The Marginalian
20 articles
Kahlil Gibran on the Courage to Weather the Uncertainties of Love
"Think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course."
The Paradoxes and Possibilities of Transformation: Adam Phillips on Our Ambivalent Desire for Change
"There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it."
How to Break Free from the Tyranny of Certainty: The Japanese Concept of “Ma”
“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,'” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. But despite all…
How Not to Waste Your Wildness
"What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure sp…
Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity
"The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state."
I Long to Read More in the Book of You: Moomins Creator Tove Jansson’s Tender and Passionate Letters to the Love of Her Life
"I’m so unused to being happy that I haven’t really come to terms with what it involves... I feel like a garden that’s finally been watered, so my flowers can bloom."
The True Purpose of Tarot
“Nothing like this has ever happened before or will ever happen again,” a friend said to me about a lucky turn of events — a statement that struck me as touchingly self-negating: a…
How to Apologize: Reflections on Forgiveness, Self-Forgiveness, and the Vulnerabilities of Being Human
"It's permitted to receive solace for whatever you did or didn't do, pitiful, beautiful human."
Erich Fromm’s 6 Rules of Listening: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist on the Art of Unselfish Understanding
"Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed."
How to Reconcile Your Most Painful Mistakes: The Life-Shaping Difference Between Regret and Remorse
You know it, that awful moment your coherent self-image shatters and a part of you, shadowy and untended, splits off to cause harm and havoc as the rest of you watches helplessly, …
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…
The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Mother
"It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger."
The Power of Being a Threshold Person: Liminality, Communitas, and the Anti-structures of Possibility
“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” one of the Moomins observes in Tove Jansson’s masterwork of philosophy disguised as a children’…
Wendell Berry on Hope, Despair, and the Measure of Effective Protest
The current of life is charged by the poles of hope and despair. What we make of our hopes and their devastation may be the purest measure of who we are and what we leave behind. P…
The Thing Itself: C.S. Lewis on What We Long for in Our Existential Longing
"...only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited."
Joan Didion on Letting Go
“We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss,” Judith Viorst wrote in her defense of life’s necessary losses, “and we cannot become separate people, responsi…
Matter, Memory, and the Paradox of Perception: Henri Bergson on How to See Reality
In 1896, decades before Santiago Ramón y Cajal pioneered neuroscience, more than a century before Oliver Sacks showed us how perception phosphoresces in the 100 milliseconds betwee…