The Marginalian
The Marginalian

20 Truths about Life from 20 Years of The Marginalian: A Ceramics and Lichen Raffle

By Maria Popova

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, the person who made your worst mistake, the person who over and over mistook fear for love, the person who thought orange was a good idea. Somehow, you have to grow arms long enough to wrap them around all those people and a heart wide enough to hold each of them with quiet compassion. Somehow, you have to both mourn and celebrate that you were them but they are no longer you.

It has been an odd thing, looking back on twenty years of The Marginalian — the record of half a lifetime of learning how to live. It called for a ritual — to honor those past persons, to celebrate the constant reconfiguration of the self.

And so: I took the first page of each of the first twenty chapters of my first book, Figuring — who wrote that book? — beginning with the prelude (Chapter 0), and applied my bird divination process to the text, letting the words refigure themselves into something new, something I have learned about life along the way of living, some piece of advice I needed to hear whispered by my own unconscious. The process itself is a lovely reminder that life is like language — it is not the words you have, your givens, but how you configure them that makes meaning, makes beauty, makes poetry. And the loveliness of life is that we are endlessly reconfigurable, brightly capable of rewriting the story with each sentence of living.

Enlisting the help of two of my greatest teachers — clay, which is constantly teaching me how to hold on while letting go and how to say “YES” to life, and lichen, which has a great deal to teach us about loneliness, patience, and resilience — I made twenty ceramic bowls glazed in the color scheme of The Marginalian, with some blue for its existential value and its lens on the universe, and I cast the words in them with resin over lichen from places I have lived over the years, from Bulgaria to Patagonia.

To celebrate the monumental role chance plays in any given life, without which none of us would be who we are, or here at all, I am giving these away in a pay-what-you-wish raffle: To enter, make a donation in any amount that is right for you by December 31, so long as you end it with the decimal .20. (The loveliness of a lottery, which is an antipode to the rich-getting-richer ugliness of an auction, is that your odds are equal whether you enter with $1.20 or $10,000.20 — the only difference is by how much you support this ongoing labor of love.)

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Ursula K. Le Guin on the Meaning of Life

By Maria Popova

Ursula K. Le Guin on the Meaning of Life

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 of it all, we emerged as creatures muzzled by a consciousness that demands we give meaning to our survival. It will not come like alms dropped from the unfeeling hand of the universe. It cannot be found ready-made in the great books and the great teachers, or bought at the price of an Ivy League tuition, or sold by Silicon Valley in a ChatGPT query. That meaning is not something we find but something we make, that it is intimate as love and subjective as the reasons for it, may be the great gift and the great onus of being alive.

Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) leavens the onus and magnifies the gift in a wonderful passage from her 1975 essay “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” later included in her altogether magnificent collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy (public library).

Ursula K. Le Guin by Benjamin Reed

With an eye to the human subject as the beating heart of the reckoning with life we call art, she writes:

What good are all the objects in the universe, if there is no subject? It isn’t that mankind is all that important. I don’t think that Man is the measure of all things, or even of very many things. I don’t think Man is the end or culmination of anything, and certainly not the center of anything. What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not know, nor do I believe anybody who says he knows, except, possibly, Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware — to pay heed. For we are not objects. That is essential… And with us, nature, the great Object, its tirelessly burning suns, its turning galaxies and planets, its rocks, seas, fish and ferns and fir trees and little furry animals, all have become, also, subjects. As we are part of them, so they are part of us. Bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. We are their consciousness.

In this sense, the meaning of life is less like a postulate than like a poem. Half a lifetime later, Le Guin would make a beautiful distinction between how science explicates the universe and poetry implicates it. Knowing that we are implicated in the universe and implicate it in ourselves, touching that knowledge, holding it at the center of our lives, may be the full stop beyond the question of meaning.

Complement with other beautiful perspectives on the meaning of life from Mary Oliver, Oliver Sacks, Loren Eiseley, Maya Angelou, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, then revisit Le Guin on how to live fully.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne on How to Look and Really See

By Maria Popova

“One can’t write directly about the soul,” Virginia Woolf wrote. “Looked at, it vanishes.” This is true of any soul — our own, that of another, that of the world. It vanishes because whenever we look, we see not as reality is but as we are. We see the rest of nature — including each other — through eyes gauzed with preconception, our distracted vision blurred by the thousand thoughts that come alive before the mind’s eye at any given moment, more vivid than the living reality before us.

