Long before he became the world's most beloved neurologist, Oliver Sacks was a twenty-seven-year-old medical resident on his first hospital post when an operation left one of his patients with an unstoppable hiccup. Already a bridge figure between medicine and literature, he found himself haunted by a Somerset Maugham short story about a man who dies of hiccups after a woman casts a spell on him. Fearing his patient might suffer the same fate unless something jolted his brain out of the spasmodic loop, Oliver suggested something radical yet emblematic of what would become his lifelong gift for harmonizing the physiology of the body and the poetry of the mind: bringing in a hypnotist. His colleagues were skeptical bordering on scornful. But the patient had been hiccuping for six days straight and no medical intervention had worked. Oliver recounts in his magnificent more-than-memoir:
To our amazement, [the hypnotist] was able to get the patient "under" and then to give him a posthypnotic command:
"When I snap my fingers, you will wake up and no longer have hiccups."
The patient woke up, free from hiccups, and they never recurred.
Why the strange mental intervention was so effective in abating this debilitating reflex of the body, and how it contours the most effective strategy for waking up from the trance of heartbreak, is rooted deep in our evolutionary history.
The spiral galaxy UGC 10214, known as Tadpole. (Photograph: Hubble Space Telescope)
A hiccup is an involuntary sharp inspiration of air as the epiglottis — the flap of skin in the back of the throat — shuts, producing the hic sound for which the spasm is named. Like our limbs carry the genetic blueprint of our dorsal fins, like our tailbones encode our primate ancestry, hiccups reminds us of where we came from. Although our basic neural infrastructure for breathing evolved from that of fish, the hiccup's distinctive pattern of nerve and muscle activity is an inheritance from the tadpole stage of our amphibian ancestors. Tadpoles use both their gills and their lungs to breathe, pumping water into the mouth and across the gills but keeping it from entering the lungs by flapping the glottis to seal the breathing tube — one long hiccup.
Frontispiece of The Natural History of Fishes, Amphibians, & Reptiles, or Monocardian Animals, 1838.
While our bodies evolved beyond recognition from the tadpole, our brains maintained the neural circuitry of this dual process — most likely, to help nursing infants manage breathing and suckling simultaneously. The vestigial gills of human embryos are no longer present in most adults, but the neuroanatomy of gilled breathing remains and is activated by certain stimuli to cause hiccups — eating too much or too fast, drinking carbonated beverages, being exposed to a rapid temperature change, undergoing extreme stress.
This is why, despite the panoply of folk remedies and pop culture myths for stopping hiccups, ranging from backbends to biting into lemon, the most effective way is simply to reset the brain out of its evolutionary time machine by making a more complex demand of its neural circuits. (For me, doing a bit of calculus invariably stops a spell of hiccups.) Although physical interventions like controlled breathing can sometimes help, it is rather the cognitive demand they make with the focus they require that interrupts the spasms.
A paradox of the human animal is that while we have not fully outgrown the bodily vestiges of our evolutionary inheritance, we have also paid a heavy price for our growing mental complexity. ("Never say higher or lower," Darwin scribbled in the margin of a natural history book, arguing with the author about the so-called higher animals. "Say more complicated.") As we rose from the oceans and crawled onto the land, then climbed the trees to learn to be social, then back came down to walk upright beneath a canopy of one hundred trillion synapses, we became creatures capable of love, which made us capable of loss — this is the price of consciousness.
Superb lyrebird. (Available as a print and a notebook.)
The experience of heartbreak — a recursive mental gasp for reciprocity that is no longer available, or perhaps never really was — is essentially an emotional hiccup: a spasm of thought that feels involuntary, interrupts healthy functioning, and causes debilitating discomfort you are unable to will away. Like the ceaseless hiccups of Oliver's patient, it is abated only by a mental reset — by setting the mind on a different track of focus that demands enough of its cognitive resources to displace the loop of rumination. It hardly matters what it is — beginning an absorbing new project (this is what the bird divinations did for me), learning a new language or a new craft (this is how ceramics came into my life), training for a triathlon or taking up the cello or going down a delicious rabbit hole about the impossibility of bats or the invention of the bicycle or the chemistry of blue (this is how I wrote Traversal). What does matter is to remember that all feeling floats on a current of thought coursing through the brain at eighty feet per second. Divert the current and the charge of the feeling dissipates — perhaps not to perfect neutrality, but to something bittersweet and bearable, like the memory of childhood, like the body remembers its gills.
It could have been otherwise. That one defiant particle of matter could have never broken free from the equipoise of antimatter to sound the first note of something out of the mute nothingness, singing a universe into being. The universe could have withheld gravity, could have never compacted those first few atoms into a common center to bud the first star, could have never bloomed with billions of them. But here we are, circling a middling star in a modest solar system on a rocky planet replete with mountains and music, lichen and love, and on it the mirror the universe invented to contemplate itself: this shimmering consciousness.
It can be hard to bear, the weight of wonder, hard to hold all this bright improbability, hard to do laundry and email while reckoning with how the cosmos forged from the iron rib of dying stars creatures capable of the Benedictus and the atomic bomb.
Luckily, a species of mind has evolved to be the weight-bearer of wonder: the poet.
In the autumn of 2013, I was invited to the Library of Congress for a celebration of the newly acquired Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan papers. There alongside Sagan's drafts of Pale Blue Dot, his hand-drawn diagrams of space and time, and his list of children's book ideas ("Why do birds fly?" "Why do we cry?" "What is it like to be a tree?" "When I talk to myself, who's listening?") was a 1974 letter to his friend Timothy Leary, whom Sagan was about to visit in prison. After some thoughts on evolution, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and the logistics of the upcoming visit, he added a postscript:
P.S. The enclosed poem, 'The Other Night' by Dianne Ackermann [sic] of Cornell, is something I think we both resonate to. It's unfinished so it shouldn't yet be quoted publically [sic].
I immediately wondered about this poem, this poet, and down the rabbit hole I went, to discover that Carl Sagan had been Diane Ackerman's doctoral adviser at Cornell and that she had gone on to publish a collection of astronomy-inspired poems. It was out of print. I managed to procure a surviving copy and instantly fell under its spell — here was a kindred spirit just as wonder-smitten by reality, "knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm," passionate and playful, "stricken / by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain / everythingness of everything, in cahoots / with the everythingness of everything else." Here was someone who could see the "light engrossed in every object," could fathom the "molecular / grit" of that light, could feel "the cold compress / of the universe" against this burning mortality impelling us to make meaning and make poems on a planet of such irrepressible aliveness, encircled by such inhospitable bodies as "Pluto, rock-ribbed as a die-hard comet," "Neptune, whose breath is ammonia," "Mercury, pockmarked / by the Sun's yellow fever," and the "agitated fossil" of Jupiter with its "whirlpools and burbling / aerosols little changed since the solar-system began."
Phases of Venus and Saturn by Maria Clara Eimmart, early 1700s. (Available as a print.)
What emerges from these ravishing portraits of otherwise, the way a sculpture emerges from the marble cut away, is a love letter to this particular world, this improbable flotsam of the possible. "How shall I / celebrate the planet / that, even now, carries me / in its fruited womb?" Diane asks, "full of stagefright / and misgiving," then goes on to sign the celestial body electric, arriving at the most fundamental question:
How can any system
observe itself?
And the poems answer: with systematic wonder.
Solar System quilt by Ellen Harding Baker, begun in 1869 and completed in 1876 to teach women astronomy when they were barred from higher education in science. (Available as a print.)
Long available only as a lucky find in a dusty corner of a second-hand bookshop, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral (public library) is now resurrected under Marginalian Editions. To celebrate its second life, I asked Diane, now approaching eighty, what has most surprised her about the universe, and the microcosm of the universe that is this life, since she wrote those dazzling poems in her twenties — a span of time in which we sequenced the human genome, invented the Internet, discovered gravitational waves and the Higgs boson and the first Earth-like planet orbiting another star, and then ten thousand more as the horizon of the observable universe spilled 93 billion light-years away from the awed eye that took 500 million years to go from trilobite to telescope.
Diane's answer is nothing less than a prose poem:
Once, I thought the universe's greatest gift was scale — those vaulting immensities of gas and dust, planets flaring like thoughts inside a skull of stars. But time, that sly astronomer, has shown me something subtler: how much of the same splendor hums within us and all of nature. The pulse of a leaf opening to sun, the quiet veer of a child's attention, my own heartbeat a small percussion in ancient starlight — all are galaxies folded inward, universes in miniature.
What surprises me now is not just the infinite, but the intimate. That carbon dust became breath and laughter. That our cells remember ancient oceans. That every discovery, no matter how remote, begins with the same feral impulse: our roving curiosity reaching outward, hoping to belong to a larger story of life seeding itself throughout the universe. The Cosmos expands and so does our vertiginous curiosity, an old companion still sending sparks of wonder through the brief ribs of our lives.
1573 painting by the Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo's. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
In the author's note to our new edition, Diane reflects on what had animated her when she wrote these eternal poems a lifetime ago:
I hoped that when readers closed the book they would feel a blend of rapture and responsibility — the sense that our little lives and the vast lives of other worlds are made of the same dust, bound by the same laws, and therefore implicated in one another's fate. I hoped for a lingering awareness that the "cosmic" is not elsewhere: the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood, the mold on bread, the storms on Jupiter, and the quiet in deep space are all chapters of a single ancestral story, and once you feel that kinship it becomes harder to treat other lives or other landscapes as expendable scenery.
I also hoped readers might feel a bridge between awe and stewardship: the knowledge that we are latecomers in an ancient universe who nonetheless possess a frightening and beautiful power to scar or to shelter the only world (at the moment) we know to be alive. I wanted that double sensation to persist—a childlike wonder before the everythingness of everything, and braided through it, the mature realization that wonder alone is not enough, that love of the cosmos must express itself as care for this particular planet, with all its ordinary (though often overlooked) natural miracles.
This essay is adapted from Traversal.
Just before the eleven-year-old Walt Whitman dropped out of school to begin his first job, his parents diverted a portion of their meager working-class means toward a subscription to the radical paper The Free Enquirer, inspired by The Enquirer published by the radical philosopher William Godwin — Mary Shelley's father — a generation earlier and an ocean over.
The prospectus of The Free Enquirer promised:
While there is no doctrine so sacred that we shall approach its discussion with apprehension, there is none so extravagant that we shall treat its expression with contempt… We will reject no creed but the creed of force, nor any system of morality but that which teaches intolerance.
One half of that we was the Scottish-born, newly naturalized radical reformer Fanny Wright. "She possessed herself of my body and soul," Whitman would recall of her in the final years of his life, adding that he "never felt so glowingly towards any other woman." He would remember her as "a brilliant woman, of beauty and estate, who was never satisfied unless she was busy doing good—public good, private good," a woman "whose orbit was a great deal larger" than those of her contemporaries — "too large to be tolerated long by them," rendering her "one of the best in history though also one of the least understood."
Fanny Wright
Born into a well-off freethinking family in Scotland in 1795, Frances Wright was still a toddler when she lost her father, her mother, and her only brother in close succession. No inheritance is large enough to recompense the loss that savages a child orphaned at so tender an age, but the inheritance Fanny and her surviving younger sister received contoured a different possibility of life than was granted most orphans. Into that possibility Fanny sketched in a life of uncommon courage and action.
Raised in England by an eighteen-year-old aunt who introduced her to the ideas of French materialism and bruised her with the temperamental lashes of a teenager, Fanny returned to Scotland at sixteen to live with a great-uncle — a professor of moral philosophy who vehemently opposed the slave trade and who now held the chair Adam Smith had held a generation earlier at the University of Glasgow, heralded as the academically commensurate but more progressive counterpart to Oxford and Cambridge. Taken with Fanny's restive intellect, the university librarian risked his job to grant her full access to one of Europe's most lavish repositories of knowledge. Fanny — tall, slender, muscular, with a firm step and large, forthright blue eyes awned by short, curly chestnut hair — sought out everything she could about the history of the United States, spending the leaden Scottish winters immersed in the ideals of the New World and the emerald summers roaming the ancient Highlands with her sure-footed stride, dreaming about the democratic vistas of the American experiment in government that had captivated her moral and political imagination.
