All articles from The Marginalian
The Art of Choosing Love Over Not-Love: Rumi’s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy
"You’ll long for me when I’m gone... You'll kiss the headstone of my grave... Kiss my face instead!"
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."
Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being
"You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimate
Why You
A self is a story of why you are you — a selective retelling of the myriad chance events between the birth of the universe and this moment: atoms bonding one way and not another, parents bonding with
Darwin’s Greatest Regret and His Deathbed Reflection on What Makes Life Worth Living
"If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week."
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."
Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die
The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Edward Abbey (January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989) set out to get
Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life
"To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that's its task."
Blaise Pascal on the Intuitive vs. the Logical Mind and How We Come to Know Truth
"The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know..."
Virginia Woolf on Self-Knowledge and the Limits of Empathy
"We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others... There is a virgin forest in each."
The Great Blue Heron, Signs vs. Omens, and Our Search for Meaning
One September dawn on the verge of a significant life change, sitting on my poet friend’s dock, I watched a great blue heron rise slow and prehistoric through the morning mist, carrying the sky on her
How We Grieve: Meghan O’Rourke on the Messiness of Mourning and Learning to Live with Loss
"The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created."
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 being can fight,” E. E. Cummings wrote in
Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life
"In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity."
Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding Peace
"Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair."
The Blessing of Burnout: Samin Nosrat on the Faustian Bargain of Achievement and the Simple Substance of the Good Life
We live in a bipolar epoch — on one end, the blamethirsty finger of cancel culture and politicized othering; on the other, the zeal for designating people, real human beings with real human lives, as
Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity
"The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state."
Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance
One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives. We are living through a time of uncom
Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System: The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation
"A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure."
A Life of One’s Own: A Penetrating Century-Old Field Guide to Self-Possession, Mindful Perception, and 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."
Oliver Sacks on Despair and the Meaning of Life
"The meaning of life... clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love."
The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece
"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Dying Mothers, the Birth 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, addressing a dau
Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning
"Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is... on each person... creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her ow
The Reason of Emotion: Bruce Lee’s Unpublished Writings on Willpower, Imagination, and Confidence
"You will never get any more out of life than you expect."
Kandinsky on the Spiritual Element in Art and the Three Responsibilities of Artists
"To harmonize the whole is the task of art."
How Pioneering Physicist Lise Meitner Discovered Nuclear Fission, Paved the Way for Women in Science, and Was Denied the Nobel Prize
"Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep joy and awe that the natural order of things
Sleep and the Meaning of Life: Fernando Pessoa on the Existential Dimension of the Horizontal Hours
One of the most important things I have learned about living is that, in any life of purpose and creative vitality, you must be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as about your work. And ye
Carl Jung on Creativity
The question of what it takes to create — to make something of beauty and substance that touches other lives across space and time — is one of the deepest, oldest questions, perhaps because the answer
What Birds Dream About: The Evolution of REM and How We Practice the Possible in Our Sleep
"It may be that in REM, this gloaming between waking consciousness and the unconscious, we practice the possible into the real... It may be that we evolved to dream ourselves into reality — a laborato
Forgiveness
Shortly after I began the year with some blessings, a friend sent me Lucille Clifton’s spare, splendid poem “blessing the boats.” We had met at a poetry workshop and shared a resolution to write more
On Children: Poignant Parenting Advice from Kahlil Gibran
"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself... You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house
Rilke on the Relationship Between Solitude, Love, Sex, and Creativity
"There is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear... People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult."
When Your Parents Are Dying: Some of the Simplest, Most Difficult and Redemptive Life-Advice You’ll Ever Receive
"Death makes human beings seem like very small containers that are packed so densely we can only be aware of a fraction of what's inside us from moment to moment."
Thich Nhat Hanh on True Love and the Five Rivers of Self-Knowledge
“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to his young correspondent. The great diff
The Middle Passage: A Jungian Field Guide to Finding Meaning and Transformation in Midlife
"Our task at midlife is to be strong enough to relinquish the ego-urgencies of the first half and open ourselves to a greater wonder."
Blue Is the Color of Desire: The Science, Poetry, and Wonder of the Bowerbird
For all the enchantment the color blue has cast upon humanity, no animal has fallen under its spell more hopelessly than the bowerbird, whose very survival hinges on blue. In a small clearing on the f
Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being
"You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimate
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."
Anaïs Nin on How Reading Awakens Us from the Slumber of Almost-Living
"It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it."
Georgia O’Keeffe on the Art of Seeing
"To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time."
How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives: Annie Dillard on Choosing Presence Over Productivity
"The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less."
Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation
"Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify
How Not to Be a Victim of Success
A self is a personal mythos — a story through which we sieve the complexity and contradictions of lived experience for coherence. The cruelest price of success — that affirmation of the self by the wo
Kurt Vonnegut on the Simplest, Hardest Secret of Happiness
The meaning of life, in a short verse.
The Three Elements of the Good Life
To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires. And yet because a person is a confederacy of parts often at odds and sometime
Necessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go
"We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and l
The Continuous Creative Act of Holding on and Letting Go: 10 Beautiful Minds on the Art of Growing Older
A great paradox of being alive in this civilization is that we have come to dread and devalue the triumph of having lived, forgetting that to grow old is not a punishment but a privilege — that of hav
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 Four Buddhist Mantras for Turning Fear into Love
"When you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence."
Don’t Waste Your Wildness
"What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into
Kahlil Gibran on Silence, Solitude, and the Courage to Know Yourself
"In much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly."
What Happens When We Die
"How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?"