The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Celebrating 20 Years of The Marginalian and the Search for Meaning: Free Livestream This Friday

By Maria Popova

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. On October 23, 2006, I began sharing my discoveries — passages from books, links to neuroscience studies, reproductions of 16th-century Japanese woodcuts — in an office email to seven colleagues. They in turn began sharing it with friends, who began sharing it with friends. The fractal spread and, within a few years, the Library of Congress had included it in its permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. It changed shape (the essays grew longer, the questions deeper) and name (Brain Pickings became The Marginalian) but continued beating with the same heart, reckoning with the ongoing bewilderment of being alive — sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder, always offered freely: no advertising, no AI, not even an assistant, a thoroughly one-woman labor of love sustained by the love of strangers.

To celebrate twenty years of it, I am inviting friends from various walks of life — poets and physicists, musicians and actors, artists and historians of science — to read fragments of the writings, poetry and prose, that have most touched me over the years as I introduce each with a short reflection on its resonance to the eternal questions we live with: what do we make of our suffering, why did the world have to be beautiful, how do we see more clearly and love more purely.

With the format of The Universe in Verse and the feeling-tone of my Marginalian essays, the evening will feature live appearances and special contributions across spacetime by a constellation of beloved humans who have made my own life more livable over the years, among them Debbie Millman, Joan As Police Woman, Krista Tippett, Marie Howe, Diane Ackerman, James Gleick, Natascha McElhone, Sophie Blackall, Stephon Alexander, Natalie Batalha, Willow Defebaugh, Wendy MacNaughton, Zoë Keating, Nick Cave, Paola Prestini with the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, and surprise guests.

If you aren’t attending in atoms at breathtaking Saratoga Performing Arts Center — a state-of-the-art outdoor amphitheater in Upstate New York, surrounded by waterfalls and hot springs, awned by an old-growth forest in full autumnal glory — you can join us virtually via this free livestream:

(And if you find it enriching your day, or your life, consider a donation to lend a helping hand with the heaping production costs.)

BP

The Map to the Route of Your Life

By Maria Popova

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. Some may give you signposts, some may become turning points, but it is a path you ultimately make by walking. Along the way, you mistake dreams and desires for destinations, only to find that they have been way-stations — as soon as you attain them, you begin longing for something else. This Möbius strip of longing is the root of everything we suffer in the fangs of the Wanting Monster, but it is also the root of our creative vitality: the restless urge to make, to leave a mark that says “I AM,” a monument to having been. It is our incompleteness that maps the territory of the possible in us. It is our existential wanderlust that makes us what we are — pilgrims of mortality, forever coming home to the horizon of tomorrow.

Mario Benedetti (September 14, 1920–May 17, 2009) captures this paradox, with subtlety that doesn’t offer an answer but whispers the living question back to you, in an unedited poem found among his papers after his death, beautifully read in the original Spanish by my Patagonian friend Manuel Gutiérrez — a communicator of wonder through theater, music, and humor, whose hospitality made the serpentine birdworlds possible and who is always teaching me how to navigate the terrain of life with an open heart for a compass.

Music: “Sun Will Set” by Zoë Keating, with the artist’s permission; image: my father walking through the sunflower fields of Bulgaria merged with the first image captured by the Vera Rubin Observatory — 678 exposures of the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae taken over the course of seven hours.

RUTA
Mario Benedetti

La encontré en mi bolsillo / era una ruta
no sabía hasta dónde me llevaba
pero igual la seguí en un merodeo
con todas mis nostalgias en la mano

era un atlas del alma / la conciencia
de lo que cometí y lo que me espera
en el suelo vi huellas que eran propias
así que era una senda ya corrida

el piélago de antes ya no estaba
todo era más fuerte más seguro
de pronto me encontré con la ribera
de ese río que siempre fue mi anhelo

sólo entonces me aconsejé a mí mismo
en el bolsillo volví a poner la ruta
y allí quedó esperando
otro mañana

ROADMAP
by Mario Benedetti
     translated by Maria Popova

I found it in my pocket / it was a roadmap
I knew not where it led
but I followed it anyway in aimless wanderlust
with all my nostalgias in hand

it was an atlas of the soul / of consciousness
of what I have committed and what awaits me
on the ground I saw footprints that were my own
and so it was a path already trodden

the vastness of before had vanished
everything was stronger, surer
suddenly I landed on the riverbank
the river that had always been my longing

only then did I heed my own advice
I tucked the path into my pocket once more
and there it remained, awaiting
another tomorrow

Couple with Benedetti’s clarion call to stop waiting and start living, then revisit C.S. Lewis on what we long for in our existential longings.

