The Marginalian

We spend our lives trying to find our power and our freedom.

“One has to shut off that nagging part of the mind and go on without it with bravo and philosophy.”

“What happened could have happened to anyone, but not everyone could have carried on.”

“Love the earth and sun and the animals… re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul…” Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) was thirty-six when he self-published Leaves of Grass (public

“People have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them.”

“Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time,” E.B.

In early September 1948, a year after she rewilded the landscape of literature with Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown watched the love of her life fade to black.

It is a beautiful dream, that there is something out there to instruct you how to live — a secret handed down by your parents or your teachers, a system like liberal arts education or cognitive behavioral therapy, a slogan held up by your heroes declaring…

Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”

We place life’s bets by countless calculations of probability, conscious and unconscious, only to discover over and over how short they fall of the wildest reaches of the possible, which always includes but exceeds the probable.

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.

“The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before.”

After twenty years of making immaterial things with my mind — ideas sculpted of words, questions woven of sentences, translucent vessels for thought and feeling in the shape of poems — I found myself overcome by the urge to make things with my hands out of

One bleak English winter a long time ago, wandering through London in the wake of a relationship that had just unraveled, I walked into an antiquarian bookstore and chanced upon a rare century-old edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales — which I had gr…

“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her passionate insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.”

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through.

“In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.”

“The poem is nothing but information.

“It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.”

Where the hard edge of physics meets the vulnerable metaphysics of the human heart.

“All living relationships are in process of change, of expansion, and must perpetually be building themselves new forms.”

It is an odd thing, looking back on your life, trying to recognize in the mirror of memory the people you used to be, finding them strangers: the person who kissed your first kiss, the person who drank your last drink, the person who had your best idea, t…

“The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion.

At the dawn of my twenties, lonely, destitute, and disoriented by the demands of making a new life in an alien world, I started keeping notes on my search for meaning while working four jobs to pay my way through college.

No one will map for you the path by which you must cross the wilderness of your own life — not your parents or your teachers, not your heroes or your lovers, not the self-help books or Shakespeare’s sonnets.

How the warm rays of hope and healing enter the dark inner chamber of leaden loneliness through the unexpected cracks of kindness.

“Learn why the world wags and what wags it.

“While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.”

“If you can acknowledge it and you can relax with it a little bit, very often it shortens its duration.”

“A way of life cannot be successful so long as it is a mere intellectual conviction.

“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not

“We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.”

This is our paradox: We know that uncertainty is the substrate of the universe, is the crucible of creativity, is the path to truth, and yet we spend our lives searching for certainty.

“Creative people live in two worlds.

This is the history of the world: revolutionaries turning into tyrants, leaders who claim to stand with the masses turning the individuals within them on each other, stirring certainties and self-righteousness to distract from the uncomfortable unknowns,…

Books show us what it is like to be another and at the same time return us to ourselves.

Our language betrays our self-betrayals: We speak of finding love, as if it were an undiscovered eighth continent or a habitable world in another solar system, as if it got lost like the Little Red Riding Hood or the names of the women who painted the cav…

This essay is adapted from Traversal.

“However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth… steps in and does something.”

“Tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies.”

“…a stillness in which the germ of what is not yet palpable pauses and gathers to begin one more time.”

How, knowing that even the universe is dying, do we bear our lives?

We are hunter-gatherers with a capacity for amazement, wired to search for an organizing principle by which to contain the chaos of reality.

“Just how charitable are you supposed to be when criticizing the views of an opponent?”

“So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself.”

“It’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations” Every creator’s creations are their coping mechanism for life — for the loneliness of being, for the longing for connection, for the dazzling incomprehension of what it all mea…

“Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk?

“It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance and ultimate understanding — and often far short.”

“Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings.