Traversal

Maria Popova

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2026
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781837265640
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

In Traversal, Maria Popova traverses the border between life and death, chance and choice, chemistry and consciousness: what makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? How do we safeguard our love of truth from our lust for power? What slakes our longings and what redeems our losses?

Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with these questions – our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems – through the intertwined lives, loves and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright. Woven throughout their stories are other threads – the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue – which come together to create a rich tapestry of life's meaning; exploring what it is that makes life alive and worth living.

By turns epic and intimate, Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Note on Names
• 0. (prelude)
• 1. space takes the time it takes
• 2. to make a planet a world
• 3. by a plurality of purpose
• 4. a trigonometry of truth
• 5. time takes the space it takes
• 6. to make a body a being
• 7. by the seam of chance and choice
• 8. you have to make a hole to make a stitch
• 9. and meanwhile all this chemistry
• 10. a shortness of breath
• 11. a chemistry of longing
• 12. longing that creates
• 13. longing that consumes
• 14. longing that destroys
• 15. the sacred geometry of life
• 16. to compose in the interlude of being
• 17. an interlude in blue
• 18. in the cobalt cathedral of life
• 19. unmasoning the catacomb of being
• 20. on the grand stage of ego
• 21. beneath the nimbus of nonbeing
• 22. beyond the body
• 23. to coalesce a self
• 24. to make a being
• 25. of atoms and alms
• 26. of windswept longing
• 27. an alchemy of ardors
• 28. crossing the divide
• 29. into a totality of being
• 30. beyond the sum of belief
• 31. between the glass plates of time
• 32. between starshine and clay
• 33. one hand holding tight the other
• 34. to become a self
• 35. another interlude in blue
• 36. singing of the fathomless
• 37. in the silence of the heart
• 38. particle and wave
• 39. nothing static
• 40. at the bottom of being
• 41. something choiceless stirs
• 42. the pattern of the world
• 43. nothing universal
• 44. the ghost in the violin
• 45. between body and spirit
• 46. the story of the world
• 47. where everything connects
• 48. everything shimmers
• 49. only the lucky die
• Bibliography
• Index