All articles from The Marginalian
How to Make the Impossible Possible: Cristina Campo on the Crucial Difference Between Hope and Trust
“What are we, anyway, at our best, but one small, persistent cluster in a greater ferment of human activity — still and forever turning toward, tuned for, the possible,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her cla
Decoding the Mystery of Intuition: AI Prophet Margaret Boden on the Three Elements of Creativity
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s first algorit
The Eternal Lyric of Love and Loss: “Goodnight Moon” Author Margaret Wise Brown’s Little-Known Poems for the Tragic Love of Her Life
"One who has dared to be gloriously good and gloriously bad in one life. No Limbo for her. Rather let life itself grow living monuments out of trees and living words so that death can never take from
Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”
A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible.
Erich Fromm’s 6 Rules of Listening: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist on the Art of Unselfish Understanding
"Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed."
The Work of Happiness: May Sarton’s Stunning Poem About Being at Home in Yourself
"What is happiness but growth in peace."
A General Theory of Possibility: The Abstract Art of Otherwise and the Physics of Resilience
"As always happens with contradictions, something in the assumptions has to give... Declaring something impossible leads to more things being possible."
Václav Havel on How to Hold Your Failure
Few things in life are more devastating than to give something your all and still fail. Not the “fail better” of startup culture, not the “fail forward” of self-help, not the failure that is childhood
The Day Hermann Hesse Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Tree
"It was the great and eternal made visible: a confluence of opposites, their fusing together in the fire of reality. It meant nothing... or, rather, it meant everything... and it was beautiful, it was
George Saunders on the Antidote to Regret
"At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the p
Brian Eno’s Remedy for Burnout and Despair
There comes a moment in every life when you find yourself suddenly wondering about the point of it all — the point of all that productivity, the point of so-called success, the point of the poem that
How to Be a Good Explorer on the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself
Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destination — success, superhuman strength, the love of another. A
Unselfing into Oneness with the All: The Forgotten Visionary Margaret Fuller on Transcendence
"How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?"
Kafka’s Approach to Creative Block and the Four Psychological Hindrances That Keep the Gifted from Living Up to Their Gifts
The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it plunges you into the depths of your being and at the same time takes you out of yourself. Writing is t
Pioneering Psychiatrist Donald Winnicott on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind and a Healthy Relationship
"A sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and yet accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other p
Thomas Bernhard on Walking, Thinking, and the Paradox of Self-Reflection
"There is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking... Walking and thinking are in a perpetual relatio
A Heron’s Antidote to Fear of Death
They didn’t imagine it, the dying dinosaurs, that they would grow wings and become birds, become the laboratory in which evolution invented dreams and the cathedral in which it invented faith. “There
Between the User and the Used: Zadie Smith on Instrumentalism
The great paradox, the great pain of human relationships is that they are so often not relational: two lonelinesses colliding without real contact, one or both orienting to the other not as a person b
Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding Peace
"Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair."
Sentinels of the Soul: Kahlil Gibran’s Moving Letter to a Soldier in a Senseless War
War is an ism — nationalism, dogmatism, capitalism — paid for by an is: the living beingness of human beings made a sacrificial offering to an ideology so powerful it has quelled the two things that m
Diseases of the Will: Neuroscience Founding Father Santiago Ramón y Cajal on the Six Psychological Flaws That Keep the Gifted from Living Up to Their Gift
"Our neurons must be used ... not only to know but also to transform knowledge; not only to experience but also to construct."
Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System: The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation
"A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure."
Any Common Desolation
"You may have to break your heart, but it isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive."
The Art of Befriending Time and Change: Debbie Millman’s Illustrated Love Letter to Gardening as a Portal to Self-discovery
You may or may not find the meaning of life while pacing a flower bed, but each time you plunge your bare hands into the hummus of the Earth and run your fingers through the roots of something that hu
The Magic of Moss and What It Teaches Us About the Art of Attentiveness to Life at All Scales
"Life [exists] only because of a myriad of synchronicities that bring us to this particular place at this particular moment. In return for such a gift, the only sane response is to glitter in reply."
The Pattern Inside the Pattern: Fractals, the Hidden Order Beneath Chaos, and the Story of the Refugee Who Revolutionized the Mathematics of Reality
"In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity."
Wherever You Think There Is Nothing
We spend our lives searching for portals to the possible. They are rarely gates swung open for us by some great hand. Often, they are where we least expect them — in the chance encounter, in the small
Hemingway’s Advice on Writing, Ambition, and His Reading List of Essential Books for Aspiring Writers
"In any art you're allowed to steal anything if you can make it better."
The Measure of a Rich Life: Wendell Berry on Delight as a Force of Resistance and the Key to Felicitous Sanity During Hardship
"The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom... is always poised upon the knowledge of
Michael Rosen’s Sad Book: A Beautiful Anatomy of Loss, Illustrated by Quentin Blake
"Sometimes I'm sad and I don’t know why. It's just a cloud that comes along and covers me up."
The Wild Iris: Nobel Laureate Louise Glück on the Door at the End of Your Suffering
"Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice."
Do Not Spare Yourself
The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak an
The Courage of Vulnerability: Teenage Frida Kahlo’s Moving Letters to Her First Love
One of the 35 girls among the 2,000 students at Mexico’s National Preparatory School, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954) was fifteen when she met Alejandro Gómez Arias. Both were passionate and
Why Are We Not Better Than We Are: How Poetry Saves Lives
"...a stillness in which the germ of what is not yet palpable pauses and gathers to begin one more time."
The Three Elements of the Good Life
To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires. And yet because a person is a confederacy of parts often at odds and sometime
The Intelligence of Emotions: Philosopher Martha Nussbaum on How Storytelling Rewires Us and Why Befriending Our Neediness Is Essential for Happiness
"Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself."
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
"Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person."
How Flamingos Got Their Pink
Against the morphological backdrop of the rest of nature, a giant pink bird on stilts sounds like something out of Lewis Carroll’s imagination. And yet flamingos came out of evolution’s laboratory, su