She was eighteen when she composed A Few Days in Athens — an imaginative fictional translation of a lost ancient Greek manuscript. At the heart of her lyrical, thoroughly original novel is an admonition against self-righteousness and a clarion call for justice, tolerance, and moral discipline, advancing the Epicurean philosophy of atomic realism, which for many centuries was misunderstood as a philosophy of pleasure but is, in fact, predicated on a moral framework that the young Wright encapsulated perfectly:
In the pleasure, — utility, — propriety of human action — whatever word we employ, the meaning is the same — in the consequences of human actions, that is, in their tendency to promote our good or our evil, we must ever find the only test of their intrinsic merit or demerit.
Epicurus from an 1813 engraving by Anthony Cardon. (New York Public Library)
Much of what the world remembers of Epicurus — the first of the Greek philosophers to admit women as his students — has come to us on the wings of poetry. A quarter millennium after him, the Roman poet Lucretius grew enchanted with the Epicurean vision of fathoming life through matter, introducing it to a Roman audience in his monumental book-length poem On the Nature of Things, which opened with an ode to Venus and went on to inspire millennia of minds: Isaac Newton and Thomas Jefferson, Mary Shelley and Mary Oliver. Channeling Epicurus, Lucretius wrote in the first century:
Nor was the mass of matter more compact
nor ever set at wider intervals,
for nothing increases and nothing perishes.
Therefore the motion of the atoms themselves
is the same now as it has ever been,
and so hereafter will their motion be;
and what has been born will evermore be born
in the same way; will be, and will grow
strong with strength as it is given by natural law.
For nothing can ever change the sum of things;
there is no hiding-place, nothing outside,
no source-place where another power might rise
bursting, to change the nature and course of things.
Epicurus and Lucretius were the original arithmeticians of the world, the poets of interdependence, singing the totality of things. Across the immense expanse of time and space, across the abyss of cultures and civilizations, Walt Whitman would rise as the next great poet of totality, with Fanny Wright as his formative influence. "What chemistry!" he would exult in the transmutation of life into death into more life in a poem titled "This Compost." But it was Fanny Wright who revived the Epicurean materialist poetics in the golden age of chemistry. In an author's note tucked toward the end of the novel, she crystallized its basic conceit:
How beautifully have the modern discoveries in chemistry and natural philosophy, and the more accurate analysis of the human mind — sciences unknown to the ancient world — substantiated the leading principles of the Epicurean ethics and physics — the only ancient school of either, really deserving the name.
Epicurus was largely influenced by Democritus, born a century earlier — the first person to formulate an atomic theory of the universe. In one of the handful of surviving fragments from his immense and influential body of work, Democritus personifies the senses and the intellect, staging between them an argument about the nature of reality. When the intellect scoffs that everything we perceive as blue or red, sweetness or bitterness, is just "atoms in the void," the senses quip: "Poor intellect, do you hope to defeat us while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat."
Epicurus seized upon this paradox to expose fundamental truths of human experience. Taking his ideas as a touchstone, Fanny Wright argued that everything from our happiness to our conceptions of right and wrong hinges on how well or poorly we understand "the position we hold in this beautiful material world." She argued that "the elements composing all substances, so far as we know and can reason, eternal, and in their nature unchangeable; and it is only the different disposition of these eternal and unchangeable atoms that produces all the varieties in the substances constituting the great material whole, of which we form a part."
She took care to keep materialism from slipping into reductionism — such a conception of nature's phenomena, she added, "is not explaining their wonders, for that is impossible, but only observing them." She placed the observation of external and internal phenomena at the center of our conscious experience, at the center of any understanding of the world calibrated by reality rather than taken on faith from doctrine and dogma. She argued — against the grain of her time, against the preoccupations of her age bracket — that moral philosophy is closer to science than to theology, for it concerns itself with the pursuit of truth and justice — a pursuit governed by observation and experiment:
Real philosophy is opposed to all systems. Her whole business is observation; and the results of that observation constitute all her knowledge. She receives no truths, until she has tested them by experience; she advances no opinions, unsupported by the testimony of facts; she acknowledges no virtue, but that involved in beneficial actions; no vice, but that involved in actions hurtful to ourselves or to others. Above all, she advances no dogmas — is slow to assert what is, and calls nothing impossible. The science of philosophy is simply a science of observation, both as regards the world without us, and the world within; and, to advance in it, are requisite only sound senses, well developed and exercised faculties, and a mind free of prejudice… Both as regards the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of mind, all is simply a process of investigation. It is a journey of discovery.
Light distribution on soap bubble from a 19th-century French science textbook. (Available as a print.)
The science-minded Thomas Jefferson cherished A Few Days in Athens as "a treat… of the highest order." It became a great influence on the young Whitman, who saw in it an emboldening testament to how powerful an instrument the poetic imagination could be for dismantling dogma, unfastening social strictures, and magnifying alternative possibilities for the realities we have taken as givens. "[The book] was daily food to me: I kept it about me for years," he recounted in old age, urging the young in his orbit to read it. At the age Mary Shelley was when she composed Frankenstein, Wright wrote:
Knowledge… is the best riches that man can possess. Without it, he is a brute; with it, he is a god. But like happiness, he often pursues it without finding it; or, at best, obtains of it but an imperfect glimpse. It is not that the road to it is either dark or difficult, but that he takes a wrong one; or if he enters on the right, he does so unprepared for the journey.
[…]
All learning is useful, all the sciences are curious, all the arts are beautiful; but more useful, more curious, and more beautiful, is the perfect knowledge and perfect government of ourselves. Though a man should read the heavens, unravel their laws and their revolutions; though he should dive into the mysteries of matter, and expound the phenomena of earth and air; though he should be conversant with all the writings, and the sayings, and the actions of the dead… though he should do one or all of these things, yet know not the secret springs of his own mind, the foundation of his opinions, the motives of his actions; if he hold not the rein over his passions; if he have not cleared the mist of all prejudices from his understanding; if he have not rubbed off all intolerance from his judgments; if he know not to weigh his own actions, and the actions of others, in the balance of justice — that man hath not knowledge; nor, though he be a man of science, a man of learning, or an artist, he is not a sage.
Art by Ariana Fields from What Do You Know? by Aracelis Girmay
Fanny Wright was twenty-three when she left Scotland and sailed for America with her sister. Aboard the ship, she composed a poem in which she declared her "daring hand and fearless soul," a soul whose twin she saw in Lord Byron's Childe Harold — a soul "as strange, as proud, as lonely from its birth — with powers as vast."
In her studies, she had seen again and again how every political system aimed at justice and equality, from the dawn of democracy in ancient Greece to the French Revolution of her childhood, had fissured under the uneven weight of its stated ideals staked on moral imagination and their warped enactments aimed at profit and power. America was to her the oasis of optimism that stood a chance of making the ideal real, and so she set out to see for herself how the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence were translating into practice. On America's soil, she would soon prove herself to possess that rare and rapturous quality of resolve that sets the revolutionary apart from the mere rebel — a life devoted not only to exposing the roots of evil but to uprooting them, remedying the poisoned soil, and replanting lush ennobling alternatives.
Shortly after arriving in New York, she wrote, produced, and published a play about Switzerland's fight for independence from Napoleonic rule, which Jefferson lauded for the way it granted "dignity and usefulness to poetry." From there, Fanny and her sister traversed several thousand miles inland — two young women traveling unchaperoned across small towns and frontier hinterlands. She recorded her exuberant impressions in a series of letters to the erudite, radical, and charming Scottish relative who was the closest thing Fanny had to a mother figure — a woman who had lived in America in her youth and had encouraged the adolescent Fanny's countercultural aspiration to be a woman of letters with the assurance to see herself as endowed with "the imagination, the temperament… of genius."
1830s engraving of Fanny Wright by Charles Joseph Hullmandel after Auguste Hervieu. (Met Museum.)
Fanny exulted in the new frontiers of possibility in America, particularly around the one colossal issue on which she parted ways with the ancient Greeks: the Aristotelian assertion that men were the proprietors of reason and therefore the proprietors of women, whose reasoning faculty was inferior by nature. She saw America as Grecian in its democratic ideals but unencumbered by the limiting gender-role conventions of the old world — a new world where "women are assuming their place as thinking beings, not in despite of the men, but chiefly in consequence of their enlarged views and exertions as fathers and legislators." But the reality of slavery — which had been only a political abstraction at the Scottish library — disquieted her, staggered her with its flagrant betrayal of this new nation's founding principles.
Upon returning to Europe two years later, Fanny edited her transatlantic letters into what became one of the era's most popular geopolitical bridges in literature: Views of Society and Manners in America — part travelogue, part memoir, part treatise of political philosophy. Luminaries and decorated revolutionaries on both sides of ocean and channel lavished her with commendations and invitations — Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Paine, Mary Shelley. Among them was the Marquis de Lafayette — a key figure in the French Revolution, who had been so moved by America's struggle for independence that in the bad English he picked up along the way to Philadelphia, he had offered to serve, and did serve, without pay in the war, then helped draft one of the most influential documents of human rights in collaboration with Thomas Jefferson.
Through the portal of mutual admiration, across the gaping divide of language and nation and age, Fanny Wright and Lafayette became friends, then lovers. She wrote to him:
You marvel sometimes at my independent way of walking through the world just as if nature had made me of your sex instead of poor Eve's. Trust me, my beloved friend, the mind has no sex but what habit and education give it, and I who was thrown in infancy upon the world like a wreck upon the waters have learned, as well to struggle with the elements as any male child of Adam.
Three years later, Fanny returned to America, this time with Lafayette, accompanying him on his twenty-four-state farewell tour of the country, witnessing his hero's welcome at every stop, and staying with him at Jefferson's home at Monticello. He was especially celebrated in New York, where he was invited to ceremoniously lay down the corner-stone of a new free library for youths and mechanics. From there, Fanny Wright parted from Lafayette to travel down the Mississippi River by herself before rejoining him in New Orleans. Along the way, she grew increasingly disquieted to see the country she had admired since girlhood as a pinnacle of democracy prop itself up on the backs of disenfranchised people.
When Lafayette headed back to Europe, she decided to stay and do what she could to help a young nation live up to the ideals that would build not just a new nation but a new world. Within a year — her thirtieth — she had become an American citizen and ridden horseback to Memphis to found an experimental colony on the banks of the Wolf River, devoted to preparing enslaved men and women for their self-earned emancipation and lifelong empowerment, devoted to rectifying the many ways in which America's institutions fell short of its founding principles. She had identified slavery as the greatest hypocrisy in the American dream of democracy — the greatest fault line along which the new landmass of possibility could collapse into a failed experiment. She had conversed with many a slaveholder and managed to sway them on moral grounds but failed to weaken their attachment to the material profit they derived from slavery. And so she set out to make her counterargument empirically — to prove that an enslaved person could become a free person with no cost to society, and an intellectual equal worthy of citizenship.
In the experimental community, labor was divided among all the members, who were paid for their work, and the work schedules were structured so that portions of each day were devoted to education and the elevation of mind. Raised in the lap of European aristocracy, where most young people never learn to perform basic chores, Fanny labored shoulder to shoulder with her Black colleagues from dawn until nightfall, her Amazonian frame seen chopping wood and rolling logs up the Tennessee hills. Word of the community — which she named Nashoba, the indigenous Chickasaw word for "wolf" — soon spread across the continent and across the Atlantic.
Art by Anna Read from The Wanting Monster by Martine Murray
When Fanny, having worked herself into physical collapse, became dangerously ill with malaria, her physician insisted that she take a break from the toil and the humid climate. She returned to England — partly to recover, but partly to recruit new allies for Nashoba. She met with Mary Shelley and left her longing to visit America for the blazing example of what a woman could achieve there, forever remembering "Miss Wright of Nashoba" as "the most wonderful and interesting woman I ever saw."
