The Marginalian
20 articles
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…”
Bob Dylan on the Unconscious Mind and the Ideal Conditions for Creative Work
"People have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them."
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,…
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,…
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…
The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Timeless Tenets of Critical Thinking
Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.
Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life
"To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that's i…
How to Be Transformed When Things Fall Apart
"Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us."
The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet
We place life’s bets by countless calculations of probability, conscious and unconscious, only to discover over and over how short they fall of the wildest reaches of the possible,…
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 …
Nathaniel Hawthorne on How to Look and Really See
"The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before."
Introducing the Museum of Delight
After twenty years of making immaterial things with my mind — ideas sculpted of words, questions woven of sentences, translucent vessels for thought and feeling in the shape of poe…
How to Hold Your Heart with Golden Hands
One bleak English winter a long time ago, wandering through London in the wake of a relationship that had just unraveled, I walked into an antiquarian bookstore and chanced upon a …
Corrective for a Broken Heart
“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her passionate insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” It can happen with a shattering, or with a thousand small fissures,…
How to Be Un-Dead: Notes on Waking Up from the Trance of Near-Living
"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."
How to Grow Old without Letting Life Become a Parody of Itself
"In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves."
The Constitution of the Inner Country: Leonard Cohen on Language and the Poetry of Presence
"The poem is nothing but information. It is the Constitution of the inner country."