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
“When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold.” A person is a note in the mouth of probability hungry for song, reverberating with echoes of the impossible. To exist at all is as close as this universe of austere laws and inert...
Here is the mathematical logic of the spirit: If love is the quality of attention we pay something other than ourselves and hate is the veil of not understanding ourselves, then loving the world more — the other word for which is...
To have a strong feeling about anything is to discover something about the poles of your own mind, some potent charge reason can’t touch that electrifies life with an energy you don’t fully understand yet can’t and often don’t want to...
The astonishing thing is that even though we will never truly know what it is like to be another creature or another person or any configuration of chemistry and chance other than ourselves, we are made of the same matter as the granite...
Time is the book we fill with the story of our lives. All great storytelling has the shape of music. All music is a shelter in time. In these lives hounded by restlessness, trembling with urgency, we need this shelter, need a place still...
There are times in life when the continent of certainty parts underfoot and, as the ash cloud of the old world rains darkness upon us, we are asked to swim in the rivers of lava that will make the new. “Almost it would appear that it is...
“My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite… and I know the amplitude of time,” wrote Walt Whitman, knowing what stone teaches about trusting time. It tempers your sorrows to know that the striking red pebble you pick up at the beach...
The light was always there — our star is a hundred million years older than our planet — but it was learning to see it, to harness it, to transform it, that made this rocky planet a living world: photoreceptors converting sunlight to...
Two centuries ago, a small group of brilliant and troubled young people trembling with the unprocessed traumas of their childhoods laid in their poems and letters and journals the foundational modern mythos of love. Although none but one...
In August 1905, while Mina Hubbard was mapping Labrador in her pioneering expedition, the Brooklyn Eagle reported one of the most “remarkable exploits in Arctic work” — a relief expedition to rescue the American explorer Anthony Fiala...
Traversal (FSG) broadens and deepens the questions raised in Figuring, the questions we live with: the relationship between chance and choice in becoming who we are, between chemistry and consciousness in being what we are, the tension...
You know the feeling, its scorching urgency, its icy impossibility: to press the undo button of life, to unwind the reel of experience and snip out the wrong turn, the wrong word, the wrong investment of the heart. It can’t be done...
“If the body is not the soul, what is the soul?” wrote Walt Whitman in his heroic revolt against the lasting tyranny of Descartes, whose dismissal of the body and disdain for the soul may be the single most damaging ideological misstep...
Bless hindsight for how it clarifies the confusions of time, for how precisely it plots the true highs and lows on the terrain map of life once the quakes of the moment have died down, for how dispassionately it reveals what was a...
A great paradox of being alive in this civilization is that we have come to dread and devalue the triumph of having lived, forgetting that to grow old is not a punishment but a privilege — that of having survived the loneliness of...