![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/SummerRedBird_suffering1.jpg\")
We spend our lives trying to find our power and our freedom. It is not easy: We live in a culture that has distorted the meaning and measure of power, confusing visibility with value, status with substance, attention with love; we live in a universe where free will may be an illusion, where chance deals the vast majority of the cards — the family and epoch we are born into, the body and biochemistry we live in, the people we cross paths with, the accidents of chemistry and happenstance we call love. The great double-edged question is how to keep power from becoming a prison and how much freedom we can find between the narrow parameters of our givens. But somewhere deep down, in the marrow of our language, we seem to know: The word power shares its Middle Latin root with possibility — its only measure is that which liberates the possible in us; our only power is our freedom.
\n\u201cNothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,\u201d James Baldwin wrote. It is unbearable largely because it demands a shedding of the self with all of its attachments — to ways of being, to ideas about how the world ought to be, to particular interpretations of reality. Such attachments are shackles best broken by what Irish Murdoch has so splendidly termed unselfing, key to each of the five kinds of freedom she identified in literature and life. For Murdoch, freedom takes radical unsefling — only then are we truly free to both be ourselves and love each other:
\n\nFreedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.
This is why, for Octavio Paz — who thought deeply about freedom — love is “a knot made of two intertwined freedoms.” And if love is our fulcrum of belonging, then belonging itself is woven of the same paradox — something Maya Angelou articulates in one of her finest interviews:
\n\nYou only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/darkwood_ofraamit_endpapers.jpg\")
In this sense, freedom is the hinge between being and belonging that swings open the door to being ourselves — which, yet again paradoxically, must include the freedom to change, to confront the illusory solidity of the self, its ceaseless mutability. Psychoanalyst Karen Horney formulates this perfectly in her pioneering work on the fundaments of personal growth:
\n\nWe do not need an inner strait jacket with which to shackle our spontaneity, nor the whip of inner dictates to drive us to perfection. There is no doubt that such disciplinary methods can succeed in suppressing undesirable factors, but there is also no doubt that they are injurious to our growth. We do not need them because we see a better possibility of dealing with destructive forces in ourselves: that of actually outgrowing them. The way toward this goal is an ever increasing awareness and understanding of ourselves. Self-knowledge, then, is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth… And as we lose the neurotic obsession with self, as we become free to grow ourselves, we also free ourselves to love and to feel concern for other people.
Then, and only then, can we contact the soul beneath the self, which is the only real locus of our freedom. Vassily Grossman — who spent a thousand days as a correspondent on the frontlines of the Holocaust — captures this beautifully in a passage from his almost unbearably poignant reckoning with life and death:
\n\nWhat constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone\u2019s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "We spend our lives trying to find our power and our freedom. It is not easy: We live in a culture that has distorted the meaning and measure of power, confusing visibility with value, status with substance, attention with love; we live in a universe where free will may be an illusion, where chance deals the vast majority of the cards — the family and epoch we are born into, the body and biochemistry we live in, the people we cross paths with, the accidents of chemistry and happenstance we call love. The great double-edged question is how to keep power from becoming a prison and how much freedom we can find between the narrow parameters of our givens. But somewhere deep down, in the marrow of our language, we seem to know: The word power shares its Middle Latin root with possibility — its only measure is that which liberates the possible in us; our only power is our freedom.
\n\u201cNothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,\u201d James Baldwin wrote. It is unbearable largely because it demands a shedding of the self with all of its attachments — to ways of being, to ideas about how the world ought to be, to particular interpretations of reality. Such attachments are shackles best broken by what Irish Murdoch has so splendidly termed unselfing, key to each of the five kinds of freedom she identified in literature and life. For Murdoch, freedom takes radical unsefling — only then are we truly free to both be ourselves and love each other:
\n\nFreedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.
This is why, for Octavio Paz — who thought deeply about freedom — love is “a knot made of two intertwined freedoms.” And if love is our fulcrum of belonging, then belonging itself is woven of the same paradox — something Maya Angelou articulates in one of her finest interviews:
\n\nYou only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.
In this sense, freedom is the hinge between being and belonging that swings open the door to being ourselves — which, yet again paradoxically, must include the freedom to change, to confront the illusory solidity of the self, its ceaseless mutability. Psychoanalyst Karen Horney formulates this perfectly in her pioneering work on the fundaments of personal growth:
\n\nWe do not need an inner strait jacket with which to shackle our spontaneity, nor the whip of inner dictates to drive us to perfection. There is no doubt that such disciplinary methods can succeed in suppressing undesirable factors, but there is also no doubt that they are injurious to our growth. We do not need them because we see a better possibility of dealing with destructive forces in ourselves: that of actually outgrowing them. The way toward this goal is an ever increasing awareness and understanding of ourselves. Self-knowledge, then, is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth… And as we lose the neurotic obsession with self, as we become free to grow ourselves, we also free ourselves to love and to feel concern for other people.
Then, and only then, can we contact the soul beneath the self, which is the only real locus of our freedom. Vassily Grossman — who spent a thousand days as a correspondent on the frontlines of the Holocaust — captures this beautifully in a passage from his almost unbearably poignant reckoning with life and death:
\n\nWhat constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone\u2019s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-27T16:02:10Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-27T16:02:10Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.brainpickings.org/?p=73501", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/27/sylvia-plath-letter-mother/", "external_url": null, "title": "Sylvia Plath on Living with the Darkness and Making Art from the Barely Bearable Lightness of Being", "content_text": "", "content_html": "![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/lettershome_sylviaplath.jpg?w=680&ssl=1\")
When the twenty-two-year-old Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932–February 11, 1963) wrote to her mother one bleak January day, both women were wading through a darkness of the soul. Science was only just beginning to hone the tools with which to begin dissecting the elemental mystery of what makes us who we are: how much of our psychology and what we experience as our personhood — whether we call it self or soul or spirit — is a product of our physical constitution, of the particular biochemical processes coursing through our particular infrastructure of matter that we experience as our body. Neuroscience was then an infant science — it still is — and the helix of heredity had just been discovered, hinting at the promise of new clarity on the ancient puzzlement of nature versus nurture, new insight into how much of our psychology is a biological inheritance and how much an ongoing composition continually revised by the confluence of chance and choice we call experience.
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/sylviapalth_smithsonian.jpg?resize=680%2C908&ssl=1\")
Several years earlier, the teenage Plath had begun contouring her consciousness and mapping its psychological promontories, its luminous surfaces and its dark edges, rhapsodizing about the joy of living, thinking deeply about free will and what make us who we are, and composing her first tragic poem in response to a minor domestic accident. Two years before she shaded in what was becoming an all-consuming darkness in “The Disquieting Muses,” she wrote to her mother in a letter included in the posthumously collected Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (public library):
\n\nI don’t know whether it is an hereditary characteristic, but our little family is altogether too prone to lie awake at nights hating ourselves for stupidities — technical or verbal or whatever — and to let careless, cruel remarks fester until they blossom in something like ulcer attacks — I know that during these last days I’ve been fighting an enormous battle with myself.
But then, with the presence of mind and the triumph of spirit that allowed her to live through the remaining years of her life — years she filled with some of the most timelessly exquisite poetry ever written — she adds:
\n\nBut beyond a point, fighting only wears one out and one has to shut off that nagging part of the mind and go on without it with bravo and philosophy… Your present life is the important thing.
There is a dangerous fallacy — a biological falsehood, a feebleness of empathy, an ethical failing — in the view that people who die by suicide after living with mental illness have somehow failed at life. It is one thing to feel deeply the tragedy of that loss, to rue the help not available to them in their time of struggle; it is quite another to fault the faulty instrument itself. It is impossible for any one consciousness to truly know what living inside another is like in the first place — we make art and poems and songs to try to show each other what it is like to be alive in this body-mind. But it is especially unfathomable for a mind coursing with fairly ordinary biochemistry, housed in a brain with fairy ordinary neurophysiology, to grasp what it might be like to live with a mind inflamed by ceaselessly misfiring neurotransmitters or a mind housed in a brain with a large tumor pressing against the amygdala at every moment of every hour. To survive even a single day with such a mind is no small feat. To have not only survived thirty-one years, as Sylvia Plath did, but to have filled those years with works of staggering beauty, with poems that irradiate generations of lives — that is a rare triumph of the spirit.
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/sylviaplath_smithsonian9.jpg?resize=680%2C512&ssl=1\")
Complement with May Sarton on the cure for despair and Lorraine Hansberry — another visionary artist of Plath’s generation, who also lived and made in the darkest depths — on the most reliable antidote to depression, then hear Meryl Streep read Plath’s stunning “Morning Song” and savor a rare glimpse of the poet’s inner world through her little-known paintings.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "When the twenty-two-year-old Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932–February 11, 1963) wrote to her mother one bleak January day, both women were wading through a darkness of the soul. Science was only just beginning to hone the tools with which to begin dissecting the elemental mystery of what makes us who we are: how much of our psychology and what we experience as our personhood — whether we call it self or soul or spirit — is a product of our physical constitution, of the particular biochemical processes coursing through our particular infrastructure of matter that we experience as our body. Neuroscience was then an infant science — it still is — and the helix of heredity had just been discovered, hinting at the promise of new clarity on the ancient puzzlement of nature versus nurture, new insight into how much of our psychology is a biological inheritance and how much an ongoing composition continually revised by the confluence of chance and choice we call experience.
Several years earlier, the teenage Plath had begun contouring her consciousness and mapping its psychological promontories, its luminous surfaces and its dark edges, rhapsodizing about the joy of living, thinking deeply about free will and what make us who we are, and composing her first tragic poem in response to a minor domestic accident. Two years before she shaded in what was becoming an all-consuming darkness in “The Disquieting Muses,” she wrote to her mother in a letter included in the posthumously collected Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (public library):
\n\nI don’t know whether it is an hereditary characteristic, but our little family is altogether too prone to lie awake at nights hating ourselves for stupidities — technical or verbal or whatever — and to let careless, cruel remarks fester until they blossom in something like ulcer attacks — I know that during these last days I’ve been fighting an enormous battle with myself.
But then, with the presence of mind and the triumph of spirit that allowed her to live through the remaining years of her life — years she filled with some of the most timelessly exquisite poetry ever written — she adds:
\n\nBut beyond a point, fighting only wears one out and one has to shut off that nagging part of the mind and go on without it with bravo and philosophy… Your present life is the important thing.
There is a dangerous fallacy — a biological falsehood, a feebleness of empathy, an ethical failing — in the view that people who die by suicide after living with mental illness have somehow failed at life. It is one thing to feel deeply the tragedy of that loss, to rue the help not available to them in their time of struggle; it is quite another to fault the faulty instrument itself. It is impossible for any one consciousness to truly know what living inside another is like in the first place — we make art and poems and songs to try to show each other what it is like to be alive in this body-mind. But it is especially unfathomable for a mind coursing with fairly ordinary biochemistry, housed in a brain with fairy ordinary neurophysiology, to grasp what it might be like to live with a mind inflamed by ceaselessly misfiring neurotransmitters or a mind housed in a brain with a large tumor pressing against the amygdala at every moment of every hour. To survive even a single day with such a mind is no small feat. To have not only survived thirty-one years, as Sylvia Plath did, but to have filled those years with works of staggering beauty, with poems that irradiate generations of lives — that is a rare triumph of the spirit.
\nComplement with May Sarton on the cure for despair and Lorraine Hansberry — another visionary artist of Plath’s generation, who also lived and made in the darkest depths — on the most reliable antidote to depression, then hear Meryl Streep read Plath’s stunning “Morning Song” and savor a rare glimpse of the poet’s inner world through her little-known paintings.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-27T09:31:37Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-27T09:31:37Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.brainpickings.org/?p=74432", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/27/marcus-aurelius-luck/", "external_url": null, "title": "Marcus Aurelius on the Good Luck of Your Bad Luck", "content_text": "", "content_html": "![\"Marcus](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/meditations_robinwaterfield.jpg?fit=320%2C496&ssl=1\")
Most people live with a great deal more suffering than is visible to even the most proximate and sensitive onlooker. Many have survived things both unimaginable and invisible to the outside world. This has been the case since the dawn of our species, for human nature has hardly changed beneath the continually repainted fa\u00e7ade of our social sanctions — human beings have always been capable of inflicting tremendous pain on each other and capable of triumphal healing.
\nThere is, however, a peculiar modern phenomenon that might best be described as a culture of competitive trauma. In recent times, the touching human longing for sympathy, that impulse to have our suffering recognized and validated, has grown distorted by a troubling compulsion for broadcast-suffering and comparative validity. Personhoods are staked on the cards dealt and not the hands played, as if we evolved the opposable thumbs of our agency for nothing. In memoirs and reality shows, across infinite Alexandrian scrolls of social media feeds, the unlucky events of life have become the currency of attention and identification.
