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
Language is the chalice we lift to our lips to taste our own experience — a vessel that constrains what it contains by giving it its own shape. The more complex our experience, the more muddled the emotions that comprise it, the more it...
“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured.” Tove Jansson (August 9, 1914–June 27, 2001) is among the most imaginative, important, and influential children’s book creators of all time, an artist...
“Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives — we are each of us unique.” “A person’s identity,” Amin Maalouf wrote in his brilliant treatise on personhood, “is like a pattern drawn...
“One has to shut off that nagging part of the mind and go on without it with bravo and philosophy.” When the twenty-two-year-old Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932–February 11, 1963) wrote to her mother one bleak January day, both women were...
“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.” This essay and poem are now part of the Universe in Verse book. In 1865 — a year before the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology, the year Emily...
The great cruelty of life, and also its great mercy, is that only hindsight ever knows each last — the last time your lover put their hand on the small of your back, the last sip of the last cup at your favorite coffee shop before it...
The great mercy of life is that we can change, we can reroute, we can surprise ourselves. The great pitfall of prediction is that, mercifully, we are unpredictable. — “All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me...
“Zen practice … requires great faith, great courage, and great questioning.” If death is so enormous a mystery that we remain unable to wrap our grownup minds around it, despite comfort from our great poets and consolation from our great...
The summer I turned sixteen, I took a bus across Bulgaria — I suppose you could call it running away, though my parents were aware and unconcerned — to go sit on the edge of the Black Sea and watch the blue horizon, to touch its infinite...
“The use of music,” Richard Powers wrote, “is to remind us how short a time we have a body” — a truth nowhere more bittersweet than in the creature whose body is the oldest unchanged musical instrument on Earth: a tiny mandolin silent...
How to “include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border.” Life is an ongoing dance between the subjective reality of what it feels like to be alive, to tremble with...
Sitting atop a Spanish mesa one sweltering August night, watching the Perseid meteor showers streak the sky with the debris of a comet burning through the atmosphere against the backdrop of a billion dead stars whose signal light is only...
“Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp… the ultimate mystery of Life itself.” This essay is adapted from Figuring. In June of...
We spend our days making plans, making promises, making predictions about the possible, and yet the most bewildering thing about life is that its imagination is always greater than that of the living — life keeps surprising us, keeps...
At the dawn of my twenties, lonely, destitute, and disoriented by the demands of making a new life in an alien world, I started keeping notes on my search for meaning while working four jobs to pay my way through college. On October 23,...