The Marginalian
20 articles
Ursula K. Le Guin on the Meaning of Life
We are the survivors of immense and minute events — violent cosmic collisions and subtle genetic mutations, the deaths of innumerable suns and the births of innumerable cells, the …
The One Hundred Milliseconds Between the World and You: Oliver Sacks on Perception
“If the doors of perception were cleansed,” William Blake wrote, “everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” But we are finite creatures, in time and in space, and there i…
How to Live a Miraculous Life
Suppose we agree that we are here to love anyway — to love even though the work is almost unbearably difficult, even though we know that everything alive is dying, that everything …
How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and Friendship
It is in relationships that we discover both our depths and our limits, there that we anneal ourselves and transcend ourselves, there that we are hurt the most and there that we fi…
How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James
"It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything."
Kahlil Gibran on the Art of Becoming Yourself Across the Sweep of Life
A roadmap to the fulfilled belonging on the other side of "the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great."
Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Ms. Boodle: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Advice on Writing to a Young Woman Aspiring to Be an Author
In late 1884, Adelaide Boodle — talented, timorous, still in her twenties — received news so thrilling she thought she was dreaming: Her favorite author was moving into the small t…
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."
Dostoyevsky in Love
“I love her happiness more than my own.”
Antidotes to Fear of Death: Astronomer and Poet Rebecca Elson’s Stunning Cosmic Salve for Existential Tremors
"Sometimes as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars."
Carl Jung on Creativity
The question of what it takes to create — to make something of beauty and substance that touches other lives across space and time — is one of the deepest, oldest questions, perhap…
How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older
"In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves."
G.K. Chesterton on the Dandelion and the Meaning of Life
Recovering the "forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence" alive in the back of our modernity-deadened minds.
Epictetus on Love and Loss: The Stoic Strategy for Surviving Heartbreak
"Who is good if he knows not who he is? and who knows what he is, if he forgets that things which have been made are perishable, and that it is not possible for one human being to …
From Mitochondria to Minds: The Illustrated Science of the Psychedelic Dream Called Life
Like consciousness, like music, like love, life itself didn’t have to exist — nothing in the fundamental laws demands it. The universe could have gone on lapping at itself as a hor…
How to Bear Your Sorrows: Nick Cave on Integrating the Darkness of Loss with the Bright Ongoingness of Life
Few things in our culture are more wounding than the concept of healing — as if the pains and losses that we suffer are an illness, a malfunction of the psyche to be cut out like a…
How to Help Someone Change: The Samurai Guide to Giving Feedback
Few things in life are more exasperating than seeing the potential in someone you love and seeing them continually fall short of it, stumbling again and again over the same self-er…