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/artyoung_treesatnight7.jpg?resize=680%2C1070&ssl=1\")
There is a way, with moderate moral imagination and considerable countercultural courage, to subvert this tendency without turning away from the reality and magnitude of suffering that we do live with — a way to esteem in attention and admiration not the unluckiness of what has happened to us but the luckiness that, despite it, we have become the people we are and have the lives we have by the sheer unwillingness to stay in that small dark place, which is at heart a willingness to be larger than our hurt selves.
\nIt is not a new way of reframing personal narrative (which, after all, is the neuropsychological pillar of identity). It is a very old way, common to many of the world’s ancient traditions but most clearly and creatively articulated by the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius (April 26, 121–March 17, 180).
\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/marcusaurelius.jpg?w=680&ssl=1\")
Because the modern mind calculates validity of vantage point by estimating the comparative value of suffering, it must be observed that, later in life, Marcus Aurelius had it easier than most of his contemporaries, being Emperor; it must also be observed that, earlier in life, he had it harder than most, being a fatherless child and a queer teenager in Roman antiquity, epochs before the notion of LGBTQ rights, or for that matter most human rights. It is hardly surprising that he turned to Stoicism for succor and training in living with the uncertainty of events and the certainty of loss.
\nHis timeless Meditations (public library), newly translated and annotated by the British classics scholar Robin Waterfield, were the original self-help — Marcus wrote these notebooks primarily as notes to himself while learning how to live: how to live with more agency, equanimity, and even joy in a world violently unpredictable at all times and especially so in his time.
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/greatwave_hokusai.jpg?resize=680%2C457&ssl=1\")
In one of those self-counsels, Marcus Aurelius considers the key to regarding one’s own life, and living it, with positive realism:
\n\nBe like a headland: the waves beat against it continuously, but it stands fast and around it the boiling water dies down. “It’s my rotten luck that this has happened to me.” On the contrary, “It’s my good luck that, although this has happened to me, I still feel no distress, since I’m unbruised by the present and unconcerned about the future.” What happened could have happened to anyone, but not everyone could have carried on without letting it distress him. So why regard the incident as a piece of bad luck rather than seeing your avoidance of distress as a piece of good luck? Do you generally describe a person as unlucky when his nature worked well? Or do you count it as a malfunction of a person’s nature when it succeeds in securing the outcome it wanted?
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hasuikawase1.jpg?resize=680%2C1014&ssl=1\")
With an eye to “what human nature wants” — what life ultimately demands as it lives itself through us, and what our highest answer is — he concludes:
\n\nCan what happened to you stop you from being fair, high-minded, moderate, conscientious, unhasty, honest, moral, self-reliant, and so on — from possessing all the qualities that, when present, enable a man’s* nature to be fulfilled? So then, whenever something happens that might cause you distress, remember to rely on this principle: this is not bad luck, but bearing it valiantly is good luck.
Complement with an equally counterintuitive and perspective-broadening modern case for the luckiness of death and Alan Watts on the ambiguity of good and bad luck, then revisit other highlights from the indispensable Meditations: Marcus Aurelius on how to handle disappointing people, the key to living with presence, the most potent motivation for work, and how to begin each day for maximum serenity of mind.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "
Most people live with a great deal more suffering than is visible to even the most proximate and sensitive onlooker. Many have survived things both unimaginable and invisible to the outside world. This has been the case since the dawn of our species, for human nature has hardly changed beneath the continually repainted fa\u00e7ade of our social sanctions — human beings have always been capable of inflicting tremendous pain on each other and capable of triumphal healing.
\nThere is, however, a peculiar modern phenomenon that might best be described as a culture of competitive trauma. In recent times, the touching human longing for sympathy, that impulse to have our suffering recognized and validated, has grown distorted by a troubling compulsion for broadcast-suffering and comparative validity. Personhoods are staked on the cards dealt and not the hands played, as if we evolved the opposable thumbs of our agency for nothing. In memoirs and reality shows, across infinite Alexandrian scrolls of social media feeds, the unlucky events of life have become the currency of attention and identification.
\nThere is a way, with moderate moral imagination and considerable countercultural courage, to subvert this tendency without turning away from the reality and magnitude of suffering that we do live with — a way to esteem in attention and admiration not the unluckiness of what has happened to us but the luckiness that, despite it, we have become the people we are and have the lives we have by the sheer unwillingness to stay in that small dark place, which is at heart a willingness to be larger than our hurt selves.
\nIt is not a new way of reframing personal narrative (which, after all, is the neuropsychological pillar of identity). It is a very old way, common to many of the world’s ancient traditions but most clearly and creatively articulated by the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius (April 26, 121–March 17, 180).
\nBecause the modern mind calculates validity of vantage point by estimating the comparative value of suffering, it must be observed that, later in life, Marcus Aurelius had it easier than most of his contemporaries, being Emperor; it must also be observed that, earlier in life, he had it harder than most, being a fatherless child and a queer teenager in Roman antiquity, epochs before the notion of LGBTQ rights, or for that matter most human rights. It is hardly surprising that he turned to Stoicism for succor and training in living with the uncertainty of events and the certainty of loss.
\nHis timeless Meditations (public library), newly translated and annotated by the British classics scholar Robin Waterfield, were the original self-help — Marcus wrote these notebooks primarily as notes to himself while learning how to live: how to live with more agency, equanimity, and even joy in a world violently unpredictable at all times and especially so in his time.
\nIn one of those self-counsels, Marcus Aurelius considers the key to regarding one’s own life, and living it, with positive realism:
\n\nBe like a headland: the waves beat against it continuously, but it stands fast and around it the boiling water dies down. “It’s my rotten luck that this has happened to me.” On the contrary, “It’s my good luck that, although this has happened to me, I still feel no distress, since I’m unbruised by the present and unconcerned about the future.” What happened could have happened to anyone, but not everyone could have carried on without letting it distress him. So why regard the incident as a piece of bad luck rather than seeing your avoidance of distress as a piece of good luck? Do you generally describe a person as unlucky when his nature worked well? Or do you count it as a malfunction of a person’s nature when it succeeds in securing the outcome it wanted?
With an eye to “what human nature wants” — what life ultimately demands as it lives itself through us, and what our highest answer is — he concludes:
\n\nCan what happened to you stop you from being fair, high-minded, moderate, conscientious, unhasty, honest, moral, self-reliant, and so on — from possessing all the qualities that, when present, enable a man’s* nature to be fulfilled? So then, whenever something happens that might cause you distress, remember to rely on this principle: this is not bad luck, but bearing it valiantly is good luck.
Complement with an equally counterintuitive and perspective-broadening modern case for the luckiness of death and Alan Watts on the ambiguity of good and bad luck, then revisit other highlights from the indispensable Meditations: Marcus Aurelius on how to handle disappointing people, the key to living with presence, the most potent motivation for work, and how to begin each day for maximum serenity of mind.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-27T03:51:41Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-27T03:51:41Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "http://www.brainpickings.org/?p=35062", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/26/bob-dylan-songwriters-on-songwriting-interview/", "external_url": null, "title": "Bob Dylan on the Unconscious Mind and the Ideal Conditions for Creative Work", "content_text": "", "content_html": "![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/songwritersonsongwriting.jpg?w=680&ssl=1\")
Van Morrison once characterized Bob Dylan (b. May 24, 1941) as the greatest living poet. And since poetry, per Muriel Rukeyser’s beautiful definition, is an art that relies on the \u201cmoving relation between individual consciousness and the world,\u201d to glimpse Dylan’s poetic prowess is to grasp at once his singular consciousness and our broader experience of the world. That’s precisely what shines through in Paul Zollo’s 1991 interview with Dylan, found in Songwriters On Songwriting (public library) — that excellent and extensive treasure trove that gave us Pete Seeger on originality and also features conversations with such celebrated musicians as Suzanne Vega, Leonard Cohen, k.d. lang, David Byrne, Carole King, and Neil Young, whose insights on songwriting extend to the broader realm of creative work in a multitude of disciplines.
Zollo captures Dylan’s singular creative footprint:
\n\nPete Seeger said, “All songwriters are links in a chain,” yet there are few artists in this evolutionary arc whose influence is as profound as that of Bob Dylan. It’s hard to imagine the art of songwriting as we know it without him.
\n[\u2026]
\nThere’s an unmistakable elegance in Dylan’s words, an almost biblical beauty that has sustained his songs throughout the years.
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/miltonglaser_dylan.jpg?w=680&ssl=1\")
One essential aspect of Dylan’s creative process that comes up again and again in the interview is the notion of the unconscious and the optimal environment for its free reign. Dylan tells Zollo:
\n\nIt’s nice to be able to put yourself in an environment where you can completely accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from your inner workings of your mind. And block yourself off to where you can control it all, take it down\u2026
Like many creators, Dylan values that unconscious aspect of creativity far more than rational deliberation, speaking to the idea that the muse cannot be willed, only welcomed — a testament to the role of unconscious processing in the psychological stages of creative work. He tells Zollo:
\n\nThe best songs to me — my best songs — are songs which were written very quickly. Yeah, very, very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it.
In order to do that, he adds, one must “stay in the unconscious frame of mind to pull it off, which is the state of mind you have to be in anyway.” Contrary to Bukowski’s punchy assertion that the ideal environment for creativity is an irrelevant delusion and E.B. White’s admonition that “a writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper,” Dylan believes this optimal frame of mind can be induced — or, at least, greatly aided — by the right conditions:
\n\nFor me, the environment to write the song is extremely important. The environment has to bring something out in me that wants to be brought out. It’s a contemplative, reflective thing\u2026
\nEnvironment is very important. People need peaceful, invigorating environments. Stimulating environments.
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/bobdylan1.jpg?w=680&ssl=1\")
To foster such unconscious receptivity, Dylan argues that “you have to be able to get the thoughts out of your mind” and explains:
\n\nFirst of all, there’s two kinds of thoughts in your mind: there’s good thoughts and evil thoughts. Both come through your mind. Some people are more loaded down with one than another. Nevertheless, they come through. And you have to be able to sort them out, if you want to be a songwriter, if you want to be a song singer. You must get rid of all that baggage. You ought to be able to sort out those thoughts, because they don’t mean anything, they’re just pulling you around, too. It’s important to get rid of them thoughts.
\nThen you can do something from some kind of surveillance of the situation. You have some kind of place where you can see it but it can’t affect you. Where you can bring something to the matter, besides just take, take, take, take, take. As so many situations in life are today. Take, take, take, that’s all that it is. What’s in it for me? That syndrome which started in the Me Decade, whenever that was. We’re still in that. It’s still happening.
Dylan makes a seemingly controversial statement that resonates with new layers of poignancy in our present age of seemingly infinite cloud libraries of streamable music and a constant, industrialized churning out of disposable pop hits:
\n\nThe world don’t need any more songs\u2026 As a matter of fact, if nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain’t gonna suffer for it. Nobody cares. There’s enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probably, each of them, a hundred songs, and never be repeated. There’s enough songs.
\nUnless someone’s gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That’s a different story.
\nBut as far as songwriting, any idiot could do it\u2026 Everybody writes a song just like everybody’s got that one great novel in them.
In fact, Dylan seems to regard “popular entertainers” — despite counting himself among them — with a certain degree of contempt and mistrust:
\n\nIt’s not a good idea and it’s bad luck to look for life’s guidance to popular entertainers.
Dylan considers what it takes to be among the few rare exceptions worthy of true creative respect:
\n\nMadonna’s good, she’s talented, she puts all kinds of stuff together, she’s learned her thing\u2026 But it’s the kind of thing which takes years and years out of your life to be able to do. You’ve got to sacrifice a whole lot to do that. Sacrifice. If you want to make it big, you’ve got to sacrifice a whole lot.
When Zollo asks Dylan whether he sees himself the way Van Morrison famously characterized him, Dylan replies:
\n\n[Pause] Sometimes. It’s within me. It’s within me to put myself up and be a poet. But it’s a dedication. [Softly] It’s a big dedication.
\n[Pause] Poets don’t drive cars. [Laughs] Poets don’t go to the supermarket. Poets don’t empty the garbage. Poets aren’t on the PTA. Poets, you know, they don’t go picket the Better Housing Bureau, or whatever. Poets don’t\u2026 poets don’t even speak on the telephone. Poets don’t even talk to anybody. Poets do a lot of listening and \u2026 and usually they know why they’re poets! [Laughs]
\n[\u2026]
\nPoets live on the land. They behave in a gentlemanly way. And live by their own gentlemanly code.
\n[Pause] And die broke. Or drown in lakes. Poets usually have very unhappy endings\u2026
When the conversation veers into the question of whether Shakespeare was really Shakespeare and people’s skepticism about accepting that a single person was able to produce such a body of work, Dylan makes a remark that extends to a great many more aspects of society:
\n\nPeople have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them.
