themarginalian.orgadded August 2026
The Marginalianby Maria Popova18d ago
A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety By Maria Popova “The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is,”...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova18d ago
The Three Elements of the Good Life By Maria Popova To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires.
The Marginalianby Maria Popova18d ago
How to Be a Poet: Elizabeth Alexander on the Yin-Yang of Connection and Contradiction By Maria Popova “The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova19d ago
Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life By Maria Popova “I mean to work tremendously hard,” the young Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881)...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova19d ago
The Vampire Problem: The Paradoxical Psychology of Why It Is So Hard to Change By Maria Popova To be human is to suffer from a peculiar congenital blindness: On the precipice of any great change...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova19d ago
How to Hold the Darkness: Notes on Living Through Uncertainty By Maria Popova There are times in life when the continent of certainty parts underfoot and, as the ash cloud of the old world rains...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova20d ago
The Science of Waiting and the Art of Delay By Maria Popova “We never live; we are always in the expectation of living,” Voltaire famously lamented.
The Marginalianby Maria Popova20d ago
Steinbeck and the Difficult Art of the Friend Breakup By Maria Popova “A friend,” wrote the poet and philosopher John O’Donohue in his beautiful meditation on the Ancient Celtic notion of anam...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova21d ago
Are You Working: In Defense of the Invisible Labors of Creativitiy By Maria Popova 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...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova21d ago
The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel By Maria Popova “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” wrote...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova22d ago
Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die By Maria Popova The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova23d ago
Against the Cartesian Myth of Work/Life Balance: André Gregory’s Extraordinary Letter to Richard Avedon about the Nature of Creativity By Maria Popova Half a millennium into our recovery from the...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova23d ago
The Stoic Key to Living with Presence: Seneca on Time Spent vs. Saved vs. Wasted By Maria Popova “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote in her abiding...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova24d ago
The Coziest Place on the Moon: Or, How to Bear Your Loneliness By Maria Popova On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova24d ago
On Losing a Parent By Maria Popova We spend our lives mastering the art of losing. Our necessary losses shape us; the unnecessary, senseless, devastating losses bend our shape to test our breaking...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova24d ago
Actuality vs. Possibility and How to Hear the Signal of Your Life By Maria Popova Sitting atop a Spanish mesa one sweltering August night, watching the Perseid meteor showers streak the sky with...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova24d ago
The Canon of Solitude: 200 Years of Great Writers, Artists, and Scientists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Fertile Aloneness By Maria Popova There is a silence at the center of each person...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova24d ago
The Measure of a Life Well Lived: Henry Miller on How to Grow Old and the Secret of Remaining Young at Heart By Maria Popova “On how one orients himself to the moment,” 48-year-old Henry Miller...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova25d ago
How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking By Maria Popova We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts, but complicated by the...
The Marginalianby Maria Popova25d ago
Virginia Woolf on Creativity By Maria Popova “Only art penetrates … the seeming realities of this world,” Saul Bellow asserted in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
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