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?
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This essay and poem are part of the Universe in Verse book. “My business is circumference,” Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her most cryptic letters. Since ancient times, human beings have been enchanted by the immutable relationship...
“Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.” We are accidents of biochemistry and chance, moving through the world waging wars and writing poems, spellbound...
“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.” In every life, there comes a time when we are razed to the bone of our resilience by losses beyond our control —...
“The people we love are built into us.” “There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone,” the young May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) wrote in her stunning ode to solitude — the solitude she came to know, over the course of...
“The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots?” “Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life,” Virginia Woolf wrote...
Once our basic physical needs for sustenance and shelter are met, most of our psychological suffering is a problem of selfing — contracting the scope of reality to the pinhole of the self and using that to explain, always painfully, the...
“Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with...
“There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it,” Adam Philips writes in his superb meditation on our ambivalent desire for change — ambivalence brilliantly rendered in the Vampire Problem...
“While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.” We move through the world largely unaware that our emotions are made of concepts — the brain’s coping...
“We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.” Friendship is the sunshine of life — the quiet radiance that makes our lives not only livable but worth living. (This is why we...
Language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents. The great danger is that we come to mistake the shape for the substance, reducing concepts and experiences we cannot name or contain to the words tasked with...
How the warm rays of hope and healing enter the dark inner chamber of leaden loneliness through the unexpected cracks of kindness. “Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can...
“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come… We live everything as it comes, without warning.” “Live as if you were living already...
“And it is so simple… You will instantly find how to live.” One November night in the 1870s, legendary Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) discovered the meaning of life in a dream — or, at least, the...
If you want to befriend time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone. Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock. Walk a beach and comb your fingers through the golden...