He seems especially dismissive of public opinion and even more so, similarly to David Bowie, of artists’ preoccupation with it:
\n\nIt’s not to anybody’s best interest to think about how they will be perceived tomorrow. It hurts you in the long run.
As the conversation progresses, Zollo returns to songwriting, citing Pete Seeger’s assertion that originality is a myth and all songwriters are “links in a chain,” to which Dylan responds:
\n\nThe evolution of a song is like a snake, with its tail in its mouth. That’s evolution. That’s what it is. As soon as you’re there, you find your tail.
Considering his own songs, Dylan contemplates their nature, the self-transcendence necessary for writing, and the creative value of being an outcast:
\n\nMy songs aren’t dreams. They’re more of a responsive nature\u2026
\nTo me, when you need them, they appear. Your life doesn’t have to be in turmoil to write a song like that but you need to be outside of it. That’s why a lot of people, me myself included, write songs when one form or another of society has rejected you. So that you can truly write about it from the outside. Someone who’s never been out there can only imagine it as anything, really.
Songwriters On Songwriting is a magnificent read in its hefty totality. Complement it with similar meditations on process and creativity from the world of writing, including thoughts by Anne Lamott, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, Susan Orlean, Neil Gaiman, Elmore Leonard, and Michael Lewis.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "Van Morrison once characterized Bob Dylan (b. May 24, 1941) as the greatest living poet. And since poetry, per Muriel Rukeyser’s beautiful definition, is an art that relies on the \u201cmoving relation between individual consciousness and the world,\u201d to glimpse Dylan’s poetic prowess is to grasp at once his singular consciousness and our broader experience of the world. That’s precisely what shines through in Paul Zollo’s 1991 interview with Dylan, found in Songwriters On Songwriting (public library) — that excellent and extensive treasure trove that gave us Pete Seeger on originality and also features conversations with such celebrated musicians as Suzanne Vega, Leonard Cohen, k.d. lang, David Byrne, Carole King, and Neil Young, whose insights on songwriting extend to the broader realm of creative work in a multitude of disciplines.
Zollo captures Dylan’s singular creative footprint:
\n\nPete Seeger said, “All songwriters are links in a chain,” yet there are few artists in this evolutionary arc whose influence is as profound as that of Bob Dylan. It’s hard to imagine the art of songwriting as we know it without him.
\n[\u2026]
\nThere’s an unmistakable elegance in Dylan’s words, an almost biblical beauty that has sustained his songs throughout the years.
One essential aspect of Dylan’s creative process that comes up again and again in the interview is the notion of the unconscious and the optimal environment for its free reign. Dylan tells Zollo:
\n\nIt’s nice to be able to put yourself in an environment where you can completely accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from your inner workings of your mind. And block yourself off to where you can control it all, take it down\u2026
Like many creators, Dylan values that unconscious aspect of creativity far more than rational deliberation, speaking to the idea that the muse cannot be willed, only welcomed — a testament to the role of unconscious processing in the psychological stages of creative work. He tells Zollo:
\n\nThe best songs to me — my best songs — are songs which were written very quickly. Yeah, very, very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it.
In order to do that, he adds, one must “stay in the unconscious frame of mind to pull it off, which is the state of mind you have to be in anyway.” Contrary to Bukowski’s punchy assertion that the ideal environment for creativity is an irrelevant delusion and E.B. White’s admonition that “a writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper,” Dylan believes this optimal frame of mind can be induced — or, at least, greatly aided — by the right conditions:
\n\nFor me, the environment to write the song is extremely important. The environment has to bring something out in me that wants to be brought out. It’s a contemplative, reflective thing\u2026
\nEnvironment is very important. People need peaceful, invigorating environments. Stimulating environments.
To foster such unconscious receptivity, Dylan argues that “you have to be able to get the thoughts out of your mind” and explains:
\n\nFirst of all, there’s two kinds of thoughts in your mind: there’s good thoughts and evil thoughts. Both come through your mind. Some people are more loaded down with one than another. Nevertheless, they come through. And you have to be able to sort them out, if you want to be a songwriter, if you want to be a song singer. You must get rid of all that baggage. You ought to be able to sort out those thoughts, because they don’t mean anything, they’re just pulling you around, too. It’s important to get rid of them thoughts.
\nThen you can do something from some kind of surveillance of the situation. You have some kind of place where you can see it but it can’t affect you. Where you can bring something to the matter, besides just take, take, take, take, take. As so many situations in life are today. Take, take, take, that’s all that it is. What’s in it for me? That syndrome which started in the Me Decade, whenever that was. We’re still in that. It’s still happening.
Dylan makes a seemingly controversial statement that resonates with new layers of poignancy in our present age of seemingly infinite cloud libraries of streamable music and a constant, industrialized churning out of disposable pop hits:
\n\nThe world don’t need any more songs\u2026 As a matter of fact, if nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain’t gonna suffer for it. Nobody cares. There’s enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probably, each of them, a hundred songs, and never be repeated. There’s enough songs.
\nUnless someone’s gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That’s a different story.
\nBut as far as songwriting, any idiot could do it\u2026 Everybody writes a song just like everybody’s got that one great novel in them.
In fact, Dylan seems to regard “popular entertainers” — despite counting himself among them — with a certain degree of contempt and mistrust:
\n\nIt’s not a good idea and it’s bad luck to look for life’s guidance to popular entertainers.
Dylan considers what it takes to be among the few rare exceptions worthy of true creative respect:
\n\nMadonna’s good, she’s talented, she puts all kinds of stuff together, she’s learned her thing\u2026 But it’s the kind of thing which takes years and years out of your life to be able to do. You’ve got to sacrifice a whole lot to do that. Sacrifice. If you want to make it big, you’ve got to sacrifice a whole lot.
When Zollo asks Dylan whether he sees himself the way Van Morrison famously characterized him, Dylan replies:
\n\n[Pause] Sometimes. It’s within me. It’s within me to put myself up and be a poet. But it’s a dedication. [Softly] It’s a big dedication.
\n[Pause] Poets don’t drive cars. [Laughs] Poets don’t go to the supermarket. Poets don’t empty the garbage. Poets aren’t on the PTA. Poets, you know, they don’t go picket the Better Housing Bureau, or whatever. Poets don’t\u2026 poets don’t even speak on the telephone. Poets don’t even talk to anybody. Poets do a lot of listening and \u2026 and usually they know why they’re poets! [Laughs]
\n[\u2026]
\nPoets live on the land. They behave in a gentlemanly way. And live by their own gentlemanly code.
\n[Pause] And die broke. Or drown in lakes. Poets usually have very unhappy endings\u2026
When the conversation veers into the question of whether Shakespeare was really Shakespeare and people’s skepticism about accepting that a single person was able to produce such a body of work, Dylan makes a remark that extends to a great many more aspects of society:
\n\nPeople have a hard time accepting anything that overwhelms them.
He seems especially dismissive of public opinion and even more so, similarly to David Bowie, of artists’ preoccupation with it:
\n\nIt’s not to anybody’s best interest to think about how they will be perceived tomorrow. It hurts you in the long run.
As the conversation progresses, Zollo returns to songwriting, citing Pete Seeger’s assertion that originality is a myth and all songwriters are “links in a chain,” to which Dylan responds:
\n\nThe evolution of a song is like a snake, with its tail in its mouth. That’s evolution. That’s what it is. As soon as you’re there, you find your tail.
Considering his own songs, Dylan contemplates their nature, the self-transcendence necessary for writing, and the creative value of being an outcast:
\n\nMy songs aren’t dreams. They’re more of a responsive nature\u2026
\nTo me, when you need them, they appear. Your life doesn’t have to be in turmoil to write a song like that but you need to be outside of it. That’s why a lot of people, me myself included, write songs when one form or another of society has rejected you. So that you can truly write about it from the outside. Someone who’s never been out there can only imagine it as anything, really.
Songwriters On Songwriting is a magnificent read in its hefty totality. Complement it with similar meditations on process and creativity from the world of writing, including thoughts by Anne Lamott, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, Susan Orlean, Neil Gaiman, Elmore Leonard, and Michael Lewis.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-26T09:11:48Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-26T09:11:48Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.brainpickings.org/?p=54727", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/26/walt-whitman-leaves-of-grass-preface/", "external_url": null, "title": "Walt Whitman\u2019s Advice on Living a Vibrant and Rewarding Life", "content_text": "", "content_html": "![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/leavesofgrass.jpg?w=680&ssl=1\")
Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) was thirty-six when he self-published Leaves of Grass (public library | public domain). Amid its dispiriting initial reception, he received a soul-saving letter of encouragement from Emerson, who by that point had become America’s most influential literary tastemaker. Whitman carried it in his pocket for a long time, proudly showing to friends and lovers, and eventually reprinted it in full in the second edition, on the spine of which a particularly vitalizing sentence from the letter — “I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career” — was stamped in gold.
Without Emerson’s emboldening missive, the young poet may have perished in obscurity. Praising the book as brimming with “incomparable things said incomparably well,” Emerson buoyed Whitman’s spirit and soon sculpted public opinion into appreciation. Leaves of Grass went on to become one of most beautiful and beloved poetic works ever written.
\n![\"Walt](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/waltwhitman_1854.jpg?resize=680%2C768&ssl=1\")
Whitman’s words in the preface to the original edition are at least as radiant and rousing as the verses themselves — words that continue to enliven heart, mind, and spirit a century and a half later. He writes:
\n\nThe land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes \u2026 but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects \u2026 they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls.
And yet he does indicate the path. In a passage partway between sermon and commencement address, he writes:
\n\nThis is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/margaretcook_leavesofgrass1.jpg?resize=680%2C883&ssl=1\")
In a sentiment which Pulitzer-winning poet Mark Strand would come to echo nearly 150 years later in contemplating the artist’s task to bear witness to the universe, Whitman extols the poet’s singular role in granting us access to this richness of being:
\n\nThe known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet. He consumes an eternal passion and is indifferent which chance happens and which possible contingency of fortune or misfortune and persuades daily and hourly his delicious pay. What baulks or breaks others is fuel for his burning progress to contact and amorous joy.
\n[…]
\nWithout effort and without exposing in the least how it is done the greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and scenes and persons some more and some less to bear on your individual character as you hear or read. To do this well is to compete with the laws that pursue and follow time.
He ends the lengthy preface with a piercing reflection on the measure of how an artist dances this dance with the laws of time:
\n\nThe proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
Absorb the timelessly rewarding Leaves of Grass and complement it with Whitman on the power of music, healthcare and the human spirit, and why a robust society is a feminist society.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) was thirty-six when he self-published Leaves of Grass (public library | public domain). Amid its dispiriting initial reception, he received a soul-saving letter of encouragement from Emerson, who by that point had become America’s most influential literary tastemaker. Whitman carried it in his pocket for a long time, proudly showing to friends and lovers, and eventually reprinted it in full in the second edition, on the spine of which a particularly vitalizing sentence from the letter — “I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career” — was stamped in gold.
Without Emerson’s emboldening missive, the young poet may have perished in obscurity. Praising the book as brimming with “incomparable things said incomparably well,” Emerson buoyed Whitman’s spirit and soon sculpted public opinion into appreciation. Leaves of Grass went on to become one of most beautiful and beloved poetic works ever written.
\nWhitman’s words in the preface to the original edition are at least as radiant and rousing as the verses themselves — words that continue to enliven heart, mind, and spirit a century and a half later. He writes:
\n\nThe land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes \u2026 but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects \u2026 they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls.
And yet he does indicate the path. In a passage partway between sermon and commencement address, he writes:
\n\nThis is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.
In a sentiment which Pulitzer-winning poet Mark Strand would come to echo nearly 150 years later in contemplating the artist’s task to bear witness to the universe, Whitman extols the poet’s singular role in granting us access to this richness of being:
\n\nThe known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet. He consumes an eternal passion and is indifferent which chance happens and which possible contingency of fortune or misfortune and persuades daily and hourly his delicious pay. What baulks or breaks others is fuel for his burning progress to contact and amorous joy.
\n[…]
\nWithout effort and without exposing in the least how it is done the greatest poet brings the spirit of any or all events and passions and scenes and persons some more and some less to bear on your individual character as you hear or read. To do this well is to compete with the laws that pursue and follow time.
He ends the lengthy preface with a piercing reflection on the measure of how an artist dances this dance with the laws of time:
\n\nThe proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
Absorb the timelessly rewarding Leaves of Grass and complement it with Whitman on the power of music, healthcare and the human spirit, and why a robust society is a feminist society.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-26T08:21:12Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-26T08:21:12Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=88296", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/25/20-childrens-books/", "external_url": null, "title": "20 Favorite Children\u2019s Books from 20 Years of The Marginalian", "content_text": "", "content_html": "“Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time,” E.B. White insisted. “You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth.”
