The Marginalian [Unofficial]

The Marginalian [Unofficial]

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Marginalia on our search for meaning. 🌉 bridged from 🌐 https://themarginalian.org/: https://fed.brid.gy/web/themarginalian.org

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The Marginalian [Unofficial]
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themarginalian.org20 Favorite Children’s Books from 20 Years of The Marginalian“Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time,” E.B. White insisted. “You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth.” Both as a reader of them and as a writer of them, I have never considered “children’s books” a separate category of literature: The best children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise, shining a sidewise gleam on the fundamental questions we live with, articulating in the language of children, which is the language of great simplicity and great profundity,… read article
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themarginalian.orgThe Dark Wood of the Golden Birds: Margaret Wise Brown’s Lost Masterpiece about Mortality and the Meaning of Life, Newly IllustratedIn early September 1948, a year after she rewilded the landscape of literature with Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown watched the love of her life fade to black. Michael Strange, born Blanche Oelrichs, had cast an instant spell on Margaret — outspoken, sophisticated, and self-possessed, so tall Margaret had to lift her grey-blue eyes to meet the black of Michael’s, her tall frame clad in masculine clothing she herself had designed to cling to her curves, with a musical voice unspooling from her haunting dark beauty, a deep velvet laugh, and a reputation for rarely keeping a promise. In her… read article
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themarginalian.org20 Favorite Books from 20 Years of The MarginalianIt is a beautiful dream, that there is something out there to instruct you how to live — a secret handed down by your parents or your teachers, a system like liberal arts education or cognitive behavioral therapy, a slogan held up by your heroes declaring the answer to the bottomless question of why you are here. Whenever you wake up, however you wake up, you find yourself on a path no one else can walk for you, a path you must make by walking. Still, you can find signposts that keep you from losing your way in loneliness. “You… read article
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themarginalian.orgThe Wildest Bet Is the Winning BetWe place life’s bets by countless calculations of probability, conscious and unconscious, only to discover over and over how short they fall of the wildest reaches of the possible, which always includes but exceeds the probable. It helps to remember that we ourselves are children of improbability, that everything we treasure exists not because it had to, not because it was likely or necessary, but because the universe took a gamble against the staggering odds otherwise. THE WILDEST BET IS THE WINNING BET by Maria Popova You wouldn’t have bet on it, the battered rock orbiting a star from the… read article
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themarginalian.orgUrsula K. Le Guin on the Meaning of LifeWe are the survivors of immense and minute events — violent cosmic collisions and subtle genetic mutations, the deaths of innumerable suns and the births of innumerable cells, the splitting of continents and the splitting of atoms. Out of it all, we emerged as creatures muzzled by a consciousness that demands we give meaning to our survival. It will not come like alms dropped from the unfeeling hand of the universe. It cannot be found ready-made in the great books and the great teachers, or bought at the price of an Ivy League tuition, or sold by Silicon Valley in… read article
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themarginalian.orgIntroducing the Museum of DelightAfter twenty years of making immaterial things with my mind — ideas sculpted of words, questions woven of sentences, translucent vessels for thought and feeling in the shape of poems — I found myself overcome by the urge to make things with my hands out of matter: clay, thread, stone, resin, wood, lichen. They now live in the Museum of Delight. Housed in a decommissioned airstream from the 1950s that took a year to transform, the Museum of Delight is a collaboration with my friend and neighbor Ryan Vahey — a multidisciplinary artist who lost his entire life’s work and… read article
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themarginalian.orgHow to Hold Your Heart with Golden HandsOne bleak English winter a long time ago, wandering through London in the wake of a relationship that had just unraveled, I walked into an antiquarian bookstore and chanced upon a rare century-old edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales — which I had grown up with — illustrated by Arthur Rackham. All fairy tales deal in enchantment, but the Grimms’ are especially powerful cautionary tales about the treacherous line between true and false enchantment in love — something Rackham’s art captured exquisitely. One particular illustration stopped me up short, unnerved me, captivated me with its disquieting fusion of terror… read article
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themarginalian.orgCorrective for a Broken Heart“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her passionate insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” It can happen with a shattering, or with a thousand small fissures, but the great paradox — the great salvation — is that every time it happens, you live to see you are unbreakable. And so, a poem. CORRECTIVE FOR A BROKEN HEART by Maria Popova Why all the threadbare drama, the stale catastrophism of calling it broken? It still beats, doesn’t it, still trembles at the sight of fog flowing through the forest like a slow dance song. It was… read article
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themarginalian.orgNineteen Truths and One Beguiling Lie about Life from 20 Years of The MarginalianIt is an odd thing, looking back on your life, trying to recognize in the mirror of memory the people you used to be, finding them strangers: the person who kissed your first kiss, the person who drank your last drink, the person who had your best idea, the person who made your worst mistake, the person who over and over mistook fear for love, the person who thought orange was a good idea. Somehow, you have to grow arms long enough to wrap them around all those people and a heart wide enough to hold each of them with… read article
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themarginalian.orgCelebrating 20 Years of The Marginalian and the Search for Meaning: Free Livestream This FridayAt the dawn of my twenties, lonely, destitute, and disoriented by the demands of making a new life in an alien world, I started keeping notes on my search for meaning while working four jobs to pay my way through college. On October 23, 2006, I began sharing my discoveries — passages from books, links to neuroscience studies, reproductions of 16th-century Japanese woodcuts — in an office email to seven colleagues. They in turn began sharing it with friends, who began sharing it with friends. The fractal spread and, within a few years, the Library of Congress had included it… read article
