The Marginalian
Reviews
Finds
- Birds by Brian Wildsmith The medieval nun who named bird flocks, painted five centuries later
- A Life of One's Own Seven years of keeping evidence on your own happiness
- The Tree and the River One tree, one river, not a single word
- Too-Ticky on uncertainty "All things are so very uncertain, and that's exactly what makes me feel reassured"
- The Book of Human Emotions Words for feelings English never got around to naming
- The Book of Delights One delight a day, birthday to birthday
- Old Blue Every black robin alive is descended from one bird
- Odds and Ends A picture book about the last time you did something
- Nature's Oldest Mandolin A cicada sings with its whole body, and the instrument has not changed in a thousand centuries
- On Looking Eleven walks around one city block, each with a different expert
- The Pressed Ginkgo Leaf in Alice in Wonderland Deep time, opened from one leaf kept between two pages
- Vonnegut's Eight Tenets of Storytelling Rule three: every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water
- Thank You, Everything A picture-book litany of thanks, built on tsukumogami
- Be like a headland Marcus Aurelius, in Meditations, on why bearing hardship valiantly is itself a form of good luck.
- Nick Cave on the everyday miracle The everyday human gesture is always a heartbeat away from the miraculous
- Thich Nhat Hanh on deep listening How a broken line of communication gets repaired
- Olga Tokarczuk on tenderness The most modest form of love
- E. E. Cummings on being yourself The hardest battle, and never stopping
- Carl Jung on neurosis and creativity Against the myth of the tortured genius
- Pablo Casals on work as the fountain of youth At 93, still finding life more fascinating
- Bayo Akomolafe on Obstacles as Creative Hubs On obstacles as the universe's hubs of creativity.
- George Forster on Reason and Feeling On the danger of worshipping cold reason at the expense of feeling.
- Rockwell Kent on Wilderness as a Living Mirror On wilderness as a mirror of the imagination.
- Camus: "My revolt, my freedom, and my passion" Camus's three consequences of accepting absurdity — not despair but revolt, freedom, and passion. Surfaced in a Maria Popova essay on a 1945 interview.
- Hesse: "Not to know whether there is a God…is far better than to know for sure" Hesse's post-WWI letter to a young German on the corrosive role of certainty — surfaced by Maria Popova at The Marginalian.
- Juan Ramón Jiménez: "Platero stops eating and looks at me" The Spanish Nobel laureate's prose poem about a quiet exchange of attention with his donkey — surfaced by Maria Popova on tenderness as a vehicle for the eternal.
- Thoreau: "The poet's relation to his theme is the relation of lovers" Thoreau on how attention becomes love — surfaced by Maria Popova through a journal entry about 24 hours spent with a screech owl.
- bell hooks: "Living as we did — on the edge — we developed a particular way of seeing reality" bell hooks on the epistemic advantage of growing up at the edge — surfaced in a Maria Popova essay on margins.
- Kundera: "We can never know what to want" Milan Kundera on the structural irreversibility of life decisions — surfaced in a Maria Popova essay on ambivalence.
- George Schaller: "Her being eludes me" Conservationist George Schaller on the limit of observing a panda — surfaced in a Maria Popova essay on the inner worlds of other creatures.
- Whitman: "I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all" Whitman's resolve in the face of Emerson's critique of Leaves of Grass — surfaced in a Maria Popova essay on creative confidence.
- Gary Snyder — "The cage they were tricked into entering" From Earth House Hold (1969), via The Marginalian
- Marianne Moore — "Imaginary gardens with real toads" From Poetry, via The Marginalian
- Martha Nussbaum on Human Fragility On openness as a precondition for being good
- Pythagoras on the Philosopher at the Olympics Where the word 'philosopher' actually came from
- Silphium and the Origin of the Heart Symbol The plant that gave us ❤ — and is being un-extincted
- Arundhati Roy on the Deepest Measure of Success Roy reframes success as a list of practiced verbs — to love, to be loved, to never forget your own insignificance — rather than an outcome.
- Simone de Beauvoir on Marriage and the Freedom to Change Beauvoir on why a marriage isn't a single decision but a daily one — and why that's its strength, not its problem.
- Hermann Hesse on Wonder and the Aim of Education On schools that teach counting and measuring over delight
- T.H. White / Merlyn — "The best thing for being sad is to learn something." Merlyn's prescription for sorrow from T.H. White's The Once and Future King — surfaced by Maria Popova as a piece of practical philosophy for low days.
- Hannah Arendt — Men in Dark Times On the strange humanity available to outsiders
- Mary Oliver — The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac A poem on belonging to your own life, written after cancer