\nBoth as a reader of them and as a writer of them, I have never considered “children’s books” a separate category of literature: The best children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise, shining a sidewise gleam on the fundamental questions we live with, articulating in the language of children, which is the language of great simplicity and great profundity, the most complex truths about being human. But reducing a lifetime of reading to just twenty favorite books to mark twenty years of The Marginalian was so tortuously hard that I am sneaking in another twenty under the dubious label “children’s.”
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "“Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time,” E.B. White insisted. “You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth.”
\nBoth as a reader of them and as a writer of them, I have never considered “children’s books” a separate category of literature: The best children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise, shining a sidewise gleam on the fundamental questions we live with, articulating in the language of children, which is the language of great simplicity and great profundity, the most complex truths about being human. But reducing a lifetime of reading to just twenty favorite books to mark twenty years of The Marginalian was so tortuously hard that I am sneaking in another twenty under the dubious label “children’s.”
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-25T12:13:16Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-25T12:13:16Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=88284", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/25/dark-wood-margaret-wise-brown-ofra-amit/", "external_url": null, "title": "The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds: Margaret Wise Brown\u2019s Lost Masterpiece about Mortality and the Meaning of Life, Newly Illustrated", "content_text": "", "content_html": "![\"The](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/darkwood_ofraamit_cover.jpg?fit=320%2C516&ssl=1\")
In early September 1948, a year after she rewilded the landscape of literature with Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown watched the love of her life fade to black.
\nMichael Strange, born Blanche Oelrichs, had cast an instant spell on Margaret — outspoken, sophisticated, and self-possessed, so tall Margaret had to lift her grey-blue eyes to meet the black of Michael\u2019s, her tall frame clad in masculine clothing she herself had designed to cling to her curves, with a musical voice unspooling from her haunting dark beauty, a deep velvet laugh, and a reputation for rarely keeping a promise. In her tight tweed pants and long-tailed blazers and oversized ties, she moved effortlessly through the sea of gloves and lace and whispering society ladies.
\nWhen her wealthy family of Austrian royal lineage had found her erotic poetry embarrassing, Blanche had emancipated herself under the male nom de plume, which soon became a stage name as she strode into the theater world as playwright and actress, and eventually swelled into a total persona — the name with which she signed her letters, the name by which her intimates addressed her, the name of her self-image.
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/michaelstrange_margaretwisebrown.jpg?resize=680%2C513&ssl=1\")
In her youth, Blanche had been named the most beautiful woman in Paris. Now, about to turn fifty-eight, Michael Strange was a ghost on a New York stage, her skin sallow, her body emaciated to the size of a child\u2019s after refusing to let her aggressive leukemia keep her from performing.
\nMargaret and Michael had met seven years earlier. One day on Vinalhaven — the Maine island where Margaret would spend much of her life and write most of her books — she had rowed to a lover\u2019s cottage and found the luscious stranger sunbathing there with her lover. Soon, back in New York, she was surprised to receive a lunch invitation from Michael, who had shown up dressed in fur from head to toe, asking bold questions about her love life while sipping sherry. Margaret was thirty, Michael fifty and on her third unhappy marriage; her latest husband had never read her poetry. Both women were born in the wrong century, bent on bending it to their will; both were accidental radicals, just by living unselfconsciously; both had had affairs with Thomas Wolfe; both were at heart poets more than anything else.
\nBy the middle of the World War, they were lovers; Michael had declared that she had never loved anyone the way she loved Margaret and never would; she had promised to love her until her dying day.
\nLate one night, Margaret\u2019s phone rang. Michael\u2019s voice poured in, sped up with alarm, imploring her to get into a taxi right away. Her husband had found out about their relationship and, in an era when the diagnostic manual of psychiatry classified same-sex love as a mental illness, was threatening to have her locked away in an asylum. A doctor was on his way to \u201cdiagnose\u201d her. With her maid\u2019s help, Michael managed to slip out through the back staircase and into the taxi as Margaret was pulling up.
\nOn the disorienting ride through the New York nocturne, they weighed their options and decided to head to the high-society women\u2019s club Michael frequented. There, she collected herself, phoned her husband to demand a formal apology, then set the wheels in motion for a legal separation.
\nFrom this point on, Michael became — to use the modern term, hard-won and ahistorical — Margaret\u2019s partner. Soon, they were living across the hallway from each other, in a pair of twin apartments on the East End, with Margaret part nominal tenant and part unnamed wife as she was quickly becoming one of the country\u2019s most original and beloved children\u2019s book authors.
\nIt was a stormy love that pushed and pulled, but grafted itself onto Margaret\u2019s being. Michael wrote adoring letters and criticized Margaret\u2019s diction at dinner parties. She gave her a golden wishbone necklace and a ring, made her feel like she was too needy, and derided her children\u2019s books as unsophisticated, \u201csilly furry stories,\u201d not Real Literature: an actress and socialite who had not published a poem in a decade and was feeling abandoned by her own muse, deriding one of the most vibrantly creative people of the past century — poet, songwriter, progressive education reformer, author of more than a hundred singularly wondrous books for the young, with which she would earn herself a little red house, a yellow convertible, and the love of millions of children; the author whom the visionary Ursula Nordstrom had no qualms calling her favorite author, despite also publishing Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein, and E.B. White. Even Michael\u2019s pet name for Margaret was laced with this ambivalent mixture of affection and disdain: Bunny-no-good.
\nAnd yet nobody ever knows what electrifies the infinite sky between two people, what magnetizes them together, what roils deep beneath the faint surface trails left in letters and diaries and the recollections of bystanders, what animates the long days between the islanded moments crashed by emotion and frozen in time. Margaret loved Michael with unassailable devotion, and Michael was dying. So she did the hardest thing in life — facing the death of a beloved while remaining a pillar for their passage — the best way she knew how: She wrote a love letter in the form of a children\u2019s book.
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/darkwood_ofraamit1.jpg?resize=680%2C1124&ssl=1\")
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/darkwood_ofraamit3.jpg?resize=680%2C1117&ssl=1\")
On the last day of spring in 1950, three years after Goodnight Moon had enraptured the world with its bright playfulness, The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds, somber and numinous with its elegiac prose, and its haunting duotone of otherworldly greens and yellows, and its simple dedication: \u201cFor Michael Strange.\u201d
\nMargaret asked her longtime collaborator Leonard Weisgard — one of the most prolific and beloved picture-book artists of the century — to illustrate it. She urged him to do it as fast as possible in order to rush the book to the printer and press it into Michael’s hands while she was still alive. He agreed out of love for Margaret, but he resented being rushed and did not condone her relationship with Michael. For an artist of such staggering talent and versatility, the unfeeling two-tone illustrations he produced for this layered, lovely book were by far his weakest. They didn’t help the book’s fate, already up against a culture that has no room and no language for grief, and no tolerance for the darkest dimensions of life, which crack open our vastest capacity for light — it fell out of print.
\nI learned about The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds through a footnote in a volume of Ursula Nordstrom’s letters. Had I not just lost a beloved friend, I might not have gone on the long dusty search for a surviving copy. When I finally found one, I fell instantly under the spell of this crepuscular story aglow with love and longing. It was odd to see such unfeeling illustrations for something so deeply felt. When Marginalian Editions was born of the conviction that the best way to complain is to create, I invited the wildly talented Ofra Amit — who had illustrated my book The Universe in Verse — to reimagine Margaret’s love letter to the mystery of death in a new edition that does justice to the subtlety, strangeness, and splendor of the story, bittersweet and beautiful like the transience of life itself.
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/darkwood_ofraamit_endpapers.jpg?resize=680%2C558&ssl=1\")
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "
In early September 1948, a year after she rewilded the landscape of literature with Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown watched the love of her life fade to black.
\nMichael Strange, born Blanche Oelrichs, had cast an instant spell on Margaret — outspoken, sophisticated, and self-possessed, so tall Margaret had to lift her grey-blue eyes to meet the black of Michael\u2019s, her tall frame clad in masculine clothing she herself had designed to cling to her curves, with a musical voice unspooling from her haunting dark beauty, a deep velvet laugh, and a reputation for rarely keeping a promise. In her tight tweed pants and long-tailed blazers and oversized ties, she moved effortlessly through the sea of gloves and lace and whispering society ladies.
\nWhen her wealthy family of Austrian royal lineage had found her erotic poetry embarrassing, Blanche had emancipated herself under the male nom de plume, which soon became a stage name as she strode into the theater world as playwright and actress, and eventually swelled into a total persona — the name with which she signed her letters, the name by which her intimates addressed her, the name of her self-image.
\nIn her youth, Blanche had been named the most beautiful woman in Paris. Now, about to turn fifty-eight, Michael Strange was a ghost on a New York stage, her skin sallow, her body emaciated to the size of a child\u2019s after refusing to let her aggressive leukemia keep her from performing.
\nMargaret and Michael had met seven years earlier. One day on Vinalhaven — the Maine island where Margaret would spend much of her life and write most of her books — she had rowed to a lover\u2019s cottage and found the luscious stranger sunbathing there with her lover. Soon, back in New York, she was surprised to receive a lunch invitation from Michael, who had shown up dressed in fur from head to toe, asking bold questions about her love life while sipping sherry. Margaret was thirty, Michael fifty and on her third unhappy marriage; her latest husband had never read her poetry. Both women were born in the wrong century, bent on bending it to their will; both were accidental radicals, just by living unselfconsciously; both had had affairs with Thomas Wolfe; both were at heart poets more than anything else.
\nBy the middle of the World War, they were lovers; Michael had declared that she had never loved anyone the way she loved Margaret and never would; she had promised to love her until her dying day.
\nLate one night, Margaret\u2019s phone rang. Michael\u2019s voice poured in, sped up with alarm, imploring her to get into a taxi right away. Her husband had found out about their relationship and, in an era when the diagnostic manual of psychiatry classified same-sex love as a mental illness, was threatening to have her locked away in an asylum. A doctor was on his way to \u201cdiagnose\u201d her. With her maid\u2019s help, Michael managed to slip out through the back staircase and into the taxi as Margaret was pulling up.
\nOn the disorienting ride through the New York nocturne, they weighed their options and decided to head to the high-society women\u2019s club Michael frequented. There, she collected herself, phoned her husband to demand a formal apology, then set the wheels in motion for a legal separation.
\nFrom this point on, Michael became — to use the modern term, hard-won and ahistorical — Margaret\u2019s partner. Soon, they were living across the hallway from each other, in a pair of twin apartments on the East End, with Margaret part nominal tenant and part unnamed wife as she was quickly becoming one of the country\u2019s most original and beloved children\u2019s book authors.
\nIt was a stormy love that pushed and pulled, but grafted itself onto Margaret\u2019s being. Michael wrote adoring letters and criticized Margaret\u2019s diction at dinner parties. She gave her a golden wishbone necklace and a ring, made her feel like she was too needy, and derided her children\u2019s books as unsophisticated, \u201csilly furry stories,\u201d not Real Literature: an actress and socialite who had not published a poem in a decade and was feeling abandoned by her own muse, deriding one of the most vibrantly creative people of the past century — poet, songwriter, progressive education reformer, author of more than a hundred singularly wondrous books for the young, with which she would earn herself a little red house, a yellow convertible, and the love of millions of children; the author whom the visionary Ursula Nordstrom had no qualms calling her favorite author, despite also publishing Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein, and E.B. White. Even Michael\u2019s pet name for Margaret was laced with this ambivalent mixture of affection and disdain: Bunny-no-good.
\nAnd yet nobody ever knows what electrifies the infinite sky between two people, what magnetizes them together, what roils deep beneath the faint surface trails left in letters and diaries and the recollections of bystanders, what animates the long days between the islanded moments crashed by emotion and frozen in time. Margaret loved Michael with unassailable devotion, and Michael was dying. So she did the hardest thing in life — facing the death of a beloved while remaining a pillar for their passage — the best way she knew how: She wrote a love letter in the form of a children\u2019s book.
\nOn the last day of spring in 1950, three years after Goodnight Moon had enraptured the world with its bright playfulness, The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds, somber and numinous with its elegiac prose, and its haunting duotone of otherworldly greens and yellows, and its simple dedication: \u201cFor Michael Strange.\u201d
\nMargaret asked her longtime collaborator Leonard Weisgard — one of the most prolific and beloved picture-book artists of the century — to illustrate it. She urged him to do it as fast as possible in order to rush the book to the printer and press it into Michael’s hands while she was still alive. He agreed out of love for Margaret, but he resented being rushed and did not condone her relationship with Michael. For an artist of such staggering talent and versatility, the unfeeling two-tone illustrations he produced for this layered, lovely book were by far his weakest. They didn’t help the book’s fate, already up against a culture that has no room and no language for grief, and no tolerance for the darkest dimensions of life, which crack open our vastest capacity for light — it fell out of print.
