The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Traversal: New Year, New Book (Seven Years in the Making)

Traversal (FSG) broadens and deepens the questions raised in Figuring, the questions we live with: the relationship between chance and choice in becoming who we are, between chemistry and consciousness in being what we are, the tension between our love of truth and our lust for power, the restlessness of our longings and the redemption of our losses.

Our various instruments of reckoning with these questions — telescopes and treatises, postulates and poems — are revealed in their power and limitation through the intertwined lives, loves, and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wagener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads — the world’s first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue — to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet more clarifying as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living.

Here is the prelude, Chapter 0, as it appears in the book, framing the 565 pages to come:

Bigger than Manhattan, Earth’s largest living organism sways in the surf south of Australia: Posidonia australis — a species of seagrass that, unable to flower, clones itself. Older than mathematics and the written word, it has been cloning itself since before the pyramids were built — a kind of immortality. And while I kiss my lover on the fresh-cut grass under the Manhattan Bridge, it goes on cloning itself as we go on dying and passing between our lips the heat of our mortality.

Between the scale of atoms and the scale of stars, between the time of mayflies and the time of mountains, we exist as proteins lit up with purpose, matter yearning for meaning on a planet capable of trees and tenderness, a world on which every living thing abides by the same dumb resilience through which we rose from the oceans to compose the Benedictus and to build the bomb.

All of our models and our maps, all of our poems and our love songs, all the conjectures chalked on the blackboard of the mind in theorems and scriptures, spring from the same elemental restlessness to locate ourselves in the cosmos of being, to know reality and to know ourselves. Across the abyss between one consciousness and another, between one frame of reference and another, we go on searching for an organizing principle to fathom the ultimate questions:

What is life?

What is death?

What makes a body a person?

What makes a planet a world?

Over and over, we discover that it is all one question, that there might just be a single answer: love. Our love of knowledge. Our love of mystery. Our love of beauty transcending the vanity of ambition. Our love of truth prevailing over the howling hunger for power. Our love for each other — each of us a festival of particles and probabilities, a living question, a perishable miracle composed of chemistry and culture, of passion and chance.

BP

Cover Song for the Second Law: A Poem for Beginnings

You know the feeling, its scorching urgency, its icy impossibility: to press the undo button of life, to unwind the reel of experience and snip out the wrong turn, the wrong word, the wrong investment of the heart.

It can’t be done without bending the universe, without undoing the second law of thermodynamics.

Our relationship to time is the single most important relationship of our lives, the substrate upon which all other relationships graft. To keep it from being one of bondage, it is useful to imagine how time might work on other worlds, because these thought experiments give us scale models of different ways of orienting to time in this world. It is useful to remember that we can always begin again. (“Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning,” wrote the poet and philosopher John O’Donohue, whose time ran out too soon, in his superb meditation on beginnings.)

And so, a poem:

COVER SONG FOR THE SECOND LAW
by Maria Popova

Let time begin again
this one not a river
but a fountain
pouring in every direction
into a pool of itself
at the center
of the sunlit plaza
of the possible

and we

corpuscles of mist
gilded for a moment
before we drop
to wash the pennies
of the dead

and then begin again.

Couple with Hannah Arendt on forgiveness as the antidote to the irreversibility of life, then revisit Robin Jeffers’s epic poem “The Beginning at the End.”

BP

The Body as Revolution: Che Guevara on Social Medicine and Personal Health as a Political Act

The Body as Revolution: Che Guevara on Social Medicine and Personal Health as a Political Act

“If the body is not the soul, what is the soul?” wrote Walt Whitman in his heroic revolt against the lasting tyranny of Descartes, whose dismissal of the body and disdain for the soul may be the single most damaging ideological misstep of modernity. Long before we had evidence that the body is where we heal the traumas of being, that it is our mightiest instrument of sanity and joy, that “the mind narrates what the nervous system knows,” Whitman ministered to disfigured soldiers as a volunteer Civil War nurse, knowing what we still, in our age of disembodied intellects, deny — that the body is the frontline of our values, the revolutionary battleground on which all of our ideas and ideals are won or lost.

A century later and a hemisphere over, a young medical student mounted his motorcycle to tour his continent, an inhaler in his battered backpack. Along the way, Ernesto “Che” Guevara (May 14, 1928–October 9, 1967) dreamt up a revolution on the scale of the world, the fundaments of which — a refusal to accept the givens, a defiant will to take charge of the possible — he had learned on the scale of the body.

Born two months premature and almost immediately afflicted with bronchial pneumonia, Ernestito was a sickly, chubby child who wore heavy glasses to correct for his astigmatism and carried a vaporizer at all times to ameliorate the regular attacks of asthma so severe that his mother home-schooled him until the authorities demanded he enroll in a state school. He did, but his attendance record was punctuated by frequent asthma-induced absences, sometimes lasting weeks, during which his mother continued to tutor him, teaching him French. From the moment he learned to read, books had been his solace through the long and lonely quarantines, and now he was reading the poetry of Baudelaire and the novels of Émile Zola in the original. But with each paginated portal into another world, he suffered the tension of a mind so free, so limitless, captive to the limitations of the body.

