The Marginalian
20 articles
Death and How to Be More Alive: Carl Jung on Immortality and the Rebirth of Middle Age
Once, I spent a year walking Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery daily, winding between the marble tombs engulfed by tree-roots and emblazoned with the surnames of the dead, ea…
Darwin’s Greatest Regret and His Deathbed Reflection on What Makes Life Worth Living
"If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week."
The Continuous Creative Act of Holding on and Letting Go: 10 Beautiful Minds on the Art of Growing Older
A great paradox of being alive in this civilization is that we have come to dread and devalue the triumph of having lived, forgetting that to grow old is not a punishment but a pri…
Blackie & Co.: A Blackbird’s Lesson in Friendship
In the middle of my bleakest winter, my friend Andrea gave me a battered copy of a forgotten book from her elderly father’s used bookshop in rural Texas, by a man named Hockley Cla…
No One You Love Is Ever Dead: Hemingway on the Most Devastating of Losses and the Meaning of Life
"We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other."
The Log from the Sea of Cortez: John Steinbeck’s Forgotten Masterpiece on How to Think and the Art of Seeing the Pattern Beyond the Particular
"Everything impinges on everything else... Everything is potentially everywhere."
A Heron, a Red Leaf, and a Hole in a Blue Star: Poet Jane Kenyon on the Art of Letting Go
The vital force of life is charged by the poles of holding on and letting go. We know that the price of love is loss, and yet we love anyway; that our atoms will one day belong to …
Games People Play: The Revolutionary 1964 Model of Human Relationships That Changed How We (Mis)Understand Ourselves and Each Other
"Because there is so little opportunity for intimacy in daily life, and because some forms of intimacy (especially if intense) are psychologically impossible for most people, the b…
The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Creativity and Time
"The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."
Kahlil Gibran on Silence, Solitude, and the Courage to Know Yourself
"In much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly."
Kindness Over Fear: Naomi Shihab Nye Tells the Remarkable Real-Life Story That Inspired Her Beloved Poem “Kindness”
"Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing."
The Bird in You, the World in You, and the Art of Trusting Time: A Ceramics and Serpentine Raffle
One December afternoon, I arrived in Patagonia with a big blue backpack, a small bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda’s love poems, and a broken heart. (Though a heart, of course, nev…
Do the Next Right Thing: Carl Jung on How to Live and the Origin of His Famous Tenet for Navigating Uncertainty
"There is no pit you cannot climb out of provided you make the right effort at the right place... do the next thing with diligence and devotion."
Love Anyway
You 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 f…
Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and Ms. Boodle: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Advice on Writing to a Young Woman Aspiring to Be an Author
In late 1884, Adelaide Boodle — talented, timorous, still in her twenties — received news so thrilling she thought she was dreaming: Her favorite author was moving into the small t…
From Mitochondria to Minds: The Illustrated Science of the Psychedelic Dream Called Life
Like consciousness, like music, like love, life itself didn’t have to exist — nothing in the fundamental laws demands it. The universe could have gone on lapping at itself as a hor…
How to Bear Your Sorrows: Nick Cave on Integrating the Darkness of Loss with the Bright Ongoingness of Life
Few things in our culture are more wounding than the concept of healing — as if the pains and losses that we suffer are an illness, a malfunction of the psyche to be cut out like a…