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?
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“My life… runs back through time and space to the very beginnings of the world and to its utmost limits. In my being I sum up the earthly inheritance and the state of the world at this moment.” To be alive is to marvel — at least...
The great paradox of human life is that our mortality is the fulcrum of our search for meaning — the yearning to make this brief lungful of life matter amid the breathless void of space and time — and yet we spend our lives obviating the...
“Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning.” There are moments in life when we are reminded that we are unfinished, that the story we have been telling ourselves about who we are and where our life leads is yet...
This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring. In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson: I had a terror — since September — I...
“Split the Lark — and You’ll find the Music, ” Emily Dickinson taunted the materialists, “Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?” In the wake of On the Origin of Species, the poet intuited that for all its magnificent revelations,...
“To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt.” “Our emotional life maps our incompleteness,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in her luminous letter of advice to the young. “A creature without any needs...
“You can expect good and bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative.” Dougal Robertson (January 29, 1924–September 22, 1991) was still a teenager, the youngest of a Scottish music teacher’s eight children, when he joined the...
It seems odd, wrong even, that “patience” and “passion” — the twin roots of love — should share a root in pāti, Latin for “to suffer.” But anyone who has lived, who has loved unskillfully or loved the unskilled, knows that the experience...
We are the survivors of immense and minute events — violent cosmic collisions and subtle genetic mutations, the deaths of innumerable suns and the births of innumerable cells, the splitting of continents and the splitting of atoms. Out...
“Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else … may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds.” “I do not believe that I have ever written a children’s book,” the great Maurice Sendak...
It is there like a constant whisper, like a ceaseless gust of thought rustling through the canopy of the collective mind: the haunting sense that ours is a particularly difficult time to be alive, that reality today is particularly hard...
“Songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came.” “A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music,” the poet Mark Strand...
Toni Morrison once lamented that people have been taught to think of a book as a mirror, when it ought to be a door. All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the...
At the hazy dawn of the twentieth century, through the byways of mental meandering and mathematical play, Albert Einstein arrived at a revelation about the nature of the universe while working as a clerk at the Swiss patent office — a...
It may be that consciousness evolved to sieve the relevant from the incomprehensible allness of all there is, to parse the world into concepts and find an organizing principle for the chaos of them. Our cognitive inheritance is a...