Just as the young Beethoven had resolved to “take fate by the throat” as he began losing his hearing, Ernesto took his destiny in his own hands. He fasted, became fastidious about his everyday diet, started swimming, took to the outdoors, trying to find his limits, to push them, sometimes so hazardously that his friends had to carry him home wheezing. As a teenager, he joined a local rugby team coached by a young biochemistry and pharmacology student several years his senior, who became a close and dear friend. During practice breaks, Ernesto would sit with his back against a light post reading Freud and Faulkner, Dumas and Steinbeck, beginning to think about what it means and what it takes to be free — thoughts that would deepen and complicate a decade later as he witnessed the hunger, poverty, and disease throughout South America from his motorcycle, thoughts that would lead him to approach the body politic of the world with the same defiant will to change the givens, to prevail over the forces that keep people unfree.

In the high summer of 1960, having anchored one major revolution and inspired many, Che Guevara addressed young doctors at the inauguration of a new training program at Cuba’s Ministry of Public Health. Although much of his speech, appropriately titled “On Revolutionary Medicine,” speaks to the particular conditions of Cuban society in the wake of the revolution, pulsating through it are timeless insights into the deepest meaning of health for any person and any society in any epoch.

The Human Heart. One of French artist Paul Sougy’s mid-century scientific diagrams of life. (Available as a print.)

Arguing that a revolution aims to create “a new type of human being,” that this is “the greatest work of social medicine,” and that “social change demands equally profound changes in the mental structure of the people,” he throws a gauntlet at Descartes with the intimation that the body is the substrate of the mind — for a person and for a people. Health, he argues, is a personal responsibility that has political power, which in turn makes it a collaborative intention:

For one to be a revolutionary doctor or to be a revolutionary at all, there must first be a revolution. Isolated individual endeavour, for all its purity of ideals, is of no use, and the desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals serves no purpose if one works alone, solitarily, in some corner of America, fighting against adverse governments and social conditions which prevent progress.

[…]

The battle against disease should be based on the principle of creating a robust body — not creating a robust body through a doctor’s artistic work on a weak organism, but creating a robust body through the world of the whole collectivity, especially the whole social collectivity.

Art from The Human Body, 1959.

He envisions the best possible fruition of revolutionary personal and public health:

One day medicine will have to become a science that serves to prevent diseases, to orient the entire public toward their medical obligations, and that intervention is only necessary in cases of extreme urgency to perform some surgical operation or to deal with something uncharacteristic of that new society we are creating.

Paradoxically, this collective triumph hinges upon the personal responsibility of the individual, who (as Eleanor Roosevelt also knew) is the fulcrum of all social change:

As for all the revolutionary tasks, fundamentally it is the individual who is needed. The revolution does not, as some claim, standardize the collective will and the collective initiative. On the contrary, it liberates man’s individual talent. What the revolution does is orient that talent.

[…]

If we know the direction in which we have to travel, then the only thing left for us is to know the daily stretch of the road and to take it. Nobody can point out that stretch; that stretch is the personal road of each individual; it is what he or she will do every day, what a person will gain from their individual experience, and what they will give of themselves.

BP

Love, Lichen, and the Art of Trusting Time: The Best of The Marginalian 2025

Bless hindsight for how it clarifies the confusions of time, for how precisely it plots the true highs and lows on the terrain map of life once the quakes of the moment have died down, for how dispassionately it reveals what was a fleeting enthusiasm and what a lifelong gift. It is good to have an annual hindsight ritual in one’s life and one’s work, the more so the more the two converge. Here are the twenty-five “best” Marginalian essays of 2025 — a composite measure of what you most loved reading and what I most loved writing, which never perfectly coincide. (Bless the otherness of minds.)

* * *

The Three Elements of the Good Life

Read it here.

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Do Not Spare Yourself

Read it here.

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An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days

Read it here.

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How to Be a Lichen: Adaptive Strategies for the Vulnerabilities of Being Human from Nature’s Tiny Titans of Tenacity

Read it here.

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A Defense of Joy

Read it here.

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HOLD ON LET GO: Urns for Living and the Art of Trusting Time

Read it here.

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How to Be a Good Explorer on the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself

Read it here.

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The Coziest Place on the Moon: An Illustrated Fable about How to Live with Loneliness and What It Means to Love, Inspired by a Real NASA Discovery

Read it here.

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Any Common Desolation

Read it here.

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What a Weasel Knows: Annie Dillard on How to Live

Read it here.

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How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo

Read it here.

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The Stubborn Art of Turning Suffering into Strength: Václav Havel’s Extraordinary Letters from Prison

Read it here.

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The Souls of Animals

Read it here.

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How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and Friendship

Read it here.

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Mushrooms and Our Search for Meaning

Read it here.

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By Contacts We Are Saved: The Forgotten Visionary Jane Ellen Harrison on Change, the Meaning of Faith, and the Courage of Heresy

Read it here.

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Anima: One Woman’s Search for Meaning in the Footsteps of Bulgarian Mountain Shepherds

Read it here.

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Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, and with Fangs: The Alchemy of Unrequited Love and the Story Behind Emily Dickinson’s Most Famous Poem

Read it here.

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Forgiveness

Read it here.

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Arundhati Roy on the Deepest Measure of Success

Read it here.

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Little Free Library Divinations: Searching for the Meaning of Life in Discarded Books and Found Objects

Read it here.

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Carl Jung on Creativity

Read it here.

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The Search for Meaning Cast in Clay: 19 Years of The Marginalian in 19 Ceramic Sentences

Read it here.

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How Not to Waste Your Life

Read it here.

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Favorite Books of 2025

Read it here.

BP

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