Maria Popova

Unfortunately, we humans need a very dramatic, you know, embodied evidence of whatever we're questioning until we believe it.

Oh, God.

Well, it was a lot.

That's an extremely research-heavy book.

That's why it took seven years.

But I follow tendrils that excite me.

This is my attempt to answer some of the biggest questions I live with, which are immense and impossible to actually answer.

There's so many different doorways to them.

You know, what makes a body a person?

What makes a planet a world?

What is life?

What is death?

Why are we here?

I mean, enormous, absurd questions to begin to tackle.

But I very intuitively follow the tendrils that lead me to the interesting doorways.

And I come in at those angles that are interesting to me.

You know, I could have approached these questions with...

seven other people's lives and 25 other events in the history of ecology and politics and all of that.

A million, million other ways, but I think we have the minds we have and the preferences we have, and it just lends to my interests.

One of the themes in Traversal is also the confirmation of tectonic plate theory, which was also extremely controversial.