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
“Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.” It is an ongoing mystery: What makes you and your childhood self the same person. Across a lifetime of physiological and psychological...
“While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.” It bears repeating that what makes life livable is our ability — our willingness — to move through the world wonder-smitten...
“Crisis… is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.” The moment we begin to see that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful...
It is hard to know why we are here, what we can make of the transience we can do nothing about, how we can fill every borrowed atom of matter with meaning. It is hard not to take for givens the answers handed down to us by our culture,...
Where the hard edge of physics meets the vulnerable metaphysics of the human heart. Few people have enchanted the popular imagination with science more powerfully and lastingly than physicist Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918–February 15,...
“Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.” “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” the...
“Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it… It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at...
“Attention without feeling … is only a report.” Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) is one of our era’s most beloved and prolific poets — a sage of wisdom on the craft of poetry and a master of its magic; a woman as...
How to keep your soul from leaving you. “The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands,” the poet and storyteller turned activist Grace Paley’s father told her in what remains the...
“It is very important to be in love with life… Life is very fragile and always elusive. As soon as we think we ‘understand,’ there is another mystery. I don’t understand anything. That is, I think, the key to understand everything.”...
“What is it like, such intensity of pain?” There are times in life when the firmament of our being seems to collapse, taking all the light with it, swallowing all color and sound into a silent scream of darkness. It rarely looks that way...
“Leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world.” I lost my darling friend Emily Levine (October 23, 1944–February 3, 2019) just as Figuring, in which she rightly occupies the first line of the acknowledgements, was...
The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it plunges you into the depths of your being and at the same time takes you out of yourself. Writing is the best instrument I have for...
“Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged.” Whatever fundamental reality might exist, we live out our lives in a...
“In order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature.” With his singular blend of physical prowess and metaphysical wisdom, coupled with his tragic untimely death, legendary Chinese-American...