A lovely recipe for how to see the world more clearly comes from Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) — perhaps a lesser novelist than Woolf, but a greater one than Melville in Melville’s own estimation, lovesick as he was, and a far greater observer of nature in his novels than all the journaling Transcendentalists combined. When Thoreau looked at nature, he saw only metaphor and parable; when Hawthorne looked, he saw nature on its own terms, letting it mirror back the fractal of itself that is human nature as the light of unfiltered awareness fell on it. In that respect, he was more a Buddhist than a Transcendentalist, more a scientist than a novelist, and always a poet of reality.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

In the high summer of 1851 — a year after The Scarlet Letter interrupted Hawthorne’s long obscurity to catapult the middle-aged author into celebrity — he took his five-year-old son Julian to the lake near the little red shanty they had rented in the Berkshires. Sitting at the water’s edge, Hawthorne wrote in a journal entry later included in Julian’s tender two-volume biography of his parents, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (public library | public domain):

The best way to get a vivid impression and feeling of a landscape, is to sit down before it and read, or become otherwise absorbed in thought; for then, when your eyes happen to be attracted to the landscape, you seem to catch Nature unawares, and see her before she has time to change her aspect. The effect lasts but for a single instant, and passes away almost as soon as you are conscious of it; but it is real, for that moment. It is as if you could overhear and understand what the trees are whispering to one another; as if you caught a glimpse of a face unveiled, which veils itself from every willful glance. The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before.

Nebular by Maria Popova. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy)

Complement with James Baldwin on the revelation that taught him to truly see and Georgia O’Keeffe on the art of seeing, then revisit Hawthorne on the edges of consciousness and his stirring meditation on life, death, and what fills the interlude with meaning, composed while watching his young daughter interact with his dying mother.

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Introducing the Museum of Delight

By Maria Popova

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 matter: clay, thread, stone, resin, wood, lichen.

They now live in the Museum of Delight.

Housed in a decommissioned airstream from the 1950s that took a year to transform, the Museum of Delight is a collaboration with my friend and neighbor Ryan Vahey — a multidisciplinary artist who lost his entire life’s work and all of his equipment as he watched his studio burn to the ground in the ferocious fire that lit up our neighborhood with the glaring reminder that anything can change for any one of us at any given moment.

Like a museum, the Museum of Delight constellates objects into an experience; unlike a museum, and more like an art gallery, you can have what is in it; unlike a gallery, you can’t buy anything, but you can have some things if chance smiles upon you: Each time the Museum of Delight is open, eleven objects in it will be given away in a pay-what-you-wish raffle. You can enter it in person or remotely by making a donation in any amount commensurate with your ability and level of delight, so long as it ends with the decimal .11. (The loveliness of a lottery is the antipode to the rich-getting-richer ugliness of art world auctions: Whether you enter with $1.11 or $10,000.11, your odds are the same — the only difference is by how much you support this labor of love, all the thousands of hours and thousands of dollars poured into making these constellations of matter, into turning waste to wonder.)

Proceeds from the raffle will also help Ryan rebuild his life: delight as the counterforce to destruction.

The Museum of Delight, which opens its space-age door at the twentieth anniversary celebration of The Marginalian tomorrow, will be touring New York City and Upstate New York in the coming months, making its next stop at Woodstock’s beloved Japanese restaurant Medo on Sunday, October 25, 1PM-4PM. More stops will be announced on this page. (If you have a dining establishment in New York City, which apparently is the only place this felictious colossus can be parked without a special permit, and you would like to host the Museum of Delight for an afternoon or evening, please contact Ryan.) Meanwhile, here is a taste of some of the objects in it.

Refiguring
Urns for Living
Embroidered Yessels
Serpentine Birdworlds
How to Hold Yourself

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How to Hold Your Heart with Golden Hands

By Maria Popova

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 grown up with — illustrated by Arthur Rackham.

All fairy tales deal in enchantment, but the Grimms’ are especially powerful cautionary tales about the treacherous line between true and false enchantment in love — something Rackham’s art captured exquisitely.

One particular illustration stopped me up short, unnerved me, captivated me with its disquieting fusion of terror and tenderness:

The image haunted me for years. I kept returning to it, puzzling over what it was telling me. I lived more, I loved more, and eventually came to see it as a perfect and terrible metaphor for what happens when two people with attachment trauma mistake their trauma for love. Most relationships fail and falter out of this confusion, whatever its manifestation. Here, in this century-old illustration, was a key to an elemental truth: You cannot hold, or hold on to, anyone else unless you can hold yourself — hold your own heart, hold the roots of your pain, whatever it may be — with absolute golden compassion.

I wanted a response to Rackham, a counterpoint, something to visualize the power of that truth, so I set out to make it.

I began wandering forests and shorelines, looking for driftwood and windthrow trees, exerting inordinate joules taking off their centuries-old roots and giant burls with my Japanese hand-saw, spending inordinate hours sanding them and polishing them with urushi lacquer, then making for them small ceramic hands covered in kintsugi gold powder.

They now live in the Museum of Delight as large-scale reminders that we spend our whole lives learning how to hold our own hearts.

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