All articles from The Marginalian
Kiss: Ellen Bass's Stunning Ode to the Courage of Tenderness as an Antidote to Helplessness
There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance — the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation — are these little acts of mercy, of tenderne
Things Become Other Things: Walking, Forgiveness, and Belonging in the Mountains of Japan
Steps are events, experiments, miniature rebellions against gravity and chance. With each step, we fall and then we catch ourselves, we choose to go one way and not another. The foot falls and worlds of possibility rise in its shadow. Every step remaps the psychogeography of the walker. Every step i
How to Be a Happier Creature
It must be encoded there, in the childhood memories of our synapses and our cells — how we came out of the ocean 35 trillion yesterdays ago, small and slippery, gills trembling with the shock of air, fins budding feet, limbs growing sinewy and furred, then unfurred, spine unfurling beneath the bone
Blink Twice to Quell a Quasar: Carl Sagan on Superstition
Growing up in Bulgaria, in a city teeming in stray dogs and cars, I was deeply distressed by the sight of each dead animal in the streets between home and school — deaths I could not prevent and could not bear. To cope with the aching helplessness, I developed a private superstition: If I touched ea
The Paradox of Knowing Who You Are and What You Want: Cristina Campo on Fairy Tales, Time, and the Meaning of Maturity
"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales," Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. "If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales." Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a plasticity of being that