The transcendent torture of romantic friendship, W.E.B. Du Bois's little-known modernist data visualizations of African American life, and more

The transcendent torture of romantic friendship, W.E.B. Du Bois's little-known modernist data visualizations of African American life, astronomer Maria Mitchell on science and religion, and more. NOTE: This message might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](. If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( – it's free. donating = loving I pour tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider supporting my labor of love with a recurring monthly [donation]( of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner: [Subscribe]( You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: [Donate]( And if you've already donated, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. If you wish to cancel your recurring donation, you can do so [here](. Share [[Forward] Forward to a friend]( Connect [[Facebook] Facebook]( [[Twitter] Twitter]( [[Instagram] Instagram]( [[Tumblr] Tumblr]( --------------------------------------------------------------- [Unsubscribe]( [Welcome]Hello, {NAME}! This is the weekly email digest of [brainpickings.org]( by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition – the five invitations of life, an illustrated collection of classic love poems celebrating longing, desire, and devotion, and more – you can catch up [right here](. If you missed the [special edition celebrating 11 years of Brain Pickings]( that is [here](. And if you're enjoying this newsletter, please consider supporting my labor of love with a [donation]( – each month, I spend hundreds of hours and tremendous resources on it, and every little bit of support helps enormously. [Sir Thomas Browne on the Transcendent Torture of Romantic Friendship]( Navigating [the various types of platonic relationships]( can be challenging enough. But few things are more existentially disorienting than trying to moor oneself within a relationship that floats back and forth across the porous boundary between the platonic and the erotic — one rooted in a deep friendship but magnetized with undeniable romantic intensity, like the relationships between [Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann]( in the nineteenth century and [Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman]( in the twentieth. But as beautiful and vitalizing as such more-than-friendships can be, they tend to be inevitably dampened by an undercurrent of disappointment, a quiet undulating heartache that comes from the disconnect between the enormity one or both persons long for and the lesser-than reality permitted by the other person’s nature or the circumstances of one or both of their lives. Four centuries ago, the English polymath Sir Thomas Browne (October 19, 1605–October 19, 1682) captured the divine heartbreak of romantic friendship with enduring insight in a passage from his first literary work, [Religio Medici (The Religion of a Physician)]( ([public library]( penned the year of his thirtieth birthday. Sir Thomas Browne by Jane Carlile Browne, whose enchanting and lyrical writing inspired many of the Romantics, celebrates romantic friendship as a love that, in transcending regular friendship, approaches the divine: I hope I do not break the fifth commandment, if I conceive I may love my friend before the nearest of my blood, even those to whom I owe the principles of life. I never yet cast a true affection on a woman; but I have loved my friend as I do virtue, my soul, my God. From hence, methinks, I do conceive how God loves man. He then presents a taxonomy of the “three most mystical unions”: 1. two natures in one person; 2. three persons in one nature; 3. one soul in two bodies. For though indeed they be really divided, yet are they so united, as they seem but one, and make rather a duality in two distinct souls. There are wonders in true affection; it is a body of enigmas, mysteries, and riddles, wherein two so become one, as they both become two. But Browne’s most poignant insight deals with the paradoxical nature of such intense connections. When we seek for another to be our everything, he suggests, we doom ourselves to continual despair and disappointment, because the most anyone can ever give us is still less-than-everything, which to the heart that longs for everything — for a complete merging of natures — feels like a sorrowing incompleteness next to nothing. He writes: I love my friend before myself, and yet methinks I do not love him enough: some few months hence my multiplied affection will make me believe I have not loved him at all. When I am [apart] from him, I am dead till I be with him; when I am with him, I am not satisfied but would still be nearer him. United souls are not satisfied with embraces, but desire to be truly each other; which being impossible, their desires are infinite, and must proceed without a possibility of satisfaction. And yet the redemption of this perennial dissatisfaction, Browne argues, is that by so intensely throwing ourselves into a love that can never be fully requited, we master the difficult art of unselfish love — a love we can then direct at anyone, free of expectation of return, perhaps more akin to the Ancient Greek notion of agape, which inspired Dr. King’s [“experiment in love.”]