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themarginalian.orgThe Map to the Route of Your LifeNo one will map for you the path by which you must cross the wilderness of your own life — not your parents or your teachers, not your heroes or your lovers, not the self-help books or Shakespeare’s sonnets. Some may give you signposts, some may become turning points, but it is a path you ultimately make by walking. Along the way, you mistake dreams and desires for destinations, only to find that they have been way-stations — as soon as you attain them, you begin longing for something else. This Möbius strip of longing is the root of everything… read article
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themarginalian.orgHow 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 the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the measure of an unwasted life is not what outlives it but how it was lived — how much integrity and authenticity and creative vitality filled these numbered days, these unrepeatable hours. Most of us will not leave behind a revolutionary insight into the nature of the universe, but we too forget that no matter… read article
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themarginalian.orgNostradamusGPT: The Psychology of Prophecy and How to Break Free from the Prison of Predictive TechnologiesThis 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 searching for certainty. The word auspicious derives from the Latin auspex — one who examines the flight of birds for omens and divinations of the future. Today, our birds are made of bits — wind-up larks of our own making we call algorithms — but they serve the same function: to let us believe that we can divine the future in order to respond to it; to sedate our anxieties… read article
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themarginalian.orgNobel Laureate Doris Lessing on Breaking Free from the Prisons We Choose to Live InsideThis 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 self-righteousness to distract from the uncomfortable unknowns, from the great open question of what makes us and keeps us human, and human together. This is also the history of the world: artists — those lighthouses of the spirit — speaking truth to power, placing imagination ahead of ideology, the soul above the self, unselfing us into seeing each other, into remembering, as James Baldwin told Margaret Mead in their epochal… read article
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themarginalian.orgHermann Hesse on How to Read a Book and How to Read YourselfBooks 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 and how to suffer, how to grieve and how to be glad. We read to clarify ourselves and to anneal our values. We read for the assurance that others have lived through what we are living through. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” James Baldwin reflected in his most personal interview. And yet while books may give… read article
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themarginalian.orgJames Baldwin on How Love (Finally) Finds YouOur 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 lost like the Little Red Riding Hood or the names of the women who painted the caves. Like the paradoxical notion of finding yourself, the notion of finding love pulsates with equal parts helplessness and hubris — a rueful recognition that something is missing from your life and a belief that it falls on you to do the looking, that if you only look hard enough and long enough, you… read article
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themarginalian.orgThe 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, addressing a daughter she was yet to have. “Always appear what you are, and you will not pass through existence without enjoying its genuine blessings, love and respect.” In late 1791, as important men were sitting down in America to make ten amendments to the young country’s constitution, which they called a Universal Bill of Rights, Wollstonecraft was sitting down in England to complete A Vindication of the Rights of… read article
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themarginalian.orgHow to Doubt Your Way into a Truer LifeThe 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. But because possibility is the hardest thing to bear, we sedate ourselves with certainty — even though we know that liminality is the most generative place, that to believe is to doubt, that we are most creative when we attempt what is not certain. (“Whatever inspiration is,” one of my favorite poets reflected in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”) In a culture… read article
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themarginalian.orgSleeping Beauties: David Byrne on Why Transformative Ideas Fall Dormant and How They Awaken to Change the WorldEach 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 be long dead. The great wonder is that its light can traverse immense expanses of space and time to gladden the darkness of today, to cast wonder upon this lonely planet. An idea is a signal that may travel across immense expanses of space and time before it touches the world. Transformative ideas can and often do fall on the closed eyes of their epoch. But, over and over, history… read article
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themarginalian.orgBut We Had Music: Nick Cave Reads an Animated Poem about How to Be More AliveHow, knowing that even the universe is dying, do we bear our lives? Most readily, through friendship, through connection, through co-creating the world we want to live in for the brief time we have together on this lonely, perfect planet. The seventh annual Universe in Verse — a many-hearted labor of love, celebrating the wonder of reality through science and poetry — occasioned a joyous collaboration with Australian musician and writer Nick Cave and Brazilian artist and filmmaker Daniel Bruson on an animated poem reckoning with this central question of being alive. BUT WE HAD MUSIC by Maria Popova Right… read article
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themarginalian.orgA Constellation of Amazements: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Joy of Collecting ThingsWe are hunter-gatherers with a capacity for amazement, wired to search for an organizing principle by which to contain the chaos of reality. We organize what we find into categories and hierarchies, hovering over which is one of the strangest things about being human: preference. How odd to have a strong feeling about a color or an object or a sequence of chords. And yet our preferences are how we sculpt the self from the monolith of the species. Preference taken to its highest form touches amazement — the glad disbelief that something so personally relevant and rapturous could exist… read article