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Chapter 1: How do we find meaning amid uncertainty?
We are matter, trembling with the longing for meaning. And whether we know it or not, we're constantly making it. With every little choice, everything we do is an attempt at meaning.
When I first met Maria Popova, neither of us knew who the other was, but we knew that we wanted to be friends. In getting to know her over the past six months or so, I have discovered one of the most brilliant minds on planet Earth. You may have encountered her words through the margin alien, formerly known as brain pickings, which reflects a 20-year quest and a search for meaning.
Maria and I have built a friendship on our shared love of science and poetry, the through line of which is wonder.
We use science to find the truth, and we use poetry to give the truth meaning. Neither can really, we can't really be fully alive without these two wings of life.
I'm Willa Defabaugh, and this is The Nature Of, where we look to the nature of our world for wisdom and ideas that change the way we live. And this week's conversation with Maria Popova is full of them. We dig into her new book, Traversal, and how to stay curious amid uncertainty.
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Chapter 2: What role does wonder play in overcoming selfing?
Maria, welcome to The Nature Of. What a joy. I have to say, because I got to see you talk last night, I was thinking about a word that feels very central to our friendship and to your life and to my life, which is wonder. And you described it as being an antidote to selfing.
Yes.
As a place to start, can you share a little bit about what that means?
Well, I think most of our human problems are problems of selfing, this narrative spiral that burrows inward and inward and inward to the incremental exclusion of all that is not us.
And to me, wonder, which is, first of all, it requires the suspension of certainty, of not knowing, and therefore the suspension of the self, because the self is a cathedral of certainties, in a way, narrative certainties. Wonder is the way out. And for me, it saves me. It saves me every day. I mean, I am prone, like all of us, to rumination and all the, you know, maladies of selfing.
And nothing takes me out more than looking outward, looking at what I don't fully understand, but kind of apprehend with more than the mind. Yeah.
So being in a space of wonder, of searching for wonder, is a way out of this mind loop where we're trying to arrive at certainty, where we're trying to arrive at certainty of the self, certainty of the world.
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Chapter 3: How does Maria Popova define selfing and its impact on suffering?
Although I will say searching for wonder might not really be the way. I think when you search, you already have a search image. You already know what you're looking for. It's more about being receptive and open to wonder and letting it ambush you when you least expect it. The difference between search and discovery, I guess, which is where the internet has failed us.
How do you practice staying open to wonder without searching for it in your life?
You put yourself in the path of it. You put yourself in the path of surprise and possibility. And mostly, as you know very well, in nature, because nature is always surprising, always full of wonder. And it is impersonal and deeply intimate at the same time, which I think are two qualities that are necessary for experiencing wonder.
I want to go back to what you were sharing around selfing being the root of so much of our, dare I say, suffering and getting outside of ourselves as an antidote to that. I think that that's so powerful for today because I think everything that we are being trained to interface daily, I mean, I think about social media, I think about the internet, it's who are you?
What are you expressing to the world? What is yourself? And all of that pushing inward is exhausting. And also when you say I am this, you're also saying I am not everything else.
Exactly. Identities are always exclusionary.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of Maria's book, Traversal?
And, you know, to me, identities and opinions are the least interesting parts of people because they're the least true. They are mutable, but they are worn as a kind of armor or costume of personality that actually conceals what is most true. What do we call it? Soul or spirit or the nature, the essence of a person is never in the identities and the opinions.
And yet we live in a culture that leads with those.
And, you know, it is, as you said earlier, it's a narrative construction of certainty. It's our way of saying, this is me, right? And if certainty and wonder can never coexist, it does kind of contour or cover up. just the wonder of a soul, of a person.
Yes, and it's also kind of absurd given how little choice we've had in the bodies, brains, families, cultures, times we were born into. We were given the vast majority of these chance variables, and then to say, this is me? It just sounds so possessive of randomness.
Right.
Especially when we are also stardust and we are also many other species that coexist within our bodies.
And we'll become them, feed them.
Now that we've set the table, I want to speak a little bit to how we met. The first thing that you said to me, you approached me and said... Did you know you look just like the portrait of Mary Shelley?
That's not what I said. I said, you must get this a lot. And you're like, I don't get this a lot.
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Chapter 5: How does the eruption of Mount Tambora connect to creativity?
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.
Not to mention also the legacy of Frankenstein has been twisted and warped and turned into its own creature. You know, when in reality, the original story holds so much wisdom for our world today, not just about ambition and power, but also about what happens when we treat people as, I'll say monsters and how treating someone as monstrous turns them monstrous. And I mean, look at our world today.
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.
Hurt people hurt people.
Mm-hmm.
So as you mentioned, Traversal interweaves the narratives of a number of revolutionary scientific and literary minds. But it also really reads to me like a love letter to chemistry, chance, connection. Would you say that these are the central forces of your life, all life?
I mean, I would like to believe that that's why we're here, these things.
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Chapter 6: What historical figures influenced Maria's writing process?
So I was in love with chemistry as a young person. I went to high school in Bulgaria, and our high school was very, very science-intense, and we had to choose a major in high school, and I chose chemistry, and we studied from American college-level chemistry or science textbooks. And, I mean, I loved all the sciences.
I thought there was such a way of touching the heart of reality that we are part of. It's not this abstract thing that's separate from culture. It is culture. It is life. But I realized only probably I was in my 30s that... All my science teachers growing up were women. And I never thought about it. I just, I mean, you know, young people, they're like, oh, this is what women do.