( Browne puts it simply: He that can love his friend with this noble ardor will, in a competent degree, affect all. Complement with Van Gogh on [unrequited love as fuel for creative work]( and David Whyte on [reclaiming heartbreak]( then revisit the [stunning epistolary record]( of Kahlil Gibran’s rich and nuanced relationship with Mary Haskell. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [W.E.B. Du Bois’s Little-Known, Arresting Modernist Data Visualizations of Black Life for the World’s Fair of 1900]( On a recent research visit to the Emily Dickinson museum and archives in Amherst, I chanced upon a most improbable discovery of forgotten, pioneering work by another titan of culture. When thirty-one-year-old W.E.B. Du Bois (February 23, 1868–August 27, 1963) heard that the World’s Fair to be held in Paris in 1900 would include a special exhibition on the subject of sociology, he saw in it an opportunity to open the world’s eyes to what had been occupying him for nearly a decade — “the American Negro problem.” In [The Autobiography of W.E.B. Dubois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century]( ([public library]( he recounts: I wanted to set down its aim and method in some outstanding way which would bring my work to notice by the thinking world. W.E.B. Du Bois’s identification card for the Paris Exposition of 1900 ([UMass Amherst Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and University Archives]( Since he became the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard, Du Bois had amassed a formidable set of statistics on the socioeconomic plight of black people in America in the decades since the transition from enslavement to freedom. But Du Bois had one pressing problem: How would he make statistics fit for an exhibition and compelling enough to compete for attention with such marvels of invention and showmanship as the talking films, panoramic paintings, escalators, and world’s largest refractor telescope, all of which made their debut at the 1900 Paris Exposition? He decided to visualize his data in a series of artful, striking diagrams that beckon both the intellect and the imagination, dispelling sociocultural misconceptions with statistics in a viscerally arresting way — a way “to give, in as systematic and compact a form as possible, the history and present condition of a large group of human beings.” W.E.B. Du Bois at the Paris Exposition of 1900 ([UMass Amherst Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and University Archives]( During the Crimean War half a century earlier, [Florence Nightingale]( had effected major political reform in healthcare through a pioneering use of data visualization. She designed a new type of pie chart, known today as the Nightingale rose diagram, comparing mortality rates across time in a simple, elegant histogram, which she sent to Queen Victoria as viscerally unambiguous proof of the effectiveness of her sanitation strategy. Polar area visualization of mortality rates by Florence Nightingale, 1857 Being exceedingly well read and indiscriminately interested in various disciplines related to social reform, Du Bois was very likely aware of Nightingale’s revolutionary visualizations of statistics. With the Paris Exposition approaching, he enlisted some of his best students in rendering his statistics on four key dimensions of the black experience — “the history of the American Negro, “his present condition,” “his education,” and “his literature” — into a series of hand-painted ink and watercolor charts, diagrams, and figures. Du Bois took great pride in the project, conceived of and created entirely by African Americans: We have [made] an honest, straightforward exhibit of a small nation of people, picturing their life and development without apology or gloss, and above all made by themselves. This they accomplished in very little time and with no funding. By the end, Du Bois found himself “threatened with nervous prostration” and unable to afford proper passage to Paris, so he purchased the cheapest possible ticket and traveled in steerage in the belly of the ship. Upon arrival, he found himself “astonished to see automobiles on the streets; not many but perhaps a dozen in a day.” He recalled in his autobiography: I lived to see the jokes about the possibility of these motors displacing the horse fade away and automobiles fill the streets and cover the nations. W.E.B. Du Bois’s exhibition room at the Paris Exposition ([UMass Amherst Libraries’ Department of Special Collections and University Archives]( Amid the spectacle of astonishments, he presented thirty-two charts, 500 photographs, and a variety of maps, mounted on two-by-three-foot hinged boards that fanned out from the walls of the 20-square-foot exhibition hall — inventive visualizations of data reminiscent of Victorian mathematician Oliver Byrne’s stunning [1847 illustrations of Euclid’s Elements]( and Goethe’s [graphically daring diagrams of color and emotion](. Aesthetically, Du Bois’s visualizations evoke the iconic abstract paintings of [Piet Mondrian]( and the pioneering color-block sculptures of [Anne Truitt]( but predate the influence of both by half a century away. The exhibition was an unexampled success, earning Du Bois a gold medal in the Paris Exposition and attracting coverage from major newspapers, both black and white, in Europe and America. “This is the first time in the history of exposition abroad that the Afro-American has ever taken so important and successful a part,” exclaimed the Saint Paul Appeal in October of 1900, seeing in Du Bois’s exhibition “proof that all classes of [the American] population are prosperous, progressive, and valuable citizens.” The project would go on to shape how Du Bois himself thought about sociology, informing the ideas with which he would set the world ablaze three years later in [The Souls of Black Folk](. Complement with Du Bois’s [magnificent letter of life-advice]( to his young daughter and his [correspondence with Einstein about social justice]( then revisit Alan Turing’s [little-known biology diagrams]( and Giorgia Lupi’s [hand-drawn visualization of great writers’ sleep habits and literary productivity](. Data images via [The Library of Congress]( [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Trailblazing Astronomer Maria Mitchell on Science, Spirituality, and the Conquest of Truth]( “The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both,” Carl Sagan [wrote]( shortly before his death. An entire century earlier, another patron saint of cosmic insight contemplated this enduring question with equal parts wisdom and warm wit — the pioneering astronomer and abolitionist Maria Mitchell (August 1, 1818–June 28, 1889), a mind amply ahead of her time, who [paved the way for women in science]( and who examined the age-old tension between science and religion throughout the eternally rewarding [Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters and Journals]( ([public library]( | [free ebook](. Mitchell’s landmark [1847 comet discovery]( earned her admission into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — she was the first woman ever inducted, and it would be nearly a century until the second. She later became the first woman hired by the United States federal government for a “specialized nondomestic skill” in her capacity as “computer of Venus” — a one-woman GPS guiding sailors around the world. As one of the world’s first true academic celebrities, Mitchell had a chance to do something only a handful of her contemporaries did — the girl who came of age on the tiny isolated island of Nantucket grew up to travel the world, visiting various institutions and observatories in England, Italy, and Russia, bringing with her an infinitely compassionate curiosity about the innumerable ways in which life is lived on our pale blue dot. Portrait of Maria Mitchell (Maria Mitchell Museum, photograph by Maria Popova) Although she was brought up in a Quaker home, Mitchell never joined any church and was consistently critical of religiosity — another hallmark of intellectual independence that defied her era’s climate. At her funeral, the president of Vassar College, where Mitchell had educated America’s first class of women astronomers and taught for many years, remarked that Professor Mitchell had devoted her life to the conquest of truth and never accepted any statement without studying its claims herself — an embodiment of Galileo’s [tenets of critical thinking](. Upon visiting Rome during her European tour in 1858, Mitchell records a striking reflection on the age-old conflict between science and religion, approaching it, as she did everything, from a thoroughly original perspective rooted in the most elemental truths of existence: This is the land of Galileo, and this is the city in which he was tried. I knew of no sadder picture in the history of science than that of the old man, Galileo, worn by a long life of scientific research, weak and feeble, trembling before that tribunal whose frown was torture, and declaring that to be false which he knew to be true. And I know of no picture in the history of religion more weakly pitiable than that of the Holy Church trembling before Galileo, and denouncing him because he found in the Book of Nature truths not stated in their own Book of God — forgetting that the Book of Nature is also a Book of God. It seems to be difficult for any one to take in the idea that two truths cannot conflict. In one of her frequent strokes of wry wisdom, Mitchell adds: It is a very singular fact, but one which seems to show that even in science “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” that the spot where Galileo was tried is very near the site of the present observatory, to which the pope was very liberal. And yet that very observatory, set in a church built in 1650, was bloodthirsty for martyrdom of a different sort: Mitchell was denied entry on account of her gender and had to seek special permission from the pope himself — a tragic testament to how humanity has long used the oppressive mythologies of religion to assault not only science but justice and basic human dignity as well. (A generation after Mitchell, Mark Twain would [condemn how religion is used to justify injustice]( Maria Mitchell, at telescope, with her students at Vassar But Mitchell, ever the observer of nuance, is careful to note that religion, like any technology of thought, can be applied equally in ways that obstruct equality and ways that advance it. During her visit to Russia, she contemplates the local approach to religion as an equalizer of humanity: I am never in a country where the Catholic or Greek church is dominant, but I see with admiration the zeal of its followers. I may pity their delusions, but I must admire their devotion. If you look around in one of our churches upon the congregation, five-sixths are women, and in some towns nineteen-twentieths; and if you form a judgment from that fact, you would suppose that religion was entirely a “woman’s right.” In a Catholic church or Greek church, the men are not only as numerous as the women, but they are as intense in their worship. Well-dressed men, with good heads, will prostrate themselves before the image of the Holy Virgin as many times, and as devoutly, as the beggar-woman. […] Then there is the democracy of the church. There are no pews to be sold to the highest bidder — no “reserved seats;” the oneness and equality before God are always recognized. A Russian gentleman, as he prays, does not look around, and move away from the poor beggar next to him. At St. Peter’s the crowd stands or kneels — at St. Isaac’s they stand; and they stand literally on the same plane. Most of all, Mitchell condemned the hypocrisies and pretensions of religion. She scoffs in her diary after attending a church service in December of 1866: [The Reverend] chanted rather than read a hymn. He chanted a sermon. His description of the journey of Moses towards Canaan had some interesting points, but his manner was affected; he cried, or pretended to cry, at the pathetic points. I hope he really cried, for a weakness is better than an affectation of weakness. He said, “The unbeliever is already condemned.” It seems to me that if anything would make me an infidel, it would be the threats lavished against unbelief. After another service, she finds herself appalled at the abyss between blind faith and fact: The sermon was wholly without logic, and yet he said, near its close, that those who had followed him must be convinced that this was true. Maria Mitchell (top row, third from left) with the first astronomy class at Vassar, 1866 By the following year, Mitchell’s frustration with religion’s assault on critical thinking reaches a boiling point: I am more and more disgusted with the preaching that I hear! … Why cannot a man act himself, be himself, and think for himself? It seems to me that naturalness alone is power; that a borrowed word is weaker than our own weakness, however small we may be. If I reach a girl’s heart or head, I know I must reach it through my own, and not from bigger hearts and heads than mine. Unlike many, who tend to find religion’s escapist promises of immortality more and more alluring as they confront their own mortality, Mitchell grew only more insistent on truth over illusion as her lifetime unfolded. In her final years, she writes of attending a preacher’s sermon at the Universalist church, which of all religious denominations she found most tolerable: [The Reverend] enumerated some of the dangers that threaten us: one was “The doctrines of scientists,” and he named Tyndale, Huxley, and Spencer. I was most surprised at his fear of these men. Can the study of truth do harm? Does not every true scientist seek only to know the truth? And in our deep ignorance of what is truth, shall we dread the search for it? I hold the simple student of nature in holy reverence; and while there live sensualists, despots, and men who are wholly self-seeking, I cannot bear to have these sincere workers held up in the least degree to reproach. And let us have truth, even if the truth be the awful denial of the good God. We must face the light and not bury our heads in the earth. I am hopeful that scientific investigation, pushed on and on, will reveal new ways in which God works, and bring to us deeper revelations of the wholly unknown. The physical and the spiritual seem to be, at present, separated by an impassable gulf; but at any moment that gulf may be overleaped — possibly a new revelation may come. In another diary entry, she captures the greatest, plainest frontier of hope for such a reconciliation: Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God. Maria Mitchell Nearly a century before Einstein contemplated what he famously termed [the inherent human “passion for comprehension,”]( Mitchell considers our parallel thirst for truth and susceptibility to delusion: We have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more are we capable of seeing. Besides learning to see, there is another art to be learned, — not to see what is not. Complement this particular portion of the endlessly insightful [Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters and Journals]( with Aldous Huxley on [science and spirituality]( Primo Levi on [the spiritual value of science]( and Alan Lightman on [secular transcendence]( then revisit Mitchell on [science and life]( [the art of knowing what to do with your life]( and [how to watch a solar eclipse](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [BP] If you enjoy my newsletter, please consider helping me keep it going with a modest [donation](. [Donate]( You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles. Our mailing address is: Brain Pickings :: Made inBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book](//brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com/vcard?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=179ffa2629) [unsubscribe from this list]( [update subscription preferences](