The Marginalian
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Marginalia on our search for meaning.
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The Wild Iris: Nobel Laureate Louise Glück on the Door at the End of Your Suffering
"Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice."
Marcus Aurelius on the Good Luck of Your Bad Luck: The Stoic Strategy for Weathering Life’s Waves and Turning Suffering into Strength
"What happened could have happened to anyone, but not everyone could have carried on."
How to Bear Your Sorrows: Nick Cave on Integrating the Darkness of Loss with the Bright Ongoingness of Life
Few things in our culture are more wounding than the concept of healing — as if the pains and losses that we suffer are an illness, a malfunction of the...
Diseases of the Will: Neuroscience Founding Father Santiago Ramón y Cajal on the Six Psychological Flaws That Keep the Gifted from Living Up to Their Gift
"Our neurons must be used ... not only to know but also to transform knowledge; not only to experience but also to construct."
The Four Buddhist Mantras for Turning Fear into Love
"When you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence."
Fernando Pessoa on Unselfing into Who You Really Are
“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human...
How to Get Love Less Wrong: George Saunders on Breaking the Patterns that Break Our Hearts
"We want to believe that love is singular and exclusive, and it unnerves us to think that it might actually be renewable..."
How to Help Someone Change: The Samurai Guide to Giving Feedback
Few things in life are more exasperating than seeing the potential in someone you love and seeing them continually fall short of it, stumbling again and again over the same...
How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life
"Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life."
How to Spot and How to Stop a Liar: Hannah Arendt on Deception, Self-Deception, and the Psychology of Defactualization
"No matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough ... to cover the immensity of factuality."
The 12 Kinds of Time and How to Be More Fully Alive
“I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars,” Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska wrote in her lovely poem “Possibilities.” Our preferences, of course, hardly matter to time —...
Pythagoras on the Purpose of Life and the Meaning of Wisdom
Abiding insight into the aim of human existence from the man who revolutionized science and coined the word "philosopher."
Do Not Spare Yourself
The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the...
Is There a God? Stephen Hawking Gives the Definitive Answer to the Eternal Question
"The universe is the ultimate free lunch."
The Art of Dignity Beyond Pride: How to Move Through Heartbreak Like Frida Kahlo
“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her exquisite insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” The price we pay for the risk is the great equalizer...
Nick Cave on the Antidote to Our Existential Helplessness
Stepping up to the subtle gestures that can redeem a day, or a life.
But We Had Music
How, knowing that even the universe is dying, do we bear our lives? Most readily, through friendship, through connection, through co-creating the world we want to live in for the...
The Healing Power of Gardens: Oliver Sacks on the Psychological and Physiological Consolations of Nature
"In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical 'therapy' to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens."
3 Kinds of Loneliness and 4 Kinds of Forever
Loneliness is the fundamental condition of life — we are born by another, but born alone; die around others (if we are lucky and loved), but die alone; we spend...
The Power of a Thin Skin
"To be thin-skinned is to feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice."