A largehearted invitation to "stand on the precipice between the known and the unknown, without fear, without anxiety, but instead with awe and wonder at this strange and beautiful cosmos we find ourselves in." | Continue reading
“I want to sleep and dream the life of trees, beings from the muted world…” | Continue reading
From Marcus Aurelius to Einstein, poets and philosophers on the deepest wellspring of our humanity. | Continue reading
On the evening of February 19, 1852, a scientist at the New Haven station of the nascent telegraph witnessed something extraordinary: A blue line appeared upon the paper, which gradually grew darker and larger, until a flame of fire followed the pen, and burned through a dozen th … | Continue reading
"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself," Kahlil Gibran wrote in his poignant verse on parenting. And yet we are, each of us, someone's child - physiologically or psychologically or both - and they sing themselves through … | Continue reading
“We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.” | Continue reading
The most moving story of self-sacrifice in the history of science. | Continue reading
Blake before Blake, Hilma before Hilma. | Continue reading
“We are all interconnected in the universe, and from this, universal responsibility arises… Everyone has the responsibility to develop a happier world.” | Continue reading
A shimmering reminder that “the magic is of our own conjuring.” | Continue reading
Illuminating the pitfalls of the mind in felt and gingerbread. | Continue reading
An inquiry into the eternal enchantment of why the world exists. | Continue reading
“Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident.” | Continue reading
“You can expect good and bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative.” | Continue reading
“Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.” | Continue reading
“Treasure this ecstasy, however absurd people may think it.” | Continue reading
On loving the world enough to surrender to the laws of gravity and chance. | Continue reading
"The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere," Hannah Arendt wrote as she considered time, space, and the thinking ego when she became the first woman to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
Inside the silent scream of life. | Continue reading
“Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.” | Continue reading
"Truth cannot die; it passes from mind to mind, imparting light in its progress, and constantly renewing its own brightness during its diffusion. The True is the Beautiful; and the truths revealed to the mind render us capable of perceiving new beauties on the earth." | Continue reading
"In forty years of medical practice," the great neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote, "I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical 'therapy' to be vitally important for patients...: music and gardens." Virginia Woolf, savaged by depression throughout and out of her life, arrived … | Continue reading
"Words belong to each other," Virginia Woolf asserted in the only surviving recording of her voice. But words also belong to us, as much as we belong to them - and out of that mutual belonging arises our most fundamental understanding of the world, as well as the inescapable misu … | Continue reading
"Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you're already in heaven now," Jack Kerouac wrote in a beautiful 1957 letter. "Kindness, kindness, kindness," Susan Sontag resolved in her diary on New Year's Day in 1972.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
“The survival of poetry depends on the failure of language.” | Continue reading
In the final weeks of 1993, Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931-August 5, 2019) became the first African American woman to receive the Nobel Prize, awarded her for being a writer "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of … | Continue reading
Thinking lately about what it means to have the right heart, which intimates the question of what it means to tend to one's own heart rightly, I was reminded of a passage from what may be the loveliest, truest, most quietly transcendent thing ever written about the art of growing … | Continue reading
“The question is: how can we sustain the illusions essential to ordinary life, without becoming self-damaging idiots?” | Continue reading
Consolation for our learned brokenness on the path to healing. | Continue reading
In 1973, more than two decades after a young woman wrote to Albert Einstein with a similar concern, one man sent a distressed letter to E.B. White (July 11, 1899-October 1, 1985), lamenting that he had lost faith in humanity.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
On February 13, 1924, Punch magazine published a short poem titled "Teddy Bear" by Alan Alexander Milne (January 18, 1882-January 31, 1956), one of the magazine's editors and a frequent contributor. The poem was inspired by the stuffed teddy bear Milne had given to his son, Chris … | Continue reading
“…and joy instead of will.” | Continue reading
On aligning the things we make with basic human values for an enduring world. | Continue reading
“We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around.” | Continue reading
From pigeons to parakeets, an uncommonly beautiful celebration of biodiversity. | Continue reading
“The mind enjoys the complete and perfect benefit of its human destiny only when… entering the secret heart of nature.” | Continue reading
"Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul... Seek solitude," young Delacroix counseled himself in 1824. Keats saw solitude as a sublime conduit to truth and beauty. Elizabeth Bishop believed that everyone should experience at least one prolonged … | Continue reading
“The thought that we must die… is the reason we must live well.” | 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
Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875-December 19, 1926) is one of the most prolific and poetic letter writers in history, a supreme master of what Virginia Woolf called "the humane art," with more than seven thousand of his epistles surviving today.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
In October of 1883, a paper in the nation's capital reported under the heading "Current Gossip" that "an Iowa woman has spent seven years embroidering the solar system on a quilt" - a news item originally printed in Iowa and syndicated widely in newspapers across the country that … | Continue reading
Friendship is one of life's greatest graces, and yet we hardly understand the gossamer threads of sympathy and love by which it binds us together. C.S. Lewis likened it to philosophy, art, and the universe itself in that "it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things … | Continue reading
“The handicaps under which Dr. Turner’s work was accomplished were many, and were modestly and bravely met.” | Continue reading
How an ancient survivor of the unsurvivable became a triumph of the human spirit in a divided world. | Continue reading
"The true object of education, like that of every other moral process, is the generation of happiness. Happiness to the individual in the first place. If individuals were universally happy, the species would be happy." | Continue reading
Living into the risk and responsibility of the multiple identities we carry. | Continue reading
“The gifts of the inner world must be accepted as gifts in the outer world if they are to retain their vitality.” | Continue reading
“Intelligence is not something which exists, but something one does.” | Continue reading