The Marginalian5 days agoLove AnywayThe Marginalian - Maria PopovaYou know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is …
The Marginalian6 days agoAwakened Cosmos: Poetry as Spiritual PracticeThe Marginalian - Maria Popova“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” wrote Whitman, who called himself a kosmos and believed of “the true poems” that “whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars.” Shortly after Whitman returned his borrowed stardust to the universe, when quantum mechanics made …
The MarginalianWe Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt, the Power of Defiant Goodwill, and the Art of Beginning AfreshThe Marginalian - Maria Popova“We speak of four fundamental forces,” a physicist recently said to me, “but I believe there are only two: good and evil” — a startling assertion coming from a scientist. Beneath it pulsates the sensitive recognition that it is precisely because free will is so uncomfortably at odds with everything …
The MarginalianSomething About the Sky: Rachel Carson’s Lost Serenade to the Science of the Clouds, Found and Illustrated by Artist Nikki McClureThe Marginalian - Maria PopovaA version of this essay appeared in The New York Times Book Review. A cloud is a spell against indifference, an emblem of the water cycle that makes this planet a living world capable of trees and tenderness, a great cosmic gasp at the improbability that such a world exists, that across the cold …
The MarginalianGeorge Saunders on How to Live an Unregretting LifeThe Marginalian - Maria PopovaThe price we pay for being children of chance, born of a billion bright improbabilities that prevailed over the staggering odds of nothingness and eternal night, is the admission of our total cosmic helplessness. We have various coping mechanisms for it — prayer, violence, routine — and still we …
The MarginalianCordyceps, the Carpenter Ant, and the Boundaries of the Self: The Strange Science of Zombie FungiThe Marginalian - Maria Popova“The mind is its own place,” Milton wrote in Paradise Lost, “and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” While this is psychologically true — the mind is, after all, how consciousness renders reality — it is not always physiologically true: The brain and body out of which the mind …