The Marginalian
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Marginalia on our search for meaning.
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A Lei for Your Losses: Joan Didion on the Art of Letting Go
“We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss,” Judith Viorst wrote in her defense of life’s necessary losses, “and we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people,...
A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows: How a Forgotten Medieval Woman Gave Groups of Birds Their Strange Names, with Wondrous Vintage Illustrations by Brian Wildsmith
Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conveying the blueness of...
The Art of Solitude: Buddhist Scholar and Teacher Stephen Batchelor on Contemplative Practice and Creativity
"Here lies the paradox of solitude. Look long and hard enough at yourself in isolation and suddenly you will see the rest of humanity staring back."
The Bird in You, the World in You, and the Art of Trusting Time: Ceramics, Serpentine, and How to Get Over Heartbreak
One December afternoon, I arrived in Patagonia with a big blue backpack, a small bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda’s love poems, and a broken heart. (Though a heart, of course,...
How We Render Reality: Attention as an Instrument of Love
"Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged."
Matter, Memory, and the Paradox of Perception: Henri Bergson on How to See Reality
In 1896, decades before Santiago Ramón y Cajal pioneered neuroscience, more than a century before Oliver Sacks showed us how perception phosphoresces in the 100 milliseconds between the world and...
How to Apprehend Reality as It Really Is: Thoreau on Knowing vs. Seeing
"We hear and apprehend only what we already half know."
Frankenstein Author Mary Shelley on the Surest Remedy for a Sunken Spirit and What Makes Life Worth Living
"There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others."
Barry Lopez on the Cure for Our Existential Loneliness and the Three Tenets of a Full Life
"Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief...
Life, Loss, and the Wisdom of Rivers
"It’s a mercy that time runs in one direction only, that we see the past but darkly and the future not at all."
A Life of One’s Own: A Brilliant Young Woman’s Forgotten Field Guide to the Art of Knowing What You Really Want
"I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it."
The Tree and the River: A Wordless Love Letter to How Nature Always Wins
Nested between two giant cedars in the remote old-growth forest where I live much of the year are the rusted remains of boxy car. A tree root has seized one...
How to Be a Tree: Notes on the Resilience of Letting Go
This essay and poem are part of the Universe in Verse book. Trees grant us some of the richest metaphors for our own lives — a polished lens on the...
How to Be Reborn Each Day
"Please try to go to hell frequently because you will find the light there."
The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior: Bertrand Russell’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
"Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought."
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."
Ode to a Good Pen: A Poem About Writing the Book of Love, Read by Nick Cave
I spent the summer using the fantastic binomial technique developed by Gianni Rodari — the beloved Italian writer whose stories lit up my Bulgarian childhood — as a creative prompt...
The Moving Letter James Baldwin Received from His Childhood Teacher at the Peak of His Fame and His Heartbreak
In early 1934, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student at Columbia Teachers College took an internship teaching drama and producing student plays at PS 24 in Harlem. Among her young charges at...
Kahlil Gibran on the Art of Becoming Yourself Across the Sweep of Life
A roadmap to the fulfilled belonging on the other side of "the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great."
Decoding the Mystery of Intuition: AI Prophet Margaret Boden on the Three Elements of Creativity
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s...