But that is all Nashoba remained — a contour of possibility. The experiment struggled to flourish under a trying confluence of chance and callousness. Just as crop failure imperiled the community's livelihood, it became known that Fanny had fallen in love with one of the Black women in the colony. Her critics squandered no time using the relation- ship against her, hurling incendiary public accusations of "free love" in the backwoods of the South. Fanny responded with dignity and reason, proposing that miscegenation, rather than a condemnable corruption of American society, was a necessary next step toward living up to America's founding democratic ideals.
America was not ready — her supporters grew too frightened of being tarred with immorality by proxy and withdrew their support.
Having devoted years of her life and more than half of her material assets to the Nashoba experiment, Fanny dismantled the colony. It was decided that New Orleans would be the place for the Black Nashobans to resettle. She traveled with them to see to their safety, arranging for their housing and employment. She then headed to the country's epicenter of culture to attack the problem at the root.
Fanny had come to see that prejudice — be it racism or sexism or the hostility to reality perpetrated by the religiously devout — was not the cause of the malady but a symptom of the malady: the American failure to rein in emotional quickenings with reason and discern fact from opinion. The remedy for unreason and unreality was science, is always science. Without science — without a framework for apprehending reality unsullied by human subjectivity — there can be no social justice.
In 1829, Fanny Wright moved to New York and purchased a former church in the Bowery. A generation after the French revolutionaries renamed Notre Dame "The Temple of Reason," she converted the church into what she christened the Hall of Science — a space "uncontaminated and undistracted by religious discussion or opinionative dissensions," devoted to examining facts rather than teaching opinions and making science the pasture of the many rather than the province of the few, devoted to the conviction that systematic advances in self-knowledge and the knowledge of reality are the only means for humanity to outgrow the childishness of religious superstition. The lectures she delivered there — impassioned, rigorously reasoned, rhetorically muscular speeches about universal access to education, about dismantling the docility of religious dogma, about women's sexual freedom and reproductive rights, about the emancipation of slaves, about equitable divorce laws, about the necessity of being a reasoning creature and the inalienable right to be a human being among human beings no matter one's gender, race, class, creed, or station — enveloped the city in a wildfire of scandal and wakefulness. They were the maturation and physical embodiment of the ideas she had first set forth in her Epicurean novel as a teenager, in which she had written:
In our search after truth, we must equally discard presumption and fear. We must come with our eyes and our ears, our hearts and our understandings open; anxious, not to find ourselves right, but to discover what is right; asserting nothing which we cannot prove; believing nothing which we have not examined; and examining all things fearlessly, dispassionately, perseveringly… There is no mystery in nature, but that involved in the very existence of all things.
Art by Margaret C. Cook for Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)
Half a lifetime later, Fanny affirmed this animating ethos in her welcome speech at the Hall of Science opening ceremony, casting a farseeing eye on the potential — and pitfall — of the human mind and how the general practice of "teaching opinions," rather than fostering critical thinking, "has tended to affect our species with a mental paralysis." For two centuries, the antidote she offered would stand shelved and dust-coated in America's apothecary of opinions:
The more we know, the less, in the popular sense of the word, do we believe. The better we understand the phenomena of nature in the visible and tangible world without us, and in the mental, moral, and physical world within us, the more just and perspicuous must be all our ideas. It is possible, indeed, to subvert, by process of reasoning, many human superstitions, and to confute by the ad absurdum many books, maxims, and statutes honored as wise, or worshipped as divine… to distinguish what in human practice is in violation and what in unison with the laws of our being.
Whitman would echo this countercultural invocation almost verbatim in the preface of Leaves of Grass, seeing himself, seeing poetry, as the great joiner of humanity. Fanny Wright saw science — this poetics of reality — as the mightiest binding agent for human divisiveness. Perched in time between the Transit of Venus expedition, which annealed a shared purpose in humanity for the first time, and Einstein's insistence upon "the common language of science" amid a war-torn world, she exhorted:
Let us unite on the safe and sure ground of fact and experiment, and we can never err; yet better, we can never differ… The field of nature is before us to explore; the world of the human heart is with us to examine. In these lie for us all that is certain, and all that is important.
Relish more of Fanny Wright's visionary life, and how it entwines with the lives of other visionaries as varied as Walt Whitman, Mary Shelley, and Frederick Douglass, in Traversal.
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