The Marginalian
The Marginalian
Maria Popova
Hello. My name is Maria Popova and The Marginalian is a record of my reading and reckoning with our search for meaning: sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. Founded in 2006 as an email to seven friends under the outgrown name Brain Pickings and since included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials, it remains a one-woman labor of love animated by the ultimate question that binds us all: What is all this?
Latest Posts
“Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.” “I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too,” the irreplaceable Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) reflected in her lovely...
“…only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.” Nothing kidnaps our capacity for presence more cruelly than longing. And yet longing is also the most...
A habit is a spell you cast upon yourself that only you can break. “We are spinning our own fates, good or evil,” William James wrote in his pioneering treatise on the psychology of habit. What we habitually let in — ideas into the mind,...
“We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.” “We are what we repeatedly do,” Aristotle famously proclaimed. “Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Perhaps most fascinating in Michael Lewis’s altogether...
Anything you give your time to and polish with attention will become a lens on your search for meaning, will lavish you with metaphors that become backdoors into the locked room of your most urgent reckonings. In my nascent adventures in...
“Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.” In a world pocked by cynicism and pummeled by devastating news, to find joy for oneself and spark it in others, to find hope for oneself and...
Once, in an extreme of despair, I posed to my therapist a version of the haunting thought experiment Mary’s Room: How, I asked her, can a person who has never been modeled healthy, secure, steadfast love even recognize it when it comes...
Somewhere along the way of life, we learn that love means very different things to different people, and yet all personal love is but a fractal of a larger universal love. Some call it God. I call it wonder. Dante called it “the Love...
“You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.” “The great doesn’t happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together,” Vincent van Gogh wrote in...
“To be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Emily Dickinson wrote. From the moment she pressed the first wildflower into her astonishing teenage herbarium until the moment Susan pinned a violet to her alabaster chest in the casket, she...
“To the dumb question ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?” “One should try to write as if posthumously,” Christopher Hitchens (April 13, 1949–December 15, 2011) famously opined in a New York Public Library...
One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock too fast not to break. We lurch into loving, only to discover again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to understand people — and “understanding is...
“What are we, anyway, at our best, but one small, persistent cluster in a greater ferment of human activity — still and forever turning toward, tuned for, the possible,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her classic Arts of the Possible while the...
“One who has dared to be gloriously good and gloriously bad in one life. No Limbo for her. Rather let life itself grow living monuments out of trees and living words so that death can never take from our half-lives this radiant living...
“Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.” “An experience makes its appearance only when it is being said,” wrote Hannah Arendt in...