\nI learned about The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds through a footnote in a volume of Ursula Nordstrom’s letters. Had I not just lost a beloved friend, I might not have gone on the long dusty search for a surviving copy. When I finally found one, I fell instantly under the spell of this crepuscular story aglow with love and longing. It was odd to see such unfeeling illustrations for something so deeply felt. When Marginalian Editions was born of the conviction that the best way to complain is to create, I invited the wildly talented Ofra Amit — who had illustrated my book The Universe in Verse — to reimagine Margaret’s love letter to the mystery of death in a new edition that does justice to the subtlety, strangeness, and splendor of the story, bittersweet and beautiful like the transience of life itself.
\n
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-25T11:38:12Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-25T11:38:12Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=88278", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/24/20-books/", "external_url": null, "title": "20 Favorite Books from 20 Years of The Marginalian", "content_text": "", "content_html": "It is a beautiful dream, that there is something out there to instruct you how to live — a secret handed down by your parents or your teachers, a system like liberal arts education or cognitive behavioral therapy, a slogan held up by your heroes declaring the answer to the bottomless question of why you are here.
\nWhenever you wake up, however you wake up, you find yourself on a path no one else can walk for you, a path you must make by walking. Still, you can find signposts that keep you from losing your way in loneliness. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin wrote, “but then you read.”
\nIn celebrating twenty years of The Marginalian — this ongoing record of learning how to live written in marginalia on the books I have read — I have attempted the impossible: to distill a lifetime of reading into the twenty books that have served as the most enduring signposts, apart from those I have written (which always both shape and are shaped by a writer’s life more profoundly than any books read). Here they are, in no particular order.
\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/riverofconsciousness_sacks.jpg\")
\nSome of why I love it
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/leguin_waveinthemind.jpg?w=680&ssl=1\")
\nSome of why I love it
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "It is a beautiful dream, that there is something out there to instruct you how to live — a secret handed down by your parents or your teachers, a system like liberal arts education or cognitive behavioral therapy, a slogan held up by your heroes declaring the answer to the bottomless question of why you are here.
\nWhenever you wake up, however you wake up, you find yourself on a path no one else can walk for you, a path you must make by walking. Still, you can find signposts that keep you from losing your way in loneliness. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin wrote, “but then you read.”
\nIn celebrating twenty years of The Marginalian — this ongoing record of learning how to live written in marginalia on the books I have read — I have attempted the impossible: to distill a lifetime of reading into the twenty books that have served as the most enduring signposts, apart from those I have written (which always both shape and are shaped by a writer’s life more profoundly than any books read). Here they are, in no particular order.
\n
\nSome of why I love it
\nSome of why I love it
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-24T17:46:12Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-24T17:46:12Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "http://www.brainpickings.org/?p=32015", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/24/baloney-detection-kit-carl-sagan/", "external_url": null, "title": "The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan\u2019s Timeless Tenets of Critical Thinking", "content_text": "", "content_html": "![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/demonhauntedworld_sagan.jpg?w=680&ssl=1\")
Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934–December 20, 1996) was many things — a cosmic sage, voracious reader, hopeless romantic, and brilliant philosopher. But above all, he endures as our era’s greatest patron saint of reason and critical thinking, a master of the vital balance between skepticism and openness. In The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (public library) — the same indispensable volume that gave us Sagan’s timeless meditation on science and spirituality, published mere months before his death in 1996 — Sagan shares his secret to upholding the rites of reason, even in the face of society’s most shameless untruths and outrageous propaganda.
In a chapter titled “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” Sagan reflects on the many types of deception to which we’re susceptible — from psychics to religious zealotry to paid product endorsements by scientists, which he held in especially low regard, noting that they “betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers” and “introduce an insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientific objectivity.” (Cue in PBS’s Joe Hanson on how to read science news.) But rather than preaching from the ivory tower of self-righteousness, Sagan approaches the subject from the most vulnerable of places — having just lost both of his parents, he reflects on the all too human allure of promises of supernatural reunions in the afterlife, reminding us that falling for such fictions doesn’t make us stupid or bad people, but simply means that we need to equip ourselves with the right tools against them.
\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/carlsagan1.jpg?w=680&ssl=1\")
Through their training, scientists are equipped with what Sagan calls a “baloney detection kit” — a set of cognitive tools and techniques that fortify the mind against penetration by falsehoods:
\n\nThe kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method.
But the kit, Sagan argues, isn’t merely a tool of science — rather, it contains invaluable tools of healthy skepticism that apply just as elegantly, and just as necessarily, to everyday life. By adopting the kit, we can all shield ourselves against clueless guile and deliberate manipulation. Sagan shares nine of these tools:
\n\n\n\n
\n- Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
\n- Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
\n- Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
\n- Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
\n- Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
\n- Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
\n- If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
\n- Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
\n- Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.
\n
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/carlsagan.jpg?w=680&ssl=1\")
Just as important as learning these helpful tools, however, is unlearning and avoiding the most common pitfalls of common sense. Reminding us of where society is most vulnerable to those, Sagan writes:
\n\nIn addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions.
He admonishes against the twenty most common and perilous ones — many rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity — with examples of each in action:
\n\n\n\n
\n- ad hominem — Latin for “to the man,” attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously)
\n- argument from authority (e.g., President Richard Nixon should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end the war in Southeast Asia — but because it was secret, there was no way for the electorate to evaluate it on its merits; the argument amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake, as it turned out)
\n- argument from adverse consequences (e.g., A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if He didn’t, society would be much more lawless and dangerous — perhaps even ungovernable. Or: The defendant in a widely publicized murder trial must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an encouragement for other men to murder their wives)
\n- appeal to ignorance — the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist — and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we’re still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
\n- special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble (e.g., How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Special plead: you don’t understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: How can there be an equally godlike Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don’t understand the Divine Mystery of the Trinity. Or: How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — each in their own way enjoined to heroic measures of loving kindness and compassion — to have perpetrated so much cruelty for so long? Special plead: You don’t understand Free Will again. And anyway, God moves in mysterious ways.)
\n- begging the question, also called assuming the answer (e.g., We must institute the death penalty to discourage violent crime. But does the violent crime rate in fact fall when the death penalty is imposed? Or: The stock market fell yesterday because of a technical adjustment and profit-taking by investors — but is there any independent evidence for the causal role of “adjustment” and profit-taking; have we learned anything at all from this purported explanation?)
\n- observational selection, also called the enumeration of favorable circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses (e.g., A state boasts of the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers)
\n- statistics of small numbers — a close relative of observational selection (e.g., “They say 1 out of every 5 people is Chinese. How is this possible? I know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese. Yours truly.” Or: “I’ve thrown three sevens in a row. Tonight I can’t lose.”)
\n- misunderstanding of the nature of statistics (e.g., President Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence);
\n- inconsistency (e.g., Prudently plan for the worst of which a potential military adversary is capable, but thriftily ignore scientific projections on environmental dangers because they’re not “proved.” Or: Attribute the declining life expectancy in the former Soviet Union to the failures of communism many years ago, but never attribute the high infant mortality rate in the United States (now highest of the major industrial nations) to the failures of capitalism. Or: Consider it reasonable for the Universe to continue to exist forever into the future, but judge absurd the possibility that it has infinite duration into the past);
\n- non sequitur — Latin for “It doesn’t follow” (e.g., Our nation will prevail because God is great. But nearly every nation pretends this to be true; the German formulation was “Gott mit uns”). Often those falling into the non sequitur fallacy have simply failed to recognize alternative possibilities;
\n- post hoc, ergo propter hoc — Latin for “It happened after, so it was caused by” (e.g., Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila: “I know of … a 26-year-old who looks 60 because she takes [contraceptive] pills.” Or: Before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons)
\n- meaningless question (e.g., What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? But if there is such a thing as an irresistible force there can be no immovable objects, and vice versa)
\n- excluded middle, or false dichotomy — considering only the two extremes in a continuum of intermediate possibilities (e.g., “Sure, take his side; my husband’s perfect; I’m always wrong.” Or: “Either you love your country or you hate it.” Or: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”)
\n- short-term vs. long-term — a subset of the excluded middle, but so important I’ve pulled it out for special attention (e.g., We can’t afford programs to feed malnourished children and educate pre-school kids. We need to urgently deal with crime on the streets. Or: Why explore space or pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?);
\n- slippery slope, related to excluded middle (e.g., If we allow abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy, it will be impossible to prevent the killing of a full-term infant. Or, conversely: If the state prohibits abortion even in the ninth month, it will soon be telling us what to do with our bodies around the time of conception);
\n- confusion of correlation and causation (e.g., A survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay. Or: Andean earthquakes are correlated with closest approaches of the planet Uranus; therefore — despite the absence of any such correlation for the nearer, more massive planet Jupiter — the latter causes the former)
\n- straw man — caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack (e.g., Scientists suppose that living things simply fell together by chance — a formulation that willfully ignores the central Darwinian insight, that Nature ratchets up by saving what works and discarding what doesn’t. Or — this is also a short-term/long-term fallacy — environmentalists care more for snail darters and spotted owls than they do for people)
\n- suppressed evidence, or half-truths (e.g., An amazingly accurate and widely quoted “prophecy” of the assassination attempt on President Reagan is shown on television; but — an important detail — was it recorded before or after the event? Or: These government abuses demand revolution, even if you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Yes, but is this likely to be a revolution in which far more people are killed than under the previous regime? What does the experience of other revolutions suggest? Are all revolutions against oppressive regimes desirable and in the interests of the people?)
\n- weasel words (e.g., The separation of powers of the U.S. Constitution specifies that the United States may not conduct a war without a declaration by Congress. On the other hand, Presidents are given control of foreign policy and the conduct of wars, which are potentially powerful tools for getting themselves re-elected. Presidents of either political party may therefore be tempted to arrange wars while waving the flag and calling the wars something else — “police actions,” “armed incursions,” “protective reaction strikes,” “pacification,” “safeguarding American interests,” and a wide variety of “operations,” such as “Operation Just Cause.” Euphemisms for war are one of a broad class of reinventions of language for political purposes. Talleyrand said, “An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public”)
\n
Sagan ends the chapter with a necessary disclaimer:
\n\nLike all tools, the baloney detection kit can be misused, applied out of context, or even employed as a rote alternative to thinking. But applied judiciously, it can make all the difference in the world — not least in evaluating our own arguments before we present them to others.
The Demon-Haunted World is a timelessly fantastic read in its entirety, timelier than ever in a great many ways amidst our present media landscape of propaganda, pseudoscience, and various commercial motives. Complement it with Sagan on science and “God”.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934–December 20, 1996) was many things — a cosmic sage, voracious reader, hopeless romantic, and brilliant philosopher. But above all, he endures as our era’s greatest patron saint of reason and critical thinking, a master of the vital balance between skepticism and openness. In The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (public library) — the same indispensable volume that gave us Sagan’s timeless meditation on science and spirituality, published mere months before his death in 1996 — Sagan shares his secret to upholding the rites of reason, even in the face of society’s most shameless untruths and outrageous propaganda.
In a chapter titled “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” Sagan reflects on the many types of deception to which we’re susceptible — from psychics to religious zealotry to paid product endorsements by scientists, which he held in especially low regard, noting that they “betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers” and “introduce an insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientific objectivity.” (Cue in PBS’s Joe Hanson on how to read science news.) But rather than preaching from the ivory tower of self-righteousness, Sagan approaches the subject from the most vulnerable of places — having just lost both of his parents, he reflects on the all too human allure of promises of supernatural reunions in the afterlife, reminding us that falling for such fictions doesn’t make us stupid or bad people, but simply means that we need to equip ourselves with the right tools against them.
\n
Through their training, scientists are equipped with what Sagan calls a “baloney detection kit” — a set of cognitive tools and techniques that fortify the mind against penetration by falsehoods:
\n\nThe kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method.
But the kit, Sagan argues, isn’t merely a tool of science — rather, it contains invaluable tools of healthy skepticism that apply just as elegantly, and just as necessarily, to everyday life. By adopting the kit, we can all shield ourselves against clueless guile and deliberate manipulation. Sagan shares nine of these tools:
\n\n\n\n
\n- Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
\n- Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
\n- Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
\n- Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
\n- Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
\n- Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
\n- If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
\n- Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
\n- Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.
\n
Just as important as learning these helpful tools, however, is unlearning and avoiding the most common pitfalls of common sense. Reminding us of where society is most vulnerable to those, Sagan writes:
\n\nIn addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions.
