Traversal (FSG) extends and deepens the questions raised in Measurementquestions we live with: the relationship between luck and choice in being who we are, between chemistry and understanding in being who we are, the tension between our true love and our thirst for power, the restlessness of our longing and the redemption of our loss.
Our various tools for reckoning with these questions – telescopes and texts, writings and poems – are revealed by the power and their limitations of the collective lives, love, and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and set aside by history, people born on the edge of their time and place in which they lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Douglas Whitrights, Frederick Whitright, Frédéric Frederick, Frédéric. Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wagener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven into their stories are other threads – the collaboration of the world's first science, the Irish potato famine, the recording of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue – to make the explanation more detailed but more clear as the book progresses, turning to the big question of what makes life alive and worth living.
Here is the introduction, Chapter 0, as it appears in the book, shaping the next 565 pages:
Larger than Manhattan, the world's largest living thing is hovering in southern Australia: Posidonia australis – a type of sea grass that, if unable to bloom, will self-grow. Older than math and the written word, it has been around since before the towers were built – a form of immortality. And while I kiss my lover on the freshly cut grass under the Manhattan Bridge, it continues to pretend to be another as we continue to die and pass between our lips the heat of our death.
Between the scale of atoms and the scale of stars, between the time of flies and the time of mountains, we exist as proteins that shine with a purpose, a story that longs for meaning in a world that knows how to have trees and compassion, a world where all living things live with the same silent endurance where we leave the sea to unite the world. Benedict and building a bomb.
All our models and maps, all our poems and love songs, all the beginnings written on the mental board in theoretical and literary texts, arise from the same basic restlessness to place ourselves in the environment, to know reality and to know ourselves. Across the abyss between one consciousness and another, between one frame of reference and another, we continue to seek an organizing principle to understand the ultimate questions:
What is life?
What is death?
What makes a body human?
What makes a planet earth?
Again and again, we find that every question is one, that there may be only one answer: love. Our passion for knowledge. Our love of mystery. Our love of beauty transcends the vanity of longing. Our true love overcomes the hunger for power. Our love for each other – each of us is a festival of particles and possibilities, a living question, a perishable miracle made of chemistry and culture, passion and opportunity.
