives, and especially love lives, are central. And mortality is much present.
Popova discusses Louis Daguerre, who made photography a thing. And the idea of photographs immortalizing a person. Yet also poignantly capturing a fleeting moment in time — already past when viewed — ineffably reminding us how that epitomizes life itself. In the end, everything is lost.
For most people in past times, this was a much bigger fact of life than now. With widespread early deaths of parents, spouses, siblings, children, friends. It was always in their faces. How differently we exist today, sheltered from that.
Another section that really hit me concerned physicist Richard Feynman. Also someone I’ve greatly admired. His delightful autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, gave me a particular laugh at its chapter titled, “You Just Ask Them.” My own (unpublished) memoir had one titled “Just Ask.” His chapter explained the method he’d discovered for getting women in bed. Mine too.
But Popova’s Feynman discussion is more serious. Concerning his first youthful marriage to Arline — beset with mortal illness soon after they’d met. She died when he was 27, working on the Manhattan Project.
Their passionate love through this ordeal, as related by Popova, is deeply moving. Then she presents a letter Feynman wrote to Arline — 488 days after her death — found after his own, by his biographer James Gleick. Which, Popova says, “discomposed” Gleick’s “most central understanding of Feynman’s character as an apostle of science and reason.”
It might seem as though Feynman was actually trying to communicate with the dead. But I think instead he was struggling to articulate, to himself, how connected he still felt with Arline, and what it meant for her to be gone. This seems clear from the letter’s final words:
“I love my wife. My wife is dead.”
Popova provides a few rare glimpses of herself. For reasons personal to her, Sapphic love is a recurring element. We see Emily Dickinson, for example, through the lens of her startlingly all-consuming love for Susan Gilbert. Later came Kate Scott Anthon — introduced to Emily by Kate’s love object — Susan. Dickinson’s letters to both women are quoted, full of wildly overwrought, even downright bizarre, expressiveness. Of course, for the bygone personages portrayed, such love was beset by its societal forbiddenness, indeed thus rarely accommodating physical expression. So much unquenchable desire. (Though at least one erotic episode between Emily and Kate may be plausible.)
While Susan’s epistolary intimacy with Dickinson was lifelong, Kate’s emphatically stopped. And Susan shut the door on physicality with Emily — upon belatedly consummating (instead!) her marriage to Emily’s brother. The dual developments were crushing for Emily, probably accounting for her otherwise seemingly mysterious self-imprisonment in the seclusion of her bedroom for her remaining quarter century.
(Another key personage Popova discusses is Margaret Fuller. I will cover her separately.)