All articles from The Marginalian
How to Keep Criticism from Sinking Your Soul: Walt Whitman and the Discipline of Creative Confidence
"I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood."
How to Be Un-Dead: Anaïs Nin and D.H. Lawrence on the Key to Living Fully
"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."
The Enemy Outside and the Enemy Within: Audre Lorde’s Antidote to Despair
“There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote between two world wars. There are many species of despair — the private despair of ill health and heartbreak, the public despair
Bloom: A Touching Animated Short Film about Depression and What It Takes to Recover the Light of Being
How the warm rays of hope and healing enter the dark inner chamber of leaden loneliness through the unexpected cracks of kindness.
Let Your Heart Be Broken
"The miracle is that we rise again out of suffering... The miracle is that we create ourselves anew."
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."
Zadie Smith on the Courage to Be More Than Yourself
Every act of learning is an act of intellectual appropriation, incorporating someone else’s knowledge into your own mental library. Every act of empathy is an act of emotional appropriation, modeling
How to Live a Miraculous Life
Suppose we agree that we are here to love anyway — to love even though the work is almost unbearably difficult, even though we know that everything alive is dying, that everything beautiful is perisha
Walt Whitman’s Advice on Living a Vibrant and Rewarding Life
“Love the earth and sun and the animals… re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul…”
Martian Gargoyles and Lunar Fish: Chilean Artist Alejandra Acosta’s Wondrous Embroidered Illustrations for This World’s First Book Theorizing Life on Other Worlds
It is the sunset of the 1600s. Milton has just pioneered the use of the word space to connote outer space. Kepler has just pioneered science fiction by imagining space travel, but going only as far as
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 our lives islanded in our one and only
Gary Snyder on How to Unbreak the World
"What we’d hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds."
Poetry: I Too, Dislike It
I was a latecomer to poetry, curling my nose at it in that confounding and rather embarrassing way we have of discounting what we don’t understand, dismissing as useless what we don’t know how to use.
The Neurophysiology of Enchantment: How Music Casts Its Spell on Us
"Music so readily transports us from the present to the past, or from what is actual to what is possible."
The Third Thing: Poet Donald Hall on the Secret to Lasting Love
"Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment."
Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” Brought to Life in a Spanish Flashmob of 100 Musicians
A touchingly human reminder of our capacity for ecstasy, transcendence, and collective felicity.
Ecology, Empire, Emoji: The Bittersweet Story of the Ancient Plant That Originated the Heart Symbol
There we were: Three women — a neuroscientist, a mycologist, and me — talking about the perplexities of love when a cloud in the perfect shape of a broken heart appeared in the gloaming sky backlit by
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum on How to Live with Our Human Fragility
"To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control."
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."
Embodiment and the (Re)invention of Emoji, from the Aztecs to Humboldt and Darwin to AI
By the time he published Vues des Cordillères, et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique, Alexander von Humboldt (September 14, 1769–May 6, 1859), barely in his forties, was the world’s most emi
Viktor Frankl on Success
In 1945, shortly after his release from the concentration camps where his mother and brother had been murdered in the gas chambers, not yet knowing the love of his life was ailing with the typhus that
Virginia Woolf on Finding Beauty in the Uncertainty of Time, Space, and Being
Calibration and consolation for those moments when it seems impossible that we should ever again recompose the world's broken fragments into a harmonious whole.
Kierkegaard on How to Channel Anxiety into Creativity
"Because it is possible to create -- creating one's self, willing to be one's self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities -- one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there w
Simone de Beauvoir on Marriage and the Freedom to Change
A self is a story we tell to bridge who we are and who we have been, turning the fluidity of personhood into a resin of narrative that hardens with each retelling. “If we are creatures of time, then w
Arundhati Roy on the Deepest Measure of Success
"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance... To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple."
Trying Not to Try: Finding Freedom from Striving in the Ancient Chinese Concept of Wu-Wei
"Our modern conception of human excellence is too often impoverished, cold, and bloodless. Success does not always come from thinking more rigorously or striving harder."
How to Be More Alive: Hermann Hesse on Wonder and the Proper Aim of Education
"While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity."
Consolation for Sorrow from King Arthur’s Court: Merlyn’s Advice on What to Do When the World Gets You Down
"Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting."
Hannah Arendt on the Power of Being an Outsider
"We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human."
Mary Oliver on the Measure of a Life Well Lived and How to Magnify Your Aliveness
"Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going?"
The Wanting Monster: A Tender Modern Fable about the Difficult Art of Resting at the Still Point of Enough
Wanting is the menacing margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that vivisects your serenity, the hammer that shatters your wholeness — to want anything is to deem your life incomplet
The Day I Became a Bird: A Tender Illustrated Parable of Falling in Love and Learning to Unmask Our True Selves
Imaginative assurance that we are worthy of love just as we are.
The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Dig for the “Submerged Sunrise of Wonder”
Recovering the "forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence" alive in the back of our modernity-deadened minds.