The Marginalian

We know good people when we encounter them, when they fall upon our lives like a sunbeam, like a song.

“Brute force crushes many plants.

Recovering the “forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence” alive in the back of our modernity-deadened minds.

Here we are, bewildered miracles of chemistry and chance, trembling embers of dead stars capable of sign and song, a wild bet against probability that won.

“The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart.”

“Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem — in my opinion — to characterize our age.”

It started with an urn for living gone wrong, the clay kiltering off center, resisting my every effort to force it back into shape.

“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.”

“Talent is insignificant.

“How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?”

“Q: What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

There are, in my experience, two fundaments of the creative life: putting yourself regularly in the path of wonder and getting out of your own way in order to receive what you encounter there.

“A star is the glowing light inside the other person, distantly seen, brave soul’s tiny flame, too bright to approach without great courage and integrity.”

Marbling the waters of every ocean with their billows of black and white, orcas are Earth’s most creative and most successful apex predator.

“Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”

Suppose we answer the most important question of existence in the affirmative.

The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and loss inseparable from being a creature with hopes and…

“Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.”

“It is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little.”

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most passionate letter.

“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.”

Enchantment, J.R.R.

“It is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires.

“The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us,” James Baldwin wrote.

“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.”

“Many of [life’s] big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself.”

There are times in life when the continent of certainty parts underfoot and, as the ash cloud of the old world rains darkness upon us, we are asked to swim in the rivers of lava that will make the new.

Exploring the intersection of time and decision-making to shine a light on what it means to be human.

“I can’t consider you a friend when out of every contact there comes some intentionally wounding thing.”

Once, at the gym with a physicist friend, I was struck by how no one else in the room had any idea that while she was sweating on the treadmill with a blank stare into space, she was doing advanced mathematics working out the logic of black holes.

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”

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 die for.

Half a millennium into our recovery from the civilizational wound Descartes inflicted by severing the body and the mind, we are bleeding with a Cartesian cleft of our own making — the damaging divide between life and work.

“Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s.

On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported that computer modeling of data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) had revealed several cylindrical pits on the Moon wi…

We spend our lives mastering the art of losing.

Sitting atop a Spanish mesa one sweltering August night, watching the Perseid meteor showers streak the sky with the debris of a comet burning through the atmosphere against the backdrop of a billion dead stars whose signal light is only now reaching us, I

There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak.

“If you can fall in love again and again… if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.”

We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts, but complicated by the struggle for a living unison between them.

“Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art… there is no Shakespeare… no Beethoven… no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

“Your children are not your children.

In 1964, Pantheon Books invited J.R.R.

“There is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking… Walking and thinking are in a perpetual relationship that is based on trust.”

On where to seek refuge from the forethought of grief.

“Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul.”

How an ancient survivor of the unsurvivable became a triumph of the human spirit in a divided world.

“By reaching beyond the brain… we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone.”