Other Echoes

Posted by Maria Popova

https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/01/02/traversal/

https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=86525

Traversal (FSG) broadens and deepens the questions raised in Figuring, the questions we live with: the relationship between chance and choice in becoming who we are, between chemistry and consciousness in being what we are, the tension between our love of truth and our lust for power, the restlessness of our longings and the redemption of our losses.

Our various instruments of reckoning with these questions — telescopes and treatises, postulates and poems — are revealed in their power and limitation 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, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wagener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads — the world’s first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue — to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet more clarifying as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living.

Here is the prelude, Chapter 0, as it appears in the book, framing the 565 pages to come:

Bigger than Manhattan, Earth’s largest living organism sways in the surf south of Australia: Posidonia australis — a species of seagrass that, unable to flower, clones itself. Older than mathematics and the written word, it has been cloning itself since before the pyramids were built — a kind of immortality. And while I kiss my lover on the fresh-cut grass under the Manhattan Bridge, it goes on cloning itself as we go on dying and passing between our lips the heat of our mortality.

Between the scale of atoms and the scale of stars, between the time of mayflies and the time of mountains, we exist as proteins lit up with purpose, matter yearning for meaning on a planet capable of trees and tenderness, a world on which every living thing abides by the same dumb resilience through which we rose from the oceans to compose the Benedictus and to build the bomb.

All of our models and our maps, all of our poems and our love songs, all the conjectures chalked on the blackboard of the mind in theorems and scriptures, spring from the same elemental restlessness to locate ourselves in the cosmos of being, to know reality and to know ourselves. Across the abyss between one consciousness and another, between one frame of reference and another, we go on searching for an organizing principle to fathom the ultimate questions:

What is life?

What is death?

What makes a body a person?

What makes a planet a world?

Over and over, we discover that it is all one question, that there might just be a single answer: love. Our love of knowledge. Our love of mystery. Our love of beauty transcending the vanity of ambition. Our love of truth prevailing over the howling hunger for power. Our love for each other — each of us a festival of particles and probabilities, a living question, a perishable miracle composed of chemistry and culture, of passion and chance.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/01/02/traversal/

https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=86525

Posted by Maria Popova

https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/01/01/che-guevara-revolutionary-medicine/

https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=86519

“If the body is not the soul, what is the soul?” wrote Walt Whitman in his heroic revolt against the lasting tyranny of Descartes, whose dismissal of the body and disdain for the soul may be the single most damaging ideological misstep of modernity. Long before we had evidence that the body is where we heal the traumas of being, that it is our mightiest instrument of sanity and joy, that “the mind narrates what the nervous system knows,” Whitman ministered to disfigured soldiers as a volunteer Civil War nurse, knowing what we still, in our age of disembodied intellects, deny — that the body is the frontline of our values, the revolutionary battleground on which all of our ideas and ideals are won or lost.

A century later and a hemisphere over, a young medical student mounted his motorcycle to tour his continent, an inhaler in his battered backpack. Along the way, Ernesto “Che” Guevara (May 14, 1928–October 9, 1967) dreamt up a revolution on the scale of the world, the fundaments of which — a refusal to accept the givens, a defiant will to take charge of the possible — he had learned on the scale of the body.

Born two months premature and almost immediately afflicted with bronchial pneumonia, Ernestito was a sickly, chubby child who wore heavy glasses to correct for his astigmatism and carried a vaporizer at all times to ameliorate the regular attacks of asthma so severe that his mother home-schooled him until the authorities demanded he enroll in a state school. He did, but his attendance record was punctuated by frequent asthma-induced absences, sometimes lasting weeks, during which his mother continued to tutor him, teaching him French. From the moment he learned to read, books had been his solace through the long and lonely quarantines, and now he was reading the poetry of Baudelaire and the novels of Émile Zola in the original. But with each paginated portal into another world, he suffered the tension of a mind so free, so limitless, captive to the limitations of the body.

Just as the young Beethoven had resolved to “take fate by the throat” as he began losing his hearing, Ernesto took his destiny in his own hands. He fasted, became fastidious about his everyday diet, started swimming, took to the outdoors, trying to find his limits, to push them, sometimes so hazardously that his friends had to carry him home wheezing. As a teenager, he joined a local rugby team coached by a young biochemistry and pharmacology student several years his senior, who became a close and dear friend. During practice breaks, Ernesto would sit with his back against a light post reading Freud and Faulkner, Dumas and Steinbeck, beginning to think about what it means and what it takes to be free — thoughts that would deepen and complicate a decade later as he witnessed the hunger, poverty, and disease throughout South America from his motorcycle, thoughts that would lead him to approach the body politic of the world with the same defiant will to change the givens, to prevail over the forces that keep people unfree.

In the high summer of 1960, having anchored one major revolution and inspired many, Che Guevara addressed young doctors at the inauguration of a new training program at Cuba’s Ministry of Public Health. Although much of his speech, appropriately titled “On Revolutionary Medicine,” speaks to the particular conditions of Cuban society in the wake of the revolution, pulsating through it are timeless insights into the deepest meaning of health for any person and any society in any epoch.

Arguing that a revolution aims to create “a new type of human being,” that this is “the greatest work of social medicine,” and that “social change demands equally profound changes in the mental structure of the people,” he throws a gauntlet at Descartes with the intimation that the body is the substrate of the mind — for a person and for a people. Health, he argues, is a personal responsibility that has political power, which in turn makes it a collaborative intention:

For one to be a revolutionary doctor or to be a revolutionary at all, there must first be a revolution. Isolated individual endeavour, for all its purity of ideals, is of no use, and the desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals serves no purpose if one works alone, solitarily, in some corner of America, fighting against adverse governments and social conditions which prevent progress.

[…]

The battle against disease should be based on the principle of creating a robust body — not creating a robust body through a doctor’s artistic work on a weak organism, but creating a robust body through the world of the whole collectivity, especially the whole social collectivity.

He envisions the best possible fruition of revolutionary personal and public health:

One day medicine will have to become a science that serves to prevent diseases, to orient the entire public toward their medical obligations, and that intervention is only necessary in cases of extreme urgency to perform some surgical operation or to deal with something uncharacteristic of that new society we are creating.

Paradoxically, this collective triumph hinges upon the personal responsibility of the individual, who (as Eleanor Roosevelt also knew) is the fulcrum of all social change:

As for all the revolutionary tasks, fundamentally it is the individual who is needed. The revolution does not, as some claim, standardize the collective will and the collective initiative. On the contrary, it liberates man’s individual talent. What the revolution does is orient that talent.

[…]

If we know the direction in which we have to travel, then the only thing left for us is to know the daily stretch of the road and to take it. Nobody can point out that stretch; that stretch is the personal road of each individual; it is what he or she will do every day, what a person will gain from their individual experience, and what they will give of themselves.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

newsletter

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/01/01/che-guevara-revolutionary-medicine/

https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=86519