“In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.” | Continue reading
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see -- who and what we are -- to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called … | Continue reading
A love-poem to those folds in spacetime that take us back to “when Sappho was a living girl.” | Continue reading
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” | Continue reading
“We think we have looked at a thing sharply until we are asked for its specific features.” | Continue reading
In praise of the exquisite instrument that channels “the huge chaos of sensations — sensations of temperature, water, force, light.” | Continue reading
“Some day… there will come a reckoning. The country will discover… that no nation can exist or have any solidity which ignores the land. But it will cost the country dear.” | Continue reading
1879 | Continue reading
“The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait.” | Continue reading
“Seashells were money before coin, jewelry before gems, art before canvas… To stare into the spiral top of a whelk or cone shell is to see the swirl of the Milky Way.” | Continue reading
“If you can acknowledge it and you can relax with it a little bit, very often it shortens its duration.” | Continue reading
Silk, vapor, and the substance of life. | Continue reading
A lovely reminder that “kindness and kin have the same mother.” | Continue reading
“Our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part.” | Continue reading
“The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.” | Continue reading
“Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment.” | Continue reading
How a confused romancer that survived the Ice Age became a tropical sensation and took over the world. | Continue reading
"Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the bulk of the time in serious social life is taken up with playing games." | Continue reading
“These days, you see a kid lying on his back and looking blank and you begin to wonder what’s wrong with him. There’s nothing wrong with him, except he’s thinking… He is trying to arriv… | Continue reading
A journey to the abyss between the real world and the ideal world, and a romp across our mightiest bridge between the two. | Continue reading
“Art is a miracle, superior to the laws.” | Continue reading
How to sail in the icy sea of uncertainty without sinking. | Continue reading
Inside the brain’s secret portal to remembering the future. | Continue reading
“The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning othe… | Continue reading
The labor of love that illuminated the wonders of the “unfathomable abyss, too wide, too deep, too vast for perfect exploration by human eye, or intellectual vision.” | Continue reading
“Art is a miracle, superior to the laws.” | Continue reading
“To be a victim of change is to ignore its existence.” | Continue reading
This is the second of nine installments in the animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. See the rest here.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
“My conscience of life and eternity is not a mistake, or a loneliness, or a foolishness — but a warm dear love of our pour predicament.” | Continue reading
"Whoever has learned how to listen to trees," Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877-August 9, 1962) wrote in what remains one of humanity's most beautiful love letters to trees, "no longer wants to be a tree. He* wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness."(them … | Continue reading
“For seeing the sea it’s sometimes better to close one’s eyes.” | Continue reading
"Our everyday experience does not prepare us to assimilate the gaping hugeness of the Grand Canyon or the crashing grandeur of Niagara Falls. We have no response at the ready; our usual frames of reference don’t fit." | Continue reading
“Legends… are bits of fact, or guesses at fact, pressed into the form of a story and flung out into the world as markers of how much ground has been travelled.” | Continue reading
“The beauty of a flower… may serve to awaken an interest in nature, which shall not sleep again.” | Continue reading
“That’s the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego.” | Continue reading
"As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state." | Continue reading
“Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning.̶… | Continue reading
On change, the measure of intelligence, the courage to take responsibility for our own lives. | Continue reading
"Wander where you will over all the world, from every valley seeing forever new hills calling you to climb them, from every mountain top farther peaks enticing you... until you stand one day on the last peak on the border of the interminable sea, stopped by the finality of that." | Continue reading
“I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it.” | Continue reading
An illustrated love letter to our Pale Blue Dot by humanity’s most innocent scale models of the universe. | Continue reading
“The Eye altering alters all.” | Continue reading
"It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us." | Continue reading
A ten-year-old boy on the side of a Lebanese mountain road, three generations of monarch butterflies, and the history of the future. | Continue reading
A teenage girl from another epoch illuminates the fault lines of ours. | Continue reading
A lively new look at one of the most beloved fantasy stories of all time. | Continue reading
A pastiche poem of tribute to the past and resolve for the possible. | Continue reading
“The human being isolates itself from the supplies of Providence for the happiness and renovation of life, unless those ties which connect it with others are formed.” | Continue reading