Maria Popova

And so I would think of, you know, there were a couple of letters of hers that I just they wouldn't let me go because they were so poignant.

And also, I started seriously writing Traversal a few months before the pandemic.

And I had just reread, she has a novel called The Last Man, which is about a 21st century plague that incrementally kills off all of humanity except the protagonist, who is left wandering amidst the statues and museums of Rome, wondering about the point of it all.

Why art?

How do we make life bearable?

And I had just finished reading that when the pandemic happened, and I thought, this woman's a prophet.

Mm-hmm.

Far beyond Frankenstein.

And also, I wanted to save her from her own limiting reputation.

I mean, she is held to an image of who she was when she was 19.

She wrote something that was, yes, extraordinary and full of these eternal questions.

But then she did so much more after that, and people have no sense of her life.

And that poignant line that the creature, she, by the way, never calls him monster.

That's the movie.

She only ever calls him creature.

There's this gutting line where he says, I am malicious because I am miserable.

And that is the history of the world.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, I would like to believe that that's why we're here, these things.

So I was in love with chemistry as a young person.