BP

Bloom: A Touching Animated Short Film about Depression and What It Takes to Recover the Light of Being

By Maria Popova

“Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands,” the poet May Sarton wrote as she contemplated the cure for despair amid a dark season of the spirit. But what does it take to perch that precarious if in the direction of the light? When we are in that dark and hollow place, that place of leaden loneliness and isolation, when “the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain,” as William Styron wrote in his classic account of the malady — an indiscriminate malady that savaged Keats and savaged Nietzsche and savaged Hansberry — what does it take to live through the horror and the hollowness to the other side, to look back and gasp disbelievingly, with the poet Jane Kenyon: “What hurt me so terribly… until this moment?”

During a recent dark season of the spirit, a dear friend buoyed me with the most wonderful, hope-giving, rehumanizing story: Some years earlier, when a colleague of hers — another physicist — was going through such a season of his own, she gave him an amaryllis bulb in a small pot; the effect it had on him was unexpected and profound, as the effect of uncalculated kindnesses always is — profound and far-reaching, the way a pebble of kindness ripples out widening circles of radiance. As the light slowly returned to his life, he decided to teach a class on the physics of animation. And so it is that one of his students, Emily Johnstone, came to make Bloom — a touching animated short film, drawing from the small personal gesture a universal metaphor for how we survive our densest private darknesses, consonant with Neil Gaiman’s insistence that “sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place… to make us warm in the coldest season.”

Complement with Tim Ferriss on how he survived suicidal depression and Tchaikovsky on depression and finding beauty amid the wreckage of the soul, then revisit “Having It Out with Melancholy” — Jane Kenyon’s stunning poem about life with and after depression.

BP

The Single Most Effective Remedy for Despair: Advice from T.H. White’s Merlyn

By Maria Popova

The Single Most Effective Remedy for Despair: Advice from T.H. White’s Merlyn

In his wonderful contribution to A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, Yo-Yo Ma tells children about how books helped him survive his own childhood, listing King Arthur among his three great heroes; as a young boy born in France to Chinese parents, trying to find his mooring as an immigrant in America, he reaped great consolation and inspiration from the tales of the legendary medieval leader — stories of “adventure, heroism, human frailty and accidental destiny” that emboldened him to believe in the power of the quest for holy grails and improbable dreams — dreams as improbable as a small boy with no homeland growing up to be the world’s greatest cellist.

And, indeed, buried inside the adventure-thrill of these Arthurian tales are treasure troves of wisdom on fortitude, courage, and the art of honorable living, nowhere richer than in the novels by T.H. White (May 29, 1906–January 17, 1964), one particular passage in which offers a meta-testament to the potency of reading in the character-formation of King Arthur himself.

Art by Cindy Derby from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader. Available as a print, benefitting the New York public library system.

In White’s 1958 Arthurian classic The Once and Future King (public library) — one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s lifelong favorite books — the mystic-magician Merlyn, aware of the young not-yet-king Arthur’s destiny, endeavors to sculpt the boy’s moral fiber and to teach him what it means to be a strong, kindly leader through a series of lessons from the animal kingdom, transforming him by turns into a fish, a hawk, an ant, a goose, and a badger. One day, the young Arthur comes to Merlyn in his ordinary human incarnation, sulking with an ordinary human disappointment — that small, merciless mallet for our fragility. Merlyn offers his advice on the mightiest antidote to disappointment and sorrow:

The best thing for being sad… is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.

In a sentiment evocative of trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell’s observation that “we have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire,” Merlyn adds:

Look at what a lot of things there are to learn — pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics — why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.

Complement with Rebecca Solnit — a modern-day magician of storytelling — on how books solace, empower, and transform us, philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how to live with our human fragility, and poet Mary Oliver on the greatest antidote to sorrow, then revisit Bruce Lee’s philosophy of learning, Lewis Carroll’s four rules of learning, and Albert Einstein’s advice to his own young son on the secret to learning anything.

BP

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