The Marginalian
Marginalia on the search for meaning.
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Latest posts
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Love in the Time of Dinosaurs
In 1824, studying a set of large fossil bones discovered in a quarry near Oxford two centuries earlier, the English theologian, geologist, and paleontologist William Buckland kept looking at the fragment of the lower jaw. Something didn’t add up. As he examined it more closely,…
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Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Moving Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” a Lifetime of Sorrow in the Making
A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible.
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The Art of Being Alone: May Sarton’s Stunning 1938 Ode to Solitude
"There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone."
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Meteor of Joy: The Young People’s Chorus of New York City Sings Bird Divinations
Children know the deepest truths about life, the elemental knowledge we unlearn in the act of living, those inarticulable truths music alone helps us remember. To hear children sing the secret wisdom of the heart is to be in the presence of something truer and more transcendent…
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Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life
"In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity."
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Music and the Body: Richard Powers on the Power of Song
"The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body."
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Halloween’s Lost Heroes: Michael Pollan on Radical Gardening and the Insurgent Botanical Origin of the Broomstick in Flying-Witch Legends
"For most of their history... gardens have been more concerned with the power of plants than with their beauty — with the power, that is, to change us in various ways, for good and for ill."
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Truth, Fact, and the Patterning of Reality: Virginia Woolf on How We Come to Know the World
The great myth is that truth is an emergent property of fact, that it bubbles up from the bottom of reality once the mind attains enough fathoms of factuality. But objective reality — all those things like gravity and light and the fossil of the Archaeopteryx that exist whether…
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When Your Parents Are Dying: Some of the Simplest, Most Difficult and Redemptive Life-Advice You’ll Ever Receive
"Death makes human beings seem like very small containers that are packed so densely we can only be aware of a fraction of what's inside us from moment to moment."
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What Is Your Refugium?
For courage, says Bulgarian folk wisdom instructs, keep a horse chestnut in your pocket. Even as a child, I was mistrustful of superstition. But every autumn, I would pick up dozens of them from the sidewalks of Sofia and fill my pockets — not as a spell against fear but as an…
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The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Mother
"It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger."
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What It Takes to Be Free
We spend our lives trying to find our power and our freedom. It is not easy: We live in a culture that has distorted the meaning and measure of power, confusing visibility with value, status with substance, attention with love; we live in a universe where free will may be an…
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Sylvia Plath on Living with the Darkness and Making Art from the Barely Bearable Lightness of Being
"One has to shut off that nagging part of the mind and go on without it with bravo and philosophy."
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Marcus Aurelius on the Good Luck of Your Bad Luck
"What happened could have happened to anyone, but not everyone could have carried on."
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Walt Whitman’s Advice on Living a Vibrant and Rewarding Life
“Love the earth and sun and the animals… re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul…”
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Bob Dylan on the Unconscious Mind and the Ideal Conditions for Creative Work
"People have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them."
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20 Favorite Children’s Books from 20 Years of The Marginalian
“Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time,” E.B. White insisted. “You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth.” Both as a reader of…
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The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds: Margaret Wise Brown’s Lost Masterpiece about Mortality and the Meaning of Life, Newly Illustrated
In early September 1948, a year after she rewilded the landscape of literature with Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown watched the love of her life fade to black. Michael Strange, born Blanche Oelrichs, had cast an instant spell on Margaret — outspoken, sophisticated, and…
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20 Favorite Books from 20 Years of The Marginalian
It is a beautiful dream, that there is something out there to instruct you how to live — a secret handed down by your parents or your teachers, a system like liberal arts education or cognitive behavioral therapy, a slogan held up by your heroes declaring the answer to the…
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The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Timeless Tenets of Critical Thinking
Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.