Traversal by Maria Popova 📚

How do you get from Captain Cook’s 1769 voyage to document the transit of Venus to Mary Shelley’s parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and their books Vindication and An Enquiry Concerning the Nature of Political Justice; to Margaret Fuller in America; to frog legs; to Aaron Burr as a destitute boarder; to the world’s first chemical equation–“grape must = carbonic acid + alcohol”; to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror; to Jane Marcet; to Michael Faraday; Ralph Wedgwood, the inventor of the noctograph; to the catastrophic eruption of Mount Tambora and its devastating global weather effects; to a doctor who wrote the first vampire-themed book, then later took his own life after being unable to convince the public of his true authorship; to phrenology; to Walt Whitman and his lost true love; to Henry David Thoreau, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Frederick Douglass?

Maria Popova, that’s how.

Maria tells a story drawn from the ages, across time and space, bringing lives together in stories of love, cruelty, and devotion. She traces the butterfly effects of historic and mundane world events that brought forth inventions and prose that have endured the centuries, and humans at their best and worst.

Because of societal norms, powerful love stories built on mutual respect and equality were almost unheard of at the time, but are celebrated in beautiful detail.

She tells the stories of history, but deeply intertwines the relationships beneath them, following a trail of connections across space and time.

I’m struck by the magnitude of what we have lost in our knowledge and our sensibilities, and by the limitations placed on women throughout history.

Over and over in the book, Maria highlights the ways women were not allowed, were taken from, removed, suppressed, discouraged, and ignored.

Where would we be if, throughout history, women’s ideas had carried the same force and power as men’s, instead of the tiny fraction they have been allowed? Men and religion have a great deal to answer for.

She takes you beyond the veneer, beyond the quick reputational one-liners of people you think you know, but don’t.

Mostly, I think Maria writes about love — the power of love. You can feel that she writes about it as something she feels deeply and understands on a profoundly human level.

Maria says:

We mistake so many things for love: loyalty, sympathy, pity, desire but somewhere in the marrow of our being, we know what love is and long for that house of belonging: the whole of who we are, or at least enough of who we are, at home in enough of the other. Enough may be love’s other name, life’s only vindication the hardest concept for the human animal to grasp.

Maria puts felt love into words better than anybody I have ever read.

Every page has pockets of beauty, and Maria understands the hearts of imperfect people. Humans are complex, capable of cruelty and self-centeredness, but also of love. Maria tells both sides in a remarkably beautiful way that only someone who has read the books, papers, letters, and journals intimately can.

Maria says in the bibliography:

Traversal is the work of seven years of writing and a lifetime of reading, of consciously and unconsciously absorbed material irreducible to a complete bibliography.

Everyone should read this book. Savor the words, the stories, and the history, and let Maria’s writing carry you to a place of reflection. I guarantee you’ll find yourself rereading paragraphs and pages, drawn in by the beauty and thought woven into them.

Personal Thoughts Invoked by Reading This Book

(scattered thoughts that I wanted to weave into my review, but was unable to)

• I would love to know how Maria keeps track of all her thought lines, how she organizes her research, and how she decides where to include it in the story.

• I am struck by how often they read to each other. Today, we seem to only read aloud to children. But, we have things read to us like audiobooks…

• I’ve never been drawn to reading Frankenstein before. Knowing the author and the history brings it into focus for me in a way I’ve never had before. How many other books am I missing out on? How many things do I know about Mary’s life now that I can see shaped in her writing?

• Read it digitally with a built-in dictionary or have a physical dictionary at your side; Maria’s vocabulary far surpasses mine.

• Compassion blossoms from the taste of suffering, the touch, the sight, the stink of suffering upon your clothes and mind.

• We, humans, do ourselves a disservice by averting our eyes from human suffering.

• Some of my most powerful thoughts and self-reflections come from reading. Just like all the people in this beautiful book, the power of the printed word has no equal.

• Remove gender from a relationship, and it’s still love. Remove sex from a relationship, and it’s still love. Love surpasses all; put anything in the way, and love finds a way.

Quotes

There is no universal morality, no single organizing principle of power, no correct shape to love. And yet something, something unites us. Ruth rendered love as a fluid thing, a forceful thing, a slippery thing with a will of its own, which no vessel can hold and no sword can punish into a shape.

