I find Popova's introduction a poetic ode to sociology:
Her first book is also a highly original survey of life, love and creativity; an intellectual odyssey that challenges easy categorisation. It interweaves the “invisible connections” between pioneering scientists, artists and writers – many of them gay women – to create a richly patterned tapestry of ideas and biographies. Her approach subverts the idea that lives “unfold in sensical narratives”. Popova’s unique act of “figuring” in this book is to create resonances and synchronicities between the lives of visionary figures. Her aim is to answer questions that “raze to the bone of life”, including the most profound of all: “How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?”
...the key thematic strands of Popova’s book crystallise, for Carson showed how the sciences “came together in a holistic understanding of nature”. As Carson said, you cannot “write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry”. Popova’s great achievement in this book is similarly holistic. At a time filled with urgent questions about identity, sexuality and the environment, she brings together science, poetry, philosophy and gender politics to find answers. As Virginia Woolf realised, the solution lies in the connectedness of everything: “the whole world is a work of art … we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself”.
Popova on the self and identity through Herman Melville :
“The self is a style of being, continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth,” the poet Robert Penn Warren wrote in his impassioned and insightful challenge to the notion of “finding yourself” — something the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert captured half a century later in his memorable quip about our blind spots of becoming: “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”
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