The Marginalian1 day agoColeridge on the Paradox of Friendship and Romantic LoveThe Marginalian - Maria PopovaOn sympathy, reciprocity, and satisfying the fulness of our nature. All relationships are asymmetrical. But there are some asymmetries that fray the fabric of the relationship and maim both people involved — none more so than those of a deep friendship where one person feels the tug of romantic love …
The Marginalian2 days agoMay Sarton on Grieving a PetThe Marginalian - Maria Popova“It is absolutely inward and private, the relation between oneself and an animal.” There is an ineffable comfort that our non-human companions bless upon our lives — those beings whose daily task it is to “bite every sorrow until it fled” — and with their loss comes an ineffable species of grief. Two …
The Marginalian4 days agoLichens and the Meaning of LifeThe Marginalian - Maria Popova“We are lichens on a grand scale.” “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” the great naturalist John Muir wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century. “We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night …
The Marginalian6 days agoAn Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of the Art of ConnectionThe Marginalian - Maria Popova“We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.” Friendship is the sunshine of life — the quiet radiance that makes our lives not only livable but worth living. (This is why we must use the utmost care in how we wield the word friend.) In …
The MarginalianFrom Cells to Souls: The Poetic Science of How the Brain BecameThe Marginalian - Maria PopovaThe making of our densely networked crucible of thought and tenderness. It seems inconceivable — that everything we know, everything we love, everything that ever was and ever will be, banged into being from the singularity, and out of that near-nothingness arose mitochondria and music and “the …
The MarginalianO Sweet Spontaneous: E.E. Cummings’s Love-Poem to Earth and the Glory of SpringThe Marginalian - Maria PopovaThe ultimate anthem of resistance to the assaults on life. There is a nonspecific gladness that envelops humanity in the first days of spring, as if kindness itself were coming abloom in the cracks of crowded sidewalks, quelling our fears, swallowing our sorrows, salving the savage loneliness. We …
