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
“Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with...
“There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it,” Adam Philips writes in his superb meditation on our ambivalent desire for change — ambivalence brilliantly rendered in the Vampire Problem...
“While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.” We move through the world largely unaware that our emotions are made of concepts — the brain’s coping...
“We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.” Friendship is the sunshine of life — the quiet radiance that makes our lives not only livable but worth living. (This is why we...
Language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents. The great danger is that we come to mistake the shape for the substance, reducing concepts and experiences we cannot name or contain to the words tasked with...
How the warm rays of hope and healing enter the dark inner chamber of leaden loneliness through the unexpected cracks of kindness. “Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can...
“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come… We live everything as it comes, without warning.” “Live as if you were living already...
“And it is so simple… You will instantly find how to live.” One November night in the 1870s, legendary Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) discovered the meaning of life in a dream — or, at least, the...
If you want to befriend time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone. Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock. Walk a beach and comb your fingers through the golden...
“Owning up: to recollect, to regret, to be responsible, ultimately to forgive and love.” Chance and choice converge to make us who we are, and although we may mistake chance for choice, our choices are the cobblestones, hard and uneven,...
“It isn’t perfect, not at all. It doesn’t need to be. It is, simply, what fills you up.” “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,”...
This essay is adapted from Traversal. On April 5, 1815, as Napoleon is assembling his troops for the Battle of Waterloo, where he would meet his final defeat, the lieutenant-governor of Java leaps to his feet upon hearing the...
A wonder-smitten reminder “that for all the horrible chaos of the contemporary political scene this world is full of kindness.” In the early nineteenth century, the teenage Mary Godwin and her not-yet-husband Percy Bysshe Shelley left...
Walking through the white-walled gallery at the graduation show of one of New York’s most esteemed art schools, between beautiful young people with Instagram faces, I was struck to see project after project take up as its subject the...
“In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws… to...