He admonishes against the twenty most common and perilous ones — many rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity — with examples of each in action:
\n\n\n\n
\n- ad hominem — Latin for “to the man,” attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously)
\n- argument from authority (e.g., President Richard Nixon should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end the war in Southeast Asia — but because it was secret, there was no way for the electorate to evaluate it on its merits; the argument amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake, as it turned out)
\n- argument from adverse consequences (e.g., A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if He didn’t, society would be much more lawless and dangerous — perhaps even ungovernable. Or: The defendant in a widely publicized murder trial must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an encouragement for other men to murder their wives)
\n- appeal to ignorance — the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist — and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we’re still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
\n- special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble (e.g., How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Special plead: you don’t understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: How can there be an equally godlike Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don’t understand the Divine Mystery of the Trinity. Or: How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — each in their own way enjoined to heroic measures of loving kindness and compassion — to have perpetrated so much cruelty for so long? Special plead: You don’t understand Free Will again. And anyway, God moves in mysterious ways.)
\n- begging the question, also called assuming the answer (e.g., We must institute the death penalty to discourage violent crime. But does the violent crime rate in fact fall when the death penalty is imposed? Or: The stock market fell yesterday because of a technical adjustment and profit-taking by investors — but is there any independent evidence for the causal role of “adjustment” and profit-taking; have we learned anything at all from this purported explanation?)
\n- observational selection, also called the enumeration of favorable circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses (e.g., A state boasts of the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers)
\n- statistics of small numbers — a close relative of observational selection (e.g., “They say 1 out of every 5 people is Chinese. How is this possible? I know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese. Yours truly.” Or: “I’ve thrown three sevens in a row. Tonight I can’t lose.”)
\n- misunderstanding of the nature of statistics (e.g., President Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence);
\n- inconsistency (e.g., Prudently plan for the worst of which a potential military adversary is capable, but thriftily ignore scientific projections on environmental dangers because they’re not “proved.” Or: Attribute the declining life expectancy in the former Soviet Union to the failures of communism many years ago, but never attribute the high infant mortality rate in the United States (now highest of the major industrial nations) to the failures of capitalism. Or: Consider it reasonable for the Universe to continue to exist forever into the future, but judge absurd the possibility that it has infinite duration into the past);
\n- non sequitur — Latin for “It doesn’t follow” (e.g., Our nation will prevail because God is great. But nearly every nation pretends this to be true; the German formulation was “Gott mit uns”). Often those falling into the non sequitur fallacy have simply failed to recognize alternative possibilities;
\n- post hoc, ergo propter hoc — Latin for “It happened after, so it was caused by” (e.g., Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila: “I know of … a 26-year-old who looks 60 because she takes [contraceptive] pills.” Or: Before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons)
\n- meaningless question (e.g., What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? But if there is such a thing as an irresistible force there can be no immovable objects, and vice versa)
\n- excluded middle, or false dichotomy — considering only the two extremes in a continuum of intermediate possibilities (e.g., “Sure, take his side; my husband’s perfect; I’m always wrong.” Or: “Either you love your country or you hate it.” Or: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”)
\n- short-term vs. long-term — a subset of the excluded middle, but so important I’ve pulled it out for special attention (e.g., We can’t afford programs to feed malnourished children and educate pre-school kids. We need to urgently deal with crime on the streets. Or: Why explore space or pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?);
\n- slippery slope, related to excluded middle (e.g., If we allow abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy, it will be impossible to prevent the killing of a full-term infant. Or, conversely: If the state prohibits abortion even in the ninth month, it will soon be telling us what to do with our bodies around the time of conception);
\n- confusion of correlation and causation (e.g., A survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay. Or: Andean earthquakes are correlated with closest approaches of the planet Uranus; therefore — despite the absence of any such correlation for the nearer, more massive planet Jupiter — the latter causes the former)
\n- straw man — caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack (e.g., Scientists suppose that living things simply fell together by chance — a formulation that willfully ignores the central Darwinian insight, that Nature ratchets up by saving what works and discarding what doesn’t. Or — this is also a short-term/long-term fallacy — environmentalists care more for snail darters and spotted owls than they do for people)
\n- suppressed evidence, or half-truths (e.g., An amazingly accurate and widely quoted “prophecy” of the assassination attempt on President Reagan is shown on television; but — an important detail — was it recorded before or after the event? Or: These government abuses demand revolution, even if you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Yes, but is this likely to be a revolution in which far more people are killed than under the previous regime? What does the experience of other revolutions suggest? Are all revolutions against oppressive regimes desirable and in the interests of the people?)
\n- weasel words (e.g., The separation of powers of the U.S. Constitution specifies that the United States may not conduct a war without a declaration by Congress. On the other hand, Presidents are given control of foreign policy and the conduct of wars, which are potentially powerful tools for getting themselves re-elected. Presidents of either political party may therefore be tempted to arrange wars while waving the flag and calling the wars something else — “police actions,” “armed incursions,” “protective reaction strikes,” “pacification,” “safeguarding American interests,” and a wide variety of “operations,” such as “Operation Just Cause.” Euphemisms for war are one of a broad class of reinventions of language for political purposes. Talleyrand said, “An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public”)
\n
Sagan ends the chapter with a necessary disclaimer:
\n\nLike all tools, the baloney detection kit can be misused, applied out of context, or even employed as a rote alternative to thinking. But applied judiciously, it can make all the difference in the world — not least in evaluating our own arguments before we present them to others.
The Demon-Haunted World is a timelessly fantastic read in its entirety, timelier than ever in a great many ways amidst our present media landscape of propaganda, pseudoscience, and various commercial motives. Complement it with Sagan on science and “God”.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-24T12:52:43Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-24T12:52:43Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.brainpickings.org/?p=69418", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/24/dostoyevsky-execution-life/", "external_url": null, "title": "Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life", "content_text": "", "content_html": "![\"Dostoyevsky,](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/dostoevskyletters_meyer.jpg?fit=320%2C482&ssl=1\")
“I mean to work tremendously hard,” the young Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) resolved in contemplating his literary future, beseeching his impoverished mother to buy him books. At the age of twenty-seven, he was arrested for belonging to a literary society that circulated books deemed dangerous by the tsarist regime. He was sentenced to death. On December 22, 1849, he was taken to a public square in Saint Petersburg, alongside a handful of other inmates, where they were to be executed as a warning to the masses. They were read their death sentence, put into their execution attire of white shirts, and allowed to kiss the cross. Ritualistic sabers were broken over their heads. Three at a time, they were stood against the stakes where the execution was to be carried out. Dostoyevsky, the sixth in line, grew acutely aware that he had only moments to live.
\nAnd then, at the last minute, a pompous announcement was made that the tsar was pardoning their lives — the whole spectacle had been orchestrated as a cruel publicity stunt to depict the despot as a benevolent ruler. The real sentence was then read: Dostoyevsky was to spend four years in a Siberian labor camp, followed by several years of compulsory military service in the tsar’s armed forces, in exile. He would be nearly forty by the time he picked up the pen again to resume his literary ambitions. But now, in the raw moments following his close escape from death, he was elated with relief, reborn into a new cherishment of life.
\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/dostoyevsky1.jpg?w=680&ssl=1\")
He poured his exultation into a stunning letter to his brother Mikhail, penned hours after the staged execution and found in the first volume of the out-of-print collection of his complete correspondence, the 1988 treasure Dostoevsky Letters (public library).
\nA century before Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl offered his hard-won assurance that \u201ceverything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one\u2019s attitude in any given set of circumstances,” Dostoyevsky writes:
\n\nBrother! I’m not despondent and I haven’t lost heart. Life is everywhere, life is in us ourselves, not outside. There will be people by my side, and to be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task. I have come to recognize that. The idea has entered my flesh and blood… The head that created, lived the higher life of art, that recognized and grew accustomed to the higher demands of the spirit, that head has already been cut from my shoulders… But there remain in me a heart and the same flesh and blood that can also love, and suffer, and pity, and remember, and that’s life, too!
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/ShaunTan.jpg?resize=680%2C953&ssl=1\")
Still, even through this elation, the animating force of his being — his identity as a writer — grounds him into a depth of despair. “Can it be that I’ll never take pen in hand?” he asks in sullen anticipation of the next four years at the labor camp. “If I won’t be able to write, I’ll perish. Better fifteen years of imprisonment and a pen in hand!” But he quickly recovers his electric gratitude for the mere fact of being alive and, reassuring his brother not to grieve for him, continues:
\n\nI haven’t lost heart, remember that hope has not abandoned me… After all I was at death’s door today, I lived with that thought for three-quarters of an hour, I faced the last moment, and now I’m alive again!
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/margaretcook_leavesofgrass12.jpg\")
In a beautiful testament to the elemental fact that when all the static of our self-righteousness dies down, what remains between good people is only love, he writes:
\n\nIf anyone remembers me with malice, and if I quarreled with anyone, if I made a bad impression on anyone — tell them to forget about that if you manage to see them. There is no bile or spite in my soul, I would like to so love and embrace at least someone out of the past at this moment.
\n[…]
\nWhen I look back at the past and think how much time was spent in vain, how much of it was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in the inability to live; how I failed to value it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit — then my heart contracts in pain. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each moment could have been an eternity of happiness. Si jeunesse savait! [If youth knew!]
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/thewellofbeing_weill0.jpg?w=680&ssl=1\")
Half a century before Oscar Wilde penned his extraordinary letter about suffering as a force of transformation and transcendence from prison, where he was interned for having loved whom he loved, Dostoyevsky adds:
\n\nNow, changing my life, I’m being regenerated into a new form. Brother! I swear to you that I won’t lose hope and will preserve my heart and spirit in purity. I’ll be reborn for the better. That’s my entire hope, my entire consolation.
\nLife in the casemate has already sufficiently killed off in me the needs of the flesh that were not completely pure; before that I took little care of myself. Now deprivations no longer bother me in the slightest, and therefore don’t be afraid that material hardship will kill me.
Having spent years in material privation myself — though never, mercifully, nearly to the extent Dostoyevsky endured — and being always grateful for how those times annealed me, how they made me less afraid of poverty and hardship, more willing to take risks others might not, to take less materially secure paths in life (one resulting in the birth of Brain Pickings), I can’t help but wonder how much this harrowing experience fomented Dostoyevsky’s extraordinary perseverance as an artist against the tides of convention and the constant specter of poverty. It certainly reverberates throughout Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, and especially The Brothers Karamazov; it certainly informed his ideas about the meaning of life, set forth decades later in the guise of a dream, and inspired his insistence upon the existential duty of seeing the goodness in people “despite the abundance of all sorts of wretches.”
\nComplement with a young neurosurgeon on the meaning of life as he faces his death and Walt Whitman on what makes life worth living, then revisit Anna — the love of Dostoyevsky’s life, who saved him from poverty and debtor’s prison — on the secret to a happy marriage.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "
“I mean to work tremendously hard,” the young Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) resolved in contemplating his literary future, beseeching his impoverished mother to buy him books. At the age of twenty-seven, he was arrested for belonging to a literary society that circulated books deemed dangerous by the tsarist regime. He was sentenced to death. On December 22, 1849, he was taken to a public square in Saint Petersburg, alongside a handful of other inmates, where they were to be executed as a warning to the masses. They were read their death sentence, put into their execution attire of white shirts, and allowed to kiss the cross. Ritualistic sabers were broken over their heads. Three at a time, they were stood against the stakes where the execution was to be carried out. Dostoyevsky, the sixth in line, grew acutely aware that he had only moments to live.
\nAnd then, at the last minute, a pompous announcement was made that the tsar was pardoning their lives — the whole spectacle had been orchestrated as a cruel publicity stunt to depict the despot as a benevolent ruler. The real sentence was then read: Dostoyevsky was to spend four years in a Siberian labor camp, followed by several years of compulsory military service in the tsar’s armed forces, in exile. He would be nearly forty by the time he picked up the pen again to resume his literary ambitions. But now, in the raw moments following his close escape from death, he was elated with relief, reborn into a new cherishment of life.
\nHe poured his exultation into a stunning letter to his brother Mikhail, penned hours after the staged execution and found in the first volume of the out-of-print collection of his complete correspondence, the 1988 treasure Dostoevsky Letters (public library).
\nA century before Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl offered his hard-won assurance that \u201ceverything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one\u2019s attitude in any given set of circumstances,” Dostoyevsky writes:
\n\nBrother! I’m not despondent and I haven’t lost heart. Life is everywhere, life is in us ourselves, not outside. There will be people by my side, and to be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task. I have come to recognize that. The idea has entered my flesh and blood… The head that created, lived the higher life of art, that recognized and grew accustomed to the higher demands of the spirit, that head has already been cut from my shoulders… But there remain in me a heart and the same flesh and blood that can also love, and suffer, and pity, and remember, and that’s life, too!
Still, even through this elation, the animating force of his being — his identity as a writer — grounds him into a depth of despair. “Can it be that I’ll never take pen in hand?” he asks in sullen anticipation of the next four years at the labor camp. “If I won’t be able to write, I’ll perish. Better fifteen years of imprisonment and a pen in hand!” But he quickly recovers his electric gratitude for the mere fact of being alive and, reassuring his brother not to grieve for him, continues:
\n\nI haven’t lost heart, remember that hope has not abandoned me… After all I was at death’s door today, I lived with that thought for three-quarters of an hour, I faced the last moment, and now I’m alive again!
