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
Life-affirming inspiration from a man who knew intimately “that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” “I am now the most miserable man living,” Abraham...
“The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s… We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.” “If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so… The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance,”...
From butterflies to Beethoven, an ode to the heart’s uncontainable dimensions. A version of this essay appears in the final chapters of Figuring. As if classifying platonic relationships weren’t complex enough a task — one that requires...
“In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.” We live in a culture that dreads the entropic inevitability of growing older, treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and...
“Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world… Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.” “Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal,...
“You’ll long for me when I’m gone… You’ll kiss the headstone of my grave… Kiss my face instead!” “What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote in her short, stunning poem about what gives meaning...
“If you can acknowledge it and you can relax with it a little bit, very often it shortens its duration.” It starts with a low hum that adheres itself to the underbelly of the hours like another dimension. Gradually, surreptitiously, the...
A self is a story of why you are you — a selective retelling of the myriad chance events between the birth of the universe and this moment: atoms bonding one way and not another, parents bonding with one partner and not another, values...
“If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.” A century before an encyclopedia titled Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know fell into Alan Turing’s...
“Here lies the paradox of solitude. Look long and hard enough at yourself in isolation and suddenly you will see the rest of humanity staring back.” “Give me solitude,” Whitman demanded in his ode to the eternal tension between city and...
The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Edward Abbey (January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989) set out to get to know the land he was being asked...
“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 its task.” “I mean to work tremendously hard,” the young...
“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know…” “Your intuition and your intellect should be working together… making love,” Madeleine L’Engle asserted in contemplating how creativity works. Ray Bradbury believed that intuition...
“We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others… There is a virgin forest in each.” It is both a terror and a mercy that we know ourselves only incompletely and each other hardly at all — because, somewhere in that lacuna of...
One September dawn on the verge of a significant life change, sitting on my poet friend’s dock, I watched a great blue heron rise slow and prehistoric through the morning mist, carrying the sky on her back. In the years since, the heron...