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
“It is very important to be in love with life… Life is very fragile and always elusive. As soon as we think we ‘understand,’ there is another mystery. I don’t understand anything. That is, I think, the key to understand everything.”...
“What is it like, such intensity of pain?” There are times in life when the firmament of our being seems to collapse, taking all the light with it, swallowing all color and sound into a silent scream of darkness. It rarely looks that way...
“Leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world.” I lost my darling friend Emily Levine (October 23, 1944–February 3, 2019) just as Figuring, in which she rightly occupies the first line of the acknowledgements, was...
The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it plunges you into the depths of your being and at the same time takes you out of yourself. Writing is the best instrument I have for...
“Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged.” Whatever fundamental reality might exist, we live out our lives in a...
“In order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature.” With his singular blend of physical prowess and metaphysical wisdom, coupled with his tragic untimely death, legendary Chinese-American...
Life-affirming inspiration from a man who knew intimately “that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” “I am now the most miserable man living,” Abraham...
“The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s… We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.” “If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so… The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance,”...
From butterflies to Beethoven, an ode to the heart’s uncontainable dimensions. A version of this essay appears in the final chapters of Figuring. As if classifying platonic relationships weren’t complex enough a task — one that requires...
“In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.” We live in a culture that dreads the entropic inevitability of growing older, treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and...
“Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world… Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.” “Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal,...
“You’ll long for me when I’m gone… You’ll kiss the headstone of my grave… Kiss my face instead!” “What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote in her short, stunning poem about what gives meaning...
“If you can acknowledge it and you can relax with it a little bit, very often it shortens its duration.” It starts with a low hum that adheres itself to the underbelly of the hours like another dimension. Gradually, surreptitiously, the...
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 one partner and not another, values...
“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.” A century before an encyclopedia titled Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know fell into Alan Turing’s...