The Marginalian
The Marginalian
Maria Popova
Hello. My name is Maria Popova and The Marginalian is a record of my reading and reckoning with our search for meaning: sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. Founded in 2006 as an email to seven friends under the outgrown name Brain Pickings and since included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials, it remains a one-woman labor of love animated by the ultimate question that binds us all: What is all this?
Latest Posts
“Often the places we grow up in… influence how we perceive and conceptualize the world, give us metaphors to live by, and shape the purpose that drives us.” “Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the...
“A poem … is when you are in love and have the sky in your mouth.” “Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire,” Adrienne Rich wrote in contemplating the cultural power of...
“Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.” “Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know neither whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them,”...
These passages appear on pages 126-127 of Traversal in the context of Mary Shelley’s life. Where does love go when it goes? It is a common question, contrived in its commonness yet savagely sincere, bellowing in the bosom of every...
I met Willow at a loom on a farm one late-summer day. She was amused that I thought she looked like Mary Shelley, in whose world I’d been immersed for seven years while writing Traversal. Neither of us knew who the other was — Willow...
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 find the most healing. But despite what a crucible of our...
“If you can fall in love again and again… if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.” “On how one orients himself to the moment,” 48-year-old Henry...
“We want to believe that love is singular and exclusive, and it unnerves us to think that it might actually be renewable…” While it is true, as generations of psychologists have found, that “who we are and who we become depends, in part,...
“What happened could have happened to anyone, but not everyone could have carried on.” Most people live with a great deal more suffering than is visible to even the most proximate and sensitive onlooker. Many have survived things both...
“We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.” “You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,” the artist Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary. How much trust and...
They are so far out of sight for us, creatures of the upper world, that we don’t readily think of them. But as soon as we do, as soon as we plunge the mind into the cold dark hummus to which the body will one day return, they become a...
“Care granted to the sick, welcome offered to the banished, forgiveness itself are worth nothing without a smile enlightening the deed.” Though researchers since Darwin may have spent considerable effort on the science of smiles, at the...
This essay and poem are part of the Universe in Verse book. “My business is circumference,” Emily Dickinson wrote in one of her most cryptic letters. Since ancient times, human beings have been enchanted by the immutable relationship...
“Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.” We are accidents of biochemistry and chance, moving through the world waging wars and writing poems, spellbound...
“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.” In every life, there comes a time when we are razed to the bone of our resilience by losses beyond our control —...