The Marginalian
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Marginalia on our search for meaning.
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The Day Dostoyevsky Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Dream
"And it is so simple... You will instantly find how to live."
The Other Significant Others: Living and Loving Outside the Confines of Conventional Friendship and Compulsory Coupledom
"While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them."
Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the Visitations of the Darkness
"If you can acknowledge it and you can relax with it a little bit, very often it shortens its duration."
How to Hold Your Helplessness: Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell’s Salve for the Anxiety of Overwhelm
"A way of life cannot be successful so long as it is a mere intellectual conviction. It must be deeply felt, deeply believed, dominant even in dreams."
How Not to Waste Your Life
“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become...
An Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of Candid Connection
"We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship."
NostradamusGPT: The Psychology of Prophecy and How to Break Free from the Prison of Predictive Technologies
This is our paradox: We know that uncertainty is the substrate of the universe, is the crucible of creativity, is the path to truth, and yet we spend our lives...
Probability Theory Pioneer Mark Kac on the Unpredictability of Creativity and the Two Types of Geniuses
"Creative people live in two worlds. One is the ordinary world which they share with others and in which they are not in any special way set apart from their...
Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing on Breaking Free from the Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
This is the history of the world: revolutionaries turning into tyrants, leaders who claim to stand with the masses turning the individuals within them on each other, stirring certainties and...
Hermann Hesse on How to Read a Book and How to Read Yourself
Books show us what it is like to be another and at the same time return us to ourselves. We read to learn how to live — how to love...
James Baldwin on How Love (Finally) Finds You
Our language betrays our self-betrayals: We speak of finding love, as if it were an undiscovered eighth continent or a habitable world in another solar system, as if it got...
The Madman Who Saved Mothers: The Invention of Handwashing and the Bittersweet True Love Story Behind ‘Frankenstein’
This essay is adapted from Traversal. “Death may snatch me from you, before you can weigh my advice,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the philosophical novel she wouldn’t live to finish,...
Elizabeth Gilbert on Love, Loss, and How to Move Through Grief as Grief Moves Through You
"Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief...
How to Doubt Your Way into a Truer Life
The most maddening thing about life is also the most beautiful: its indeterminacy. The course of our lives, the fate of our species, the future of the universe: all undecided....
How Memory Makes Us and Breaks Truth: The Rashomon Effect and the Science of How Memories Form and Falter in the Brain
"We are our memory… that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.”
Sleeping Beauties: David Byrne on Why Transformative Ideas Fall Dormant and How They Awaken to Change the World
Each time you look up at the night sky, you see only ancient signals — by the time a photon has reached your pupil, the star that emitted it may...
Improvisation and the Quantum of Consciousness
Inside the brain's secret portal to remembering the future.
How to Remake Yourself When You Are Undone: Lincoln and the Gift of His Suicidal Depression
Life-affirming inspiration from a man who knew intimately “that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.”
Vincent van Gogh on Fear, Taking Risks, and How Inspired Mistakes Propel Us Forward
"However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth... steps in and does something."
Walt Whitman, Shortly After His Paralytic Stroke, on What Makes Life Worth Living
"Tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies."