How to Be More Alive: Hermann Hesse on Wonder and the Proper Aim of Education

“While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

How People Change: Psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis on the Essence of Freedom and the Two Elements of Self-Transcendence

“We create ourselves. The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Look Up: The Illustrated Story of Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, Who Laid the Groundwork for Measuring the Universe

How a brilliant woman rose against the tide of her time to fathom the mysteries of space. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Fox and Bear: A Tender Modern Fable About Reversing the Anthropocene, Illustrated in Cut-Cardboard Dioramas

An antidote to the civilizational compulsions that rob human nature of nature. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Reason and Emotion: Scottish Philosopher John Macmurray on the Key to Wholeness and the Fundaments of a Fulfilling Life

"The emotional life is not simply a part or an aspect of human life. It is not, as we so often think, subordinate, or subsidiary to the mind. It is the core and essence of human life. The intellect arises out of it, is rooted in it, draws its nourishment and sustenance from it." | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Work of Happiness: May Sarton’s Stunning Poem About Being at Home in Yourself

“What is happiness but growth in peace.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

A Shelter in Time: John Berger on the Power of Music

“Songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Archives of Joy: Reflections on Animals and the Nature of Being

An invitation to “a certain, forgotten way of seeing the world” and an exultation at “earthly life, with its duration so short it obliges us to surpass ourselves.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

An Antidote to the Anxiety About Imperfection: Parenting Advice from Mister Rogers

“It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance and ultimate understanding — and often far short.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Wonder-Sighting on Planet Earth: The Space Telescope Eye of the Scallop

Inside Earth’s most alien vision. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Experience Machine: Cognitive Philosopher Andy Clark on the Power of Expectation and How the Mind Renders Reality

"We are never simply seeing what’s 'really there,' stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions." | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Between Matter and Spirit: Psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis on the Substance of What We Are

“We are carriers of spirit… into a future unknown, unknowable, and in continual creation.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Everything Is Already There: Javier Marías on the Courage to Heed Your Intuitions

“This has nothing to do with premonitions, there is nothing supernatural or mysterious about it, what’s mysterious is that we pay no heed to it.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

A Victorian Visionary’s Prescient Case for Animal Rights and Vegetarianism

“Once upon a time your fore-fathers made no scruple about not only killing, but also eating their relations.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Kierkegaard on the Value of Despair

“To despair over oneself, in despair to want to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Universe and the Soul: Richard Jefferies on Nature as Prayer for Presence

How to grow “absorbed into the being or existence of the universe.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

A Taste of How It Feels to Be Free: Pioneering Psychoanalyst Karen Horney on Our Inner Conflicts, the Psychology of Hopelessness, and the Path to Wholeness

"The most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be without pretense, to be emotionally sincere, to be able to put the whole of oneself into one’s feelings, one’s work, one’s beliefs. It can be approximated only to the extent that … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Poetry of Reality: Robert Louis Stevenson on What Makes Life Worth Living

“The true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

William James on the Most Vital Understanding for Successful Relationships

“Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Enchantment and the Courage of Joy: René Magritte on the Antidote to the Banality of Pessimism

“Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

How the Octopus Came to Earth: Stunning 19th-Century French Chromolithographs of Cephalopods

The art-science that captured the wonder of some of “the most brilliant productions of Nature.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Some Thoughts about the Ocean and the Universe

How to bear the gravity of being. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Wholeness and the Implicate Order: Physicist David Bohm on Bridging Consciousness and Reality

How to “include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Challenge of Closeness: Alain de Botton on Love, Vulnerability, and the Paradox of Avoidance

The psychological machinery of our commonest coping mechanism for the terror of hurt, rejection, and abandonment. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Dead Stars: Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s Stunning Love Poem to Life

“We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

May Sarton on the Art of Living Alone

“The people we love are built into us.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Sundogs and the Sacred Geometry of Wonder: The Science of the Atmospheric Phenomenon That Inspired Hilma af Klint

Notes on the eternal dialogue between art and science in our yearning to know reality. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

What We Look for When We Are Looking: John Steinbeck on Wonder and the Relational Nature of the Universe

Searching for “that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Love and Fear: A Stunning 17th-Century Poem About How to Live with the Transcendent Terror of Love

“Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

What It Takes to Grow: Pioneering Psychoanalyst Karen Horney on the Key to Self-Realization

"Self-knowledge... is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth. In this sense, to work at ourselves becomes not only the prime moral obligation, but... the prime moral privilege." | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Paradox of Free Will

The neuroscience, physics, and philosophy of freedom in a universe of fixed laws. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Stunning Century-Old Illustrations of Tibetan Fairy Tales from the Artist Who Created Bambi

Soulful art from stories that speak “to the childhood of all times and all races.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

How We Render Reality: Attention as an Instrument of Love

“Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Last Wonder: D.H. Lawrence on the Best Lifelong Preparation for Death

“Know thyself, and that thou art mortal. But know thyself, denying that thou art mortal.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” Brought to Life in a Spanish Flashmob of 100 Musicians

A touchingly human reminder of our capacity for ecstasy, transcendence, and collective felicity. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Heart of Matter: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on Bridging the Scientific and the Sacred

"Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever new-born; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth." | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Double Flame: Octavio Paz on Love

“Love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own; the freedom of the Other… A knot made of two intertwined freedoms.” We love to forget ourselves, but also to remember what we are: mortal creatures lustful of meaning, radiant with life, eternally alone and eternally long … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Search for Meaning: Oliver Sacks on ChatGPT, 30 Years Before ChatGPT

“We read excitedly of the latest chemical, computational, or quantum theory of mind, and then ask, ‘Is that all there is to it?'” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Loving the Tree of Life: Annie Dillard on How to Bear Your Mortality

“We live and move by splitting the light of the present, as a canoe’s bow parts water.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Practical Mysticism: Evelyn Underhill’s Stunning Century-Old Manifesto for Secular Transcendence and Seeing the Heart of Reality

"Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent." | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Henry James on Losing a Mother

“These are hours of exquisite pain; thank Heaven this particular pang comes to us but once.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Heroism and the Human Search for Meaning: Ernest Becker on the Hidden Root of Our Existential Longing

“To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Let Your Heart Be Broken

“The miracle is that we rise again out of suffering… The miracle is that we create ourselves anew.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

How to Grow Up: Nick Cave’s Life-Advice to a 13-Year-Old

“Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world… Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

May Sarton on Writing, Gardening, and the Importance of Patience Over Will in Creative Work

“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Afterlives of the Soul: Sister Nivedita on Love and Death

“To the soul, time does not exist. Only her own great purpose exists, shining clear and steady through the mists before her.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Magnolias and the Meaning of Life: Science, Poetry, Existentialism

On cruelty, kindness, and the song of life. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Art of Lying Fallow: Psychoanalyst Masud Khan on the Existential Salve for the Age of Cultish Productivity and Compulsive Distraction

On inviting the state of being that “allows for that larval inner experience which distinguishes true psychic creativity from obsessional productiveness.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago