TRAVERSAL

In 2006, Popova created the Marginalian, which has evolved into a web archive revealing her wide-ranging reading and search for meaning, both evident in her latest compendium. Deftly synthesizing a wealth of primary material, she considers thorny and ponderous questions: “What is life?” “What is death?” “What are the building blocks of personhood, of sovereignty, of identity? Where does the body end and the soul begin?” Biography, history, and cultural criticism inform her portrayals of an eclectic cast of poets and scientists, reformers and visionaries, including astronomers Johannes Kepler and Edmond Halley, intent on mapping the solar system; Captain James Cook, who led an expedition to Tahiti in 1769 to see the transit of Venus, and whose observations of Tahitian society—so alien from what he knew in Britain—resulted in a primitive version of cultural anthropology; and Mary Shelley, shaped by her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and entangled with a group of poets awed by the “immensity of the universe” and the dark depths of their own minds. There are natural philosophers Volta, Aldini, and Galvani, who delved into the mystery of animal electricity; chemist Antoine Lavoisier, condemned to death during the French Revolution, who identified and named hydrogen and oxygen; Humphry Davy, who “ushered in the dawn of biochemistry”; anthropologist Ruth Benedict, with a “porous curiosity about alternative societies,” as eager to understand herself as she was to understand other cultures. And there is Walt Whitman, the unabashed celebrant of nature. In chronicling her subjects’ intellectual and emotional passions, Popova makes much of intersections and interconnections among individuals, from various times, places, and circumstances, who have measured, dissected, rhapsodized, and invented as they grappled with the vexing conundrums, and the grandeur, of being.