In a beautiful testament to the elemental fact that when all the static of our self-righteousness dies down, what remains between good people is only love, he writes:
\n\nIf anyone remembers me with malice, and if I quarreled with anyone, if I made a bad impression on anyone — tell them to forget about that if you manage to see them. There is no bile or spite in my soul, I would like to so love and embrace at least someone out of the past at this moment.
\n[…]
\nWhen I look back at the past and think how much time was spent in vain, how much of it was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in the inability to live; how I failed to value it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit — then my heart contracts in pain. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each moment could have been an eternity of happiness. Si jeunesse savait! [If youth knew!]
Half a century before Oscar Wilde penned his extraordinary letter about suffering as a force of transformation and transcendence from prison, where he was interned for having loved whom he loved, Dostoyevsky adds:
\n\nNow, changing my life, I’m being regenerated into a new form. Brother! I swear to you that I won’t lose hope and will preserve my heart and spirit in purity. I’ll be reborn for the better. That’s my entire hope, my entire consolation.
\nLife in the casemate has already sufficiently killed off in me the needs of the flesh that were not completely pure; before that I took little care of myself. Now deprivations no longer bother me in the slightest, and therefore don’t be afraid that material hardship will kill me.
Having spent years in material privation myself — though never, mercifully, nearly to the extent Dostoyevsky endured — and being always grateful for how those times annealed me, how they made me less afraid of poverty and hardship, more willing to take risks others might not, to take less materially secure paths in life (one resulting in the birth of Brain Pickings), I can’t help but wonder how much this harrowing experience fomented Dostoyevsky’s extraordinary perseverance as an artist against the tides of convention and the constant specter of poverty. It certainly reverberates throughout Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, and especially The Brothers Karamazov; it certainly informed his ideas about the meaning of life, set forth decades later in the guise of a dream, and inspired his insistence upon the existential duty of seeing the goodness in people “despite the abundance of all sorts of wretches.”
\nComplement with a young neurosurgeon on the meaning of life as he faces his death and Walt Whitman on what makes life worth living, then revisit Anna — the love of Dostoyevsky’s life, who saved him from poverty and debtor’s prison — on the secret to a happy marriage.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-24T03:12:53Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-24T03:12:53Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.brainpickings.org/?p=61900", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/23/when-things-fall-apart-pema-chodron/", "external_url": null, "title": "How to Be Transformed When Things Fall Apart", "content_text": "", "content_html": "![\"How](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/whenthingsfallapart_chodron.jpg?fit=320%2C506&ssl=1\")
In every life, there comes a time when we are razed to the bone of our resilience by losses beyond our control — lacerations of the heart that feel barely bearable, that leave us bereft of solid ground. What then?
\n“In art,” Kafka assured his teenage walking companion, “one must throw one\u2019s life away in order to gain it.” As in art, so in life — so suggests the American Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n. In When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (public library), she draws on her own confrontation with personal crisis and on the ancient teachings of Tibetan Buddhism to offer gentle and incisive guidance to the enormity we stand to gain during those times when all seems to be lost. Half a century after Albert Camus asserted that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n reframes those moments of acute despair as opportunities for befriending life by befriending ourselves in the deepest sense.
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/fog.jpg?resize=680%2C680&ssl=1\")
Writing in that Buddhist way of wrapping in simple language the difficult and beautiful truths of existence, Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n examines the most elemental human response to the uncharted territory that comes with loss or any other species of unforeseen change:
\n\nFear is a universal experience. Even the smallest insect feels it. We wade in the tidal pools and put our finger near the soft, open bodies of sea anemones and they close up. Everything spontaneously does that. It\u2019s not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.
\nIf we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.
This clarity, Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n argues, is a matter of becoming intimate with fear and rather than treating it as a problem to be solved, using it as a tool with which to dismantle all of our familiar structures of being, “a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking.” Noting that bravery is not the absence of fear but the intimacy with fear, she writes:
\n\nWhen we really begin to do this, we\u2019re going to be continually humbled. There\u2019s not going to be much room for the arrogance that holding on to ideals can bring. The arrogance that inevitably does arise is going to be continually shot down by our own courage to step forward a little further. The kinds of discoveries that are made through practice have nothing to do with believing in anything. They have much more to do with having the courage to die, the courage to die continually.
In essence, this is the hard work of befriending ourselves, which is our only mechanism for befriending life in its completeness. Out of that, Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n argues, arises our deepest strength:
\n\nOnly to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.
\n[…]
\nThings falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don\u2019t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It\u2019s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/tree_by_MariaPopova.jpg?resize=680%2C680&ssl=1\")
Decades after Rollo May made his case for the constructiveness of despair, Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n considers the fundamental choice we have in facing our unsettlement — whether with aggressive aversion or with generative openness to possibility:
\n\nLife is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don\u2019t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It\u2019s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs.
\nTo stay with that shakiness — to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge — that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic — this is the spiritual path. Getting the knack of catching ourselves, of gently and compassionately catching ourselves, is the path of the warrior. We catch ourselves one zillion times as once again, whether we like it or not, we harden into resentment, bitterness, righteous indignation — harden in any way, even into a sense of relief, a sense of inspiration.
Half a century after Alan Watts began introducing Eastern teachings into the West with his clarion call for presence as the antidote to anxiety, Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n points to the present moment — however uncertain, however difficult — as the sole seedbed of wakefulness to all of life:
\n\nThis very moment is the perfect teacher, and it\u2019s always with us.
\n[…]
\nWe can be with what\u2019s happening and not dissociate. Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.
![](\"https://i1.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/lisberthzwerger_grimm19.jpg\")
Remaining present and intimate with the moment, she argues, requires mastering maitri — the Buddhist practice of loving-kindness toward oneself, that most difficult art of self-compassion. She contrasts maitri with the typical Western therapy and self-help method of handling crises:
\n\nWhat makes maitri such a different approach is that we are not trying to solve a problem. We are not striving to make pain go away or to become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart. This starts with realizing that whatever occurs is neither the beginning nor the end. It is just the same kind of normal human experience that\u2019s been happening to everyday people from the beginning of time. Thoughts, emotions, moods, and memories come and they go, and basic nowness is always here.
\n[…]
\nIn the midst of all the heavy dialogue with ourselves, open space is always there.
Another Buddhist concept at odds with our Western coping mechanisms is the Tibetan expression ye tang che. Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n explains its connotations, evocative of Camus’s insistence on the vitalizing power of despair:
\n\nThe ye part means \u201ctotally, completely,\u201d and the rest of it means \u201cexhausted.\u201d Altogether, ye tang che means totally tired out. We might say \u201ctotally fed up.\u201d It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope. This is an important point. This is the beginning of the beginning. Without giving up hope — that there\u2019s somewhere better to be, that there\u2019s someone better to be — we will never relax with where we are or who we are.
\n[…]
\nSuffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there\u2019s anywhere to hide.
Decades after Simone de Beauvoir’s proclamation about atheism and the ultimate frontier of hope, Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n points out that at the heart of Buddhism’s approach is not the escapism of religion but the realism of secular philosophy. And yet these crude demarcations fail to capture the subtlety of these teachings. She clarifies:
\n\nThe difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God… Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there\u2019s some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us. It means thinking there\u2019s always going to be a babysitter available when we need one. We all are inclined to abdicate our responsibilities and delegate our authority to something outside ourselves. Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.
\n[…]
\nHopelessness is the basic ground. Otherwise, we\u2019re going to make the journey with the hope of getting security… Begin the journey without hope of getting ground under your feet. Begin with hopelessness.
\n[…]
\nWhen inspiration has become hidden, when we feel ready to give up, this is the time when healing can be found in the tenderness of pain itself… In the midst of loneliness, in the midst of fear, in the middle of feeling misunderstood and rejected is the heartbeat of all things.
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/lionandbird_dubuc17.jpg?w=680&ssl=1\")
Only through such active self-compassion to our own darkness, Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n suggests, can we begin to offer authentic light to anybody else, to become a force of radiance in the world. She writes:
\n\nWe don\u2019t set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people\u2019s hearts.
Complement the immensely grounding and elevating When Things Fall Apart with Camus on strength of character in times of trouble, Erich Fromm on what self-love really means, and Nietzsche on why a fulfilling life requires embracing rather than running from difficulty, then revisit Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n on the art of letting go.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "
In every life, there comes a time when we are razed to the bone of our resilience by losses beyond our control — lacerations of the heart that feel barely bearable, that leave us bereft of solid ground. What then?
\n“In art,” Kafka assured his teenage walking companion, “one must throw one\u2019s life away in order to gain it.” As in art, so in life — so suggests the American Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher Pema Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n. In When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (public library), she draws on her own confrontation with personal crisis and on the ancient teachings of Tibetan Buddhism to offer gentle and incisive guidance to the enormity we stand to gain during those times when all seems to be lost. Half a century after Albert Camus asserted that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n reframes those moments of acute despair as opportunities for befriending life by befriending ourselves in the deepest sense.
\nWriting in that Buddhist way of wrapping in simple language the difficult and beautiful truths of existence, Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n examines the most elemental human response to the uncharted territory that comes with loss or any other species of unforeseen change:
\n\nFear is a universal experience. Even the smallest insect feels it. We wade in the tidal pools and put our finger near the soft, open bodies of sea anemones and they close up. Everything spontaneously does that. It\u2019s not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.
\nIf we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.
This clarity, Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n argues, is a matter of becoming intimate with fear and rather than treating it as a problem to be solved, using it as a tool with which to dismantle all of our familiar structures of being, “a complete undoing of old ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and thinking.” Noting that bravery is not the absence of fear but the intimacy with fear, she writes:
\n\nWhen we really begin to do this, we\u2019re going to be continually humbled. There\u2019s not going to be much room for the arrogance that holding on to ideals can bring. The arrogance that inevitably does arise is going to be continually shot down by our own courage to step forward a little further. The kinds of discoveries that are made through practice have nothing to do with believing in anything. They have much more to do with having the courage to die, the courage to die continually.
In essence, this is the hard work of befriending ourselves, which is our only mechanism for befriending life in its completeness. Out of that, Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n argues, arises our deepest strength:
\n\nOnly to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.
\n[…]
\nThings falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don\u2019t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It\u2019s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.
Decades after Rollo May made his case for the constructiveness of despair, Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n considers the fundamental choice we have in facing our unsettlement — whether with aggressive aversion or with generative openness to possibility:
\n\nLife is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don\u2019t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It\u2019s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs.
\nTo stay with that shakiness — to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge — that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic — this is the spiritual path. Getting the knack of catching ourselves, of gently and compassionately catching ourselves, is the path of the warrior. We catch ourselves one zillion times as once again, whether we like it or not, we harden into resentment, bitterness, righteous indignation — harden in any way, even into a sense of relief, a sense of inspiration.
Half a century after Alan Watts began introducing Eastern teachings into the West with his clarion call for presence as the antidote to anxiety, Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n points to the present moment — however uncertain, however difficult — as the sole seedbed of wakefulness to all of life:
\n\nThis very moment is the perfect teacher, and it\u2019s always with us.
\n[…]
\nWe can be with what\u2019s happening and not dissociate. Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.
Remaining present and intimate with the moment, she argues, requires mastering maitri — the Buddhist practice of loving-kindness toward oneself, that most difficult art of self-compassion. She contrasts maitri with the typical Western therapy and self-help method of handling crises:
\n\nWhat makes maitri such a different approach is that we are not trying to solve a problem. We are not striving to make pain go away or to become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart. This starts with realizing that whatever occurs is neither the beginning nor the end. It is just the same kind of normal human experience that\u2019s been happening to everyday people from the beginning of time. Thoughts, emotions, moods, and memories come and they go, and basic nowness is always here.
\n[…]
\nIn the midst of all the heavy dialogue with ourselves, open space is always there.
Another Buddhist concept at odds with our Western coping mechanisms is the Tibetan expression ye tang che. Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n explains its connotations, evocative of Camus’s insistence on the vitalizing power of despair:
\n\nThe ye part means \u201ctotally, completely,\u201d and the rest of it means \u201cexhausted.\u201d Altogether, ye tang che means totally tired out. We might say \u201ctotally fed up.\u201d It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope. This is an important point. This is the beginning of the beginning. Without giving up hope — that there\u2019s somewhere better to be, that there\u2019s someone better to be — we will never relax with where we are or who we are.
\n[…]
\nSuffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there\u2019s anywhere to hide.
Decades after Simone de Beauvoir’s proclamation about atheism and the ultimate frontier of hope, Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n points out that at the heart of Buddhism’s approach is not the escapism of religion but the realism of secular philosophy. And yet these crude demarcations fail to capture the subtlety of these teachings. She clarifies:
\n\nThe difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God… Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there\u2019s some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us. It means thinking there\u2019s always going to be a babysitter available when we need one. We all are inclined to abdicate our responsibilities and delegate our authority to something outside ourselves. Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.
