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
“The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart.” “The state of enchantment is one of certainty,” W.H. Auden wrote in...
“I have nothing, except for certain, and perhaps very minor, literary abilities.” Aristotle believed that everyone’s true calling lies at the crossing point of their natural talent and the world’s need. But this simple, seductive...
“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…” Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) was thirty-six when he self-published...
This essay is adapted from Traversal. We look at a thing — a bird, a ball, a planet — and perceive it to be a certain color. But what we are really seeing is the color that does not inhere in it—the portion of the spectrum it shirks, the...
“To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.” “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce...
“Is there anything we know more intimately than the fleetingness of time, the transience of each and every moment?” “An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock...
“Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.” It is an ongoing mystery: What makes you and your childhood self the same person. Across a lifetime of physiological and psychological...
“While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.” It bears repeating that what makes life livable is our ability — our willingness — to move through the world wonder-smitten...
“Crisis… is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.” The moment we begin to see that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful...
It is hard to know why we are here, what we can make of the transience we can do nothing about, how we can fill every borrowed atom of matter with meaning. It is hard not to take for givens the answers handed down to us by our culture,...
Where the hard edge of physics meets the vulnerable metaphysics of the human heart. Few people have enchanted the popular imagination with science more powerfully and lastingly than physicist Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918–February 15,...
“Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.” “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” the...
“Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it… It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at...
“Attention without feeling … is only a report.” Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) is one of our era’s most beloved and prolific poets — a sage of wisdom on the craft of poetry and a master of its magic; a woman as...
How to keep your soul from leaving you. “The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands,” the poet and storyteller turned activist Grace Paley’s father told her in what remains the...