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
“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.” “Give me solitude,” Whitman demanded in his ode to the eternal tension between city and...
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 to know the land he was being asked...
“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.” “I mean to work tremendously hard,” the young...
“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know…” “Your intuition and your intellect should be working together… making love,” Madeleine L’Engle asserted in contemplating how creativity works. Ray Bradbury believed that intuition...
“We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others… There is a virgin forest in each.” It is both a terror and a mercy that we know ourselves only incompletely and each other hardly at all — because, somewhere in that lacuna of...
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 back. In the years since, the heron...
“The people we most love do become a physical part of us, ingrained in our synapses, in the pathways where memories are created.” John Updike wrote in his memoir, “Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is...
“In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity.” What an astrophysicist might have the perspective to eulogize as “the incredibly...
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 secular saints expected to give us...
“The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.” “A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” William James wrote in his pioneering 1884 theory of how our bodies affect our feelings — the first great...
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 uncommon helplessness and uncertainty,...
“A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.” “We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us,” Adrienne Rich wrote in framing her superb definition of honorable human...
“I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it.” “One must know what one wants to be,” the eighteenth-century French mathematician Émilie du Châtelet wrote in weighing the nature of genius. “In the...
“The meaning of life… clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love.” Meaning is not something we find — it is something we make, and the puzzle pieces are often the fragments of our shattered hopes and dreams. “There...
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” “Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire,” Adrienne Rich wrote in contemplating what poetry does. “Insofar as poetry has a social...