I never thought about it. And then I was asked, why don't you write about women in science? And I was like, I don't. I write about scientists. And then I realized how much modeling does for us in how we conceive of the world. And so I'm very interested in people who are kind of in the margins of their time and place, but modeled possibilities that opened entire doorways for others. Mm-hmm.
And so anyway, Mary Shelley was one of them, Dorothy Crawford Hodgkin, to people who haven't heard of her, who is most people, Dorothy Crawford Hodgkin is the first and to this day only British woman to have won a Nobel Prize in science. And she decoded the molecular structure of insulin, penicillin and B12, the building blocks of life.
But why I fell in love with her is that she used her celebrity to become a cross-cultural bridge and peace activist, even more so than Einstein, who was, of course, very famously active in that way. She was arrested multiple times. She was denied an American visa. She was called a communist because she hired scientists from India and North Africa and, you know, the...
countries that are supposed to be communist. And she just didn't care because she thought science does not know these types of identity boundaries, right? Because politics and nationalism are identity.
I mean, we're talking about this happening with the Cold War as the backdrop, right? And so who's to say what role she played in preventing that from becoming
Well, huge.
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Chapter 7: How do science and poetry intersect in Maria's work?
I mean, we can say because the Pugwash Conference, which is kind of the entity that essentially instituted the nuclear test bans. I mean, we forget. We live in such an ahistorical time. We forget that the nuclear war did not happen. I mean, it actually was prevented, meaning it works. Resistance works. Activism works. People putting their minds, their hearts together to say no works.
We could all be dead, meaning we could have never been born if that hadn't worked.
I'm reminded of what you were sharing last night about the transit of Venus, right? Which was in a lot of ways the first truly global scientific experiment. And you were sharing how that's kind of a welcome reminder for this moment we're living in where it feels like science is really under attack.
Yeah, so we should say, so last night I did a talk with the poet Diane Ackerman, who writes beautifully about science. And then we had an audience Q&A and a, I think, young, youngish woman asked, she said she has always loved space, grew up loving space, and now it's become politicized. And, you know, who's vested interest, you know, colonizing Mars and all that.
How can we remain excited about the wonder of it? How can we remain excited about scientific discovery when there's so much corporate interest? And so I, of course, being a fan of giving our fears a historical calibration, mentioned what traversal opens with, which is the story of the transit of Venus observation, which is when Venus passes in front of the sun, like a tiny, tiny, tiny black dot.
and how transits of Venus are the rarest of all the predictable astronomical events. They happen every 200 and some years in pairs of two. So Edmund Halley, for whom we've named Halley's Comet, had figured out that if you observe the transit of Venus from different vantage points on Earth, you could apply basic trigonometry to calculate the Earth-Sun distance, so the yardstick of the universe.
We didn't have one until then. We had a map of the solar system, but nobody knew how far things were. But then Halley died before the next transit of Venus. It just didn't happen in his lifetime. So when it did happen in 1769, scientists around the world used his essentially manifesto and sent different expeditions. Catherine the Great in Russia sent a team.
King George III sent a team, hired James Cook to be the commander of the ship. But what was actually happening is that You know, this was a very turbulent time, a lot of wars in different parts of the world, and the scientific vessels got permission to pass unharmed through the warring waters.
So King George III, who was like the Elon Musk, I mean, I don't think he was that smart, but he was that, you know, he decided he was going to use the scientific mission wisely.
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Chapter 8: What insights does Maria share about love and connection?
I mean, look at elementary and primary education. There's no real scientific foothold, you know? And so it's not so much that I feel an urgency to, as that I love a creative challenge, I love creative constraint. How much can you do with very limiting parameters and how many doors can you open when everything is walls?
First of all, I just want to underline science is a reverence for reality. Chef's kiss, beautifully said. And also, you know, what struck me in what you were sharing earlier also is you started, you majored in chemistry in high school.
Yes.
Did you arrive at poetry through science? Science came first for you.
Yes, I'm an extremely latecomer to poetry. I would roll my eyes at it the way we do at things we don't understand because I was illiterate in it. I did not have an education in poetry. I didn't know how to read it, how to relate to it.
And then in my 20s, on a transatlantic flight, red-eye transatlantic flight, I met across the aisle this older woman who was in her 70s named Emily Levine, who was a comedian, philosopher of science, extraordinary person, extraordinary. We hit it off so hard, much to the discontentment of the whole coach cabin. And we talked all the way to New York from Edinburgh, wherever we were.
And over the years, she took it upon herself to educate me in poetry. And in fact, we're here recording on the corner of 29th Street and 7th Avenue. One day, Emily came. She lived in Northern California. She came to visit and went to a cafe that is literally diagonally on the corner here on the other side of the street on 29th and 7th. And it was a Sunday. We went in. It was packed.
And she somehow got us a tiny little table. And she said something or other again about poetry. And I once again, in the full hubris of a 20-something, was like, oh, that's poetry. And Emily gripped the edge of the table, rose to her full height of 4.5. No, wait, 4.3. She was shorter than me.
and began reciting the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, that famous TSLA poem that has the line, do I dare to disturb the universe? And then she sat down and I looked around and people had stopped mid-stride in this New York cafe and started applauding. I mean, this like never happens. And I thought, okay, maybe there is some power to this. Maybe this stuff does disturb the universe.
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