Two centuries later, a small tribe of renegade scholars would formalize this method of observation in a new science they would christen cultural anthropology, traversing the world to demonstrate systematically something that would always remain difficult for the human animal to face and fathom: that the discomfort with which we recoil at cultural practices and personal choices different from our own, the judgments we lash on the lives and loves of others, are data not about the other but about ourselves, revealing our own fears and insecurities, our closures of mind and clenchings of heart.

How do we live with our human fragility, with our existential loneliness, with our profound porousness to circumstance and to the conditioning that pumps the human heart’s dual capacities for good and evil?
How, in this world born by brutality–­by a gauntlet of violent collisions between rocky bodies formed from the debris that swarmed the Sun 4.5 billion years ago, bodies that went on to pulverize each other into Earth and Moon–­do we find a semblance of peace, among and within the particles of our humanity?

The 1769 Transit of Venus had furnished the model for such global unity through science, through the shared search for universal truth. It had also, by hijacking the astronomical mission as a weapon of political power and as a means to material gain, furnished the building blocks of every global war to come.

Cook could not have known it then, but his arrival to these strange and splendid lands would be the beginning of a British occupation that would bleed into multigenerational trauma for native peoples, into the violent erasure of the oldest continuous culture on Earth, and into the dispassionate extinction of entire species. Within a century of his landfall at Australia and New Zealand, 90 percent of the native inhabitants would be dead. A regime of racial tyranny would slowly siphon the survivors of dignity, that lifeblood.

Both Wollstonecraft and Godwin made their reputations on the bold denunciation of institutions, including the institution of marriage: Wollstonecraft in Vindication in 1792, Godwin in An Enquiry Concerning the Nature of Political Justice in 1793, which issued a rigorously reasoned eight-­book call for a society of equals, indicting government, religion, and marriage as oppressive forces that limit individual freedom and gape the abyss of inequality. Government and religion, Godwin argued, would be rendered obsolete with sufficient advancement of human knowledge and morality. “Marriage, as now understood,” he wrote, “is a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies. So long as two human beings are forbidden, by positive institution, to follow the dictates of their own mind, prejudice will be alive and vigorous.” Wollstonecraft inveighed against marriage as the only means for women to “rise in the world,” which in turn reduced their aspirations to those of “mere animals” and made them act as children once they did enter this institution of wholesale dependency.
The woman who has only been taught to please, will soon find that her charms are oblique sun-­beams.

What she called for instead–­equal access to education and an emphasis on the intellectual and moral development of girls, rather than their looks, dress, and manners–­seems banal by our present standards, almost embarrassing. The luxury of being embarrassed by it–­in just five human lifetimes, in a species 7,500 generations old–­is the measure of our progress.

We feel first and think second, then spend our lives contorting to invert the order, sublimating emotion to reason, only to find ourselves made smaller and less alive by the flight from feeling.

No one connected this uncanny weather to the Tambora eruption. News of it didn’t even reach Europe and America for months. In Ireland, the first mention of Tambora appeared nine months after the eruption, which had savaged the island’s harvest and unleashed a famine-­fomented typhoid epidemic that killed sixty thousand people. Meteorology was an unborn science. These were calamities without causal link. An enormous hand seemed to have shaken the snow globe of spacetime until the parts came loose and fell in all the wrong places across the miniature of life.

so many lives, millions, might have been spared; among them might have been another Cook, another Wollstonecraft, another Einstein; the bicycle might not exist, Frankenstein might not exist, the opioid crisis might not exist. Over and over chance reaches into the loom of the possible to unspool the events of our lives, lives livable only if we never think about how unrecognizable the tapestry would be had any one thread been different.

A limitation of the human animal is that we stand up more easily for those who are like us along some vector of identity or affiliation than for those who are unlike us. Morality may simply be the work of rising from the two-­dimensional world of the ego so that the axis becomes a plane of shared human experience. Another limitation, and perhaps our greatest: Nothing appalls us more than the world’s unkindness to us, yet we are never as kind to others as we wish they were to us.

This is the great delusion: how much our hero mythos of personal choice and character conceals these elements of chance, and to what extent character is at all separable from those subatomic particles of personhood. Infinite tributaries of chance stream into the mirage-­cataract of any choice. Character is just the vapor of chemistry and chance.