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?
August 2026
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All posts (539)
“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” “Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion,” the great painter Richard Diebenkorn counseled in his ten rules for beginning creative projects. “One doesn’t arrive — in words or in art — by...
“Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies… differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear… What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.” “I function only by falling in love: with French and...
The current of life is charged by the poles of hope and despair. What we make of our hopes and their devastation may be the purest measure of who we are and what we leave behind. Protest is what we call the resistance we launch against our reasons for despair — personal, political, existential. Although in its...
“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely poem, distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an easy knowledge to live with amid the...
“We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss,” Judith Viorst wrote in her defense of life’s necessary losses, “and we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go.” We know that loving anything or anyone...
Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conveying the blueness of blue and the wonder of being alive. But it is also a thing of great pliancy and creativity — a living reminder that how we name things changes what we...
In 1896, decades before Santiago Ramón y Cajal pioneered neuroscience, more than a century before Oliver Sacks showed us how perception phosphoresces in the 100 milliseconds between the world and us, half a lifetime before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the polymathic French philosopher Henri Bergson (October 18,...
“We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.” “No really creative transformation can possibly be effected by human beings,” physicist David Bohm wrote in examining the nature of creativity, “unless they are in the creative state of mind that is generally sensitive to the differences that always exist...
“There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others.” Half a century before Walt Whitman considered what makes life worth living when a paralytic stroke boughed him to the ground of being, Mary Shelley (August 30, 1797–February 1, 1851) placed...
Nested between two giant cedars in the remote old-growth forest where I live much of the year are the rusted remains of boxy car. A tree root has seized one of the rear wheels. A sapling has growth through the glassless windshield. Bright orange fungi have colonized the driver’s seat. Lichen and moss cover nearly...
“Please try to go to hell frequently because you will find the light there.” In their strange cosmogony predating Copernicus by two millennia, the ancient Greek scientific sect of the Pythagoreans placed at the center of the universe a ball of fire. It was not hell but the heart of creation. Hell, Milton told us...
In early 1934, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student at Columbia Teachers College took an internship teaching drama and producing student plays at PS 24 in Harlem. Among her young charges at that “dreadful ancient New York schoolhouse,” as she would later recall, was a ten-year-old boy she was astonished to find...
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