\n[…]
\nHopelessness is the basic ground. Otherwise, we\u2019re going to make the journey with the hope of getting security… Begin the journey without hope of getting ground under your feet. Begin with hopelessness.
\n[…]
\nWhen inspiration has become hidden, when we feel ready to give up, this is the time when healing can be found in the tenderness of pain itself… In the midst of loneliness, in the midst of fear, in the middle of feeling misunderstood and rejected is the heartbeat of all things.
Only through such active self-compassion to our own darkness, Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n suggests, can we begin to offer authentic light to anybody else, to become a force of radiance in the world. She writes:
\n\nWe don\u2019t set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people\u2019s hearts.
Complement the immensely grounding and elevating When Things Fall Apart with Camus on strength of character in times of trouble, Erich Fromm on what self-love really means, and Nietzsche on why a fulfilling life requires embracing rather than running from difficulty, then revisit Ch\u00f6dr\u00f6n on the art of letting go.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-23T04:15:05Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-23T04:15:05Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=87198", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/22/bet/", "external_url": null, "title": "The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet", "content_text": "", "content_html": "We place life’s bets by countless calculations of probability, conscious and unconscious, only to discover over and over how short they fall of the wildest reaches of the possible, which always includes but exceeds the probable. It helps to remember that we ourselves are children of improbability, that everything we treasure exists not because it had to, not because it was likely or necessary, but because the universe took a gamble against the staggering odds otherwise.
\n\n\nTHE WILDEST BET IS THE WINNING BET
\n
\nby Maria PopovaYou wouldn’t have bet on it,
\n
\nthe battered rock
\norbiting a star
\nfrom the discount bin
\nof the universe,
\nwouldn’t have guessed
\nthat it would bloom
\nmitochondria and music,
\nthat it would mushroom
\nmountains and minds,and the hummingbird wing
\n
\nwhirring a hundred times faster
\nthan your eye can blink,and your eye that took
\n
\nfive hundred million years
\nfrom trilobite to telescope,and the unhurried orange lichen
\n
\ngrowing on the black boulder
\ntwo hundred times more slowly
\nthan the tectonic plates beneath
\nare drifting apartand the marbled orca
\n
\ncarrying her dead calf
\ndown the entire edge
\nof the continent,
\ncarrying the weight
\nof consciousnessand consciousness
\nhow it windows
\nthis tenement
\nof breath and bone
\nwith wonder,
\nhow it hovers over everything,
\ngigantic and unnecessary,
\nlike music,
\nlike love.
My brightest gratitude to Nick Cave for the soulful reading and to Brazilian artist Daniel Bruson for the breathtaking animation, and to both of them for the ongoing collaboration that began with “But We Had Music.”
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "We place life’s bets by countless calculations of probability, conscious and unconscious, only to discover over and over how short they fall of the wildest reaches of the possible, which always includes but exceeds the probable. It helps to remember that we ourselves are children of improbability, that everything we treasure exists not because it had to, not because it was likely or necessary, but because the universe took a gamble against the staggering odds otherwise.
\n\n\nTHE WILDEST BET IS THE WINNING BET
\n
\nby Maria PopovaYou wouldn’t have bet on it,
\n
\nthe battered rock
\norbiting a star
\nfrom the discount bin
\nof the universe,
\nwouldn’t have guessed
\nthat it would bloom
\nmitochondria and music,
\nthat it would mushroom
\nmountains and minds,and the hummingbird wing
\n
\nwhirring a hundred times faster
\nthan your eye can blink,and your eye that took
\n
\nfive hundred million years
\nfrom trilobite to telescope,and the unhurried orange lichen
\n
\ngrowing on the black boulder
\ntwo hundred times more slowly
\nthan the tectonic plates beneath
\nare drifting apartand the marbled orca
\n
\ncarrying her dead calf
\ndown the entire edge
\nof the continent,
\ncarrying the weight
\nof consciousnessand consciousness
\nhow it windows
\nthis tenement
\nof breath and bone
\nwith wonder,
\nhow it hovers over everything,
\ngigantic and unnecessary,
\nlike music,
\nlike love.
My brightest gratitude to Nick Cave for the soulful reading and to Brazilian artist Daniel Bruson for the breathtaking animation, and to both of them for the ongoing collaboration that began with “But We Had Music.”
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-22T17:14:17Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-22T17:14:17Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=87390", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/22/le-guin-life/", "external_url": null, "title": "Ursula K. Le Guin on the Meaning of Life", "content_text": "", "content_html": "![\"Ursula](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/leguin_languageofthenight.jpg?fit=320%2C487&ssl=1\")
We are the survivors of immense and minute events — violent cosmic collisions and subtle genetic mutations, the deaths of innumerable suns and the births of innumerable cells, the splitting of continents and the splitting of atoms. Out of it all, we emerged as creatures muzzled by a consciousness that demands we give meaning to our survival. It will not come like alms dropped from the unfeeling hand of the universe. It cannot be found ready-made in the great books and the great teachers, or bought at the price of an Ivy League tuition, or sold by Silicon Valley in a ChatGPT query. That meaning is not something we find but something we make, that it is intimate as love and subjective as the reasons for it, may be the great gift and the great onus of being alive.
\nUrsula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) leavens the onus and magnifies the gift in a wonderful passage from her 1975 essay “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” later included in her altogether magnificent collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy (public library).
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ursulakleguin_benjaminreed_galaxy.jpg?resize=680%2C471&ssl=1\")
With an eye to the human subject as the beating heart of the reckoning with life we call art, she writes:
\n\nWhat good are all the objects in the universe, if there is no subject? It isn\u2019t that mankind is all that important. I don\u2019t think that Man is the measure of all things, or even of very many things. I don\u2019t think Man is the end or culmination of anything, and certainly not the center of anything. What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not know, nor do I believe anybody who says he knows, except, possibly, Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware — to pay heed. For we are not objects. That is essential… And with us, nature, the great Object, its tirelessly burning suns, its turning galaxies and planets, its rocks, seas, fish and ferns and fir trees and little furry animals, all have become, also, subjects. As we are part of them, so they are part of us. Bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. We are their consciousness.
In this sense, the meaning of life is less like a postulate than like a poem. Half a lifetime later, Le Guin would make a beautiful distinction between how science explicates the universe and poetry implicates it. Knowing that we are implicated in the universe and implicate it in ourselves, touching that knowledge, holding it at the center of our lives, may be the full stop beyond the question of meaning.
\nComplement with other beautiful perspectives on the meaning of life from Mary Oliver, Oliver Sacks, Loren Eiseley, Maya Angelou, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, then revisit Le Guin on how to live fully.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "
We are the survivors of immense and minute events — violent cosmic collisions and subtle genetic mutations, the deaths of innumerable suns and the births of innumerable cells, the splitting of continents and the splitting of atoms. Out of it all, we emerged as creatures muzzled by a consciousness that demands we give meaning to our survival. It will not come like alms dropped from the unfeeling hand of the universe. It cannot be found ready-made in the great books and the great teachers, or bought at the price of an Ivy League tuition, or sold by Silicon Valley in a ChatGPT query. That meaning is not something we find but something we make, that it is intimate as love and subjective as the reasons for it, may be the great gift and the great onus of being alive.
\nUrsula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929–January 22, 2018) leavens the onus and magnifies the gift in a wonderful passage from her 1975 essay “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” later included in her altogether magnificent collection The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy (public library).
\nWith an eye to the human subject as the beating heart of the reckoning with life we call art, she writes:
\n\nWhat good are all the objects in the universe, if there is no subject? It isn\u2019t that mankind is all that important. I don\u2019t think that Man is the measure of all things, or even of very many things. I don\u2019t think Man is the end or culmination of anything, and certainly not the center of anything. What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not know, nor do I believe anybody who says he knows, except, possibly, Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware — to pay heed. For we are not objects. That is essential… And with us, nature, the great Object, its tirelessly burning suns, its turning galaxies and planets, its rocks, seas, fish and ferns and fir trees and little furry animals, all have become, also, subjects. As we are part of them, so they are part of us. Bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. We are their consciousness.
In this sense, the meaning of life is less like a postulate than like a poem. Half a lifetime later, Le Guin would make a beautiful distinction between how science explicates the universe and poetry implicates it. Knowing that we are implicated in the universe and implicate it in ourselves, touching that knowledge, holding it at the center of our lives, may be the full stop beyond the question of meaning.
\nComplement with other beautiful perspectives on the meaning of life from Mary Oliver, Oliver Sacks, Loren Eiseley, Maya Angelou, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, then revisit Le Guin on how to live fully.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-22T11:21:50Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-22T11:21:50Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=78068", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/22/nathaniel-hawthorne-nature/", "external_url": null, "title": "Nathaniel Hawthorne on How to Look and Really See", "content_text": "", "content_html": "\u201cOne can\u2019t write directly about the soul,” Virginia Woolf wrote. “Looked at, it vanishes.\u201d This is true of any soul — our own, that of another, that of the world. It vanishes because whenever we look, we see not as reality is but as we are. We see the rest of nature — including each other — through eyes gauzed with preconception, our distracted vision blurred by the thousand thoughts that come alive before the mind’s eye at any given moment, more vivid than the living reality before us.
\nA lovely recipe for how to see the world more clearly comes from Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) — perhaps a lesser novelist than Woolf, but a greater one than Melville in Melville’s own estimation, lovesick as he was, and a far greater observer of nature in his novels than all the journaling Transcendentalists combined. When Thoreau looked at nature, he saw only metaphor and parable; when Hawthorne looked, he saw nature on its own terms, letting it mirror back the fractal of itself that is human nature as the light of unfiltered awareness fell on it. In that respect, he was more a Buddhist than a Transcendentalist, more a scientist than a novelist, and always a poet of reality.
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/nathanielhawthorne.jpg?resize=680%2C950&ssl=1\")
In the high summer of 1851 — a year after The Scarlet Letter interrupted Hawthorne’s long obscurity to catapult the middle-aged author into celebrity — he took his five-year-old son Julian to the lake near the little red shanty they had rented in the Berkshires. Sitting at the water’s edge, Hawthorne wrote in a journal entry later included in Julian’s tender two-volume biography of his parents, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (public library | public domain):
\n\nThe best way to get a vivid impression and feeling of a landscape, is to sit down before it and read, or become otherwise absorbed in thought; for then, when your eyes happen to be attracted to the landscape, you seem to catch Nature unawares, and see her before she has time to change her aspect. The effect lasts but for a single instant, and passes away almost as soon as you are conscious of it; but it is real, for that moment. It is as if you could overhear and understand what the trees are whispering to one another; as if you caught a glimpse of a face unveiled, which veils itself from every willful glance. The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before.
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Nebular_by_MariaPopova.jpg?resize=680%2C680&ssl=1\")
Complement with James Baldwin on the revelation that taught him to truly see and Georgia O’Keeffe on the art of seeing, then revisit Hawthorne on the edges of consciousness and his stirring meditation on life, death, and what fills the interlude with meaning, composed while watching his young daughter interact with his dying mother.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "\u201cOne can\u2019t write directly about the soul,” Virginia Woolf wrote. “Looked at, it vanishes.\u201d This is true of any soul — our own, that of another, that of the world. It vanishes because whenever we look, we see not as reality is but as we are. We see the rest of nature — including each other — through eyes gauzed with preconception, our distracted vision blurred by the thousand thoughts that come alive before the mind’s eye at any given moment, more vivid than the living reality before us.
\nA lovely recipe for how to see the world more clearly comes from Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804–May 19, 1864) — perhaps a lesser novelist than Woolf, but a greater one than Melville in Melville’s own estimation, lovesick as he was, and a far greater observer of nature in his novels than all the journaling Transcendentalists combined. When Thoreau looked at nature, he saw only metaphor and parable; when Hawthorne looked, he saw nature on its own terms, letting it mirror back the fractal of itself that is human nature as the light of unfiltered awareness fell on it. In that respect, he was more a Buddhist than a Transcendentalist, more a scientist than a novelist, and always a poet of reality.
\nIn the high summer of 1851 — a year after The Scarlet Letter interrupted Hawthorne’s long obscurity to catapult the middle-aged author into celebrity — he took his five-year-old son Julian to the lake near the little red shanty they had rented in the Berkshires. Sitting at the water’s edge, Hawthorne wrote in a journal entry later included in Julian’s tender two-volume biography of his parents, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (public library | public domain):
\n\nThe best way to get a vivid impression and feeling of a landscape, is to sit down before it and read, or become otherwise absorbed in thought; for then, when your eyes happen to be attracted to the landscape, you seem to catch Nature unawares, and see her before she has time to change her aspect. The effect lasts but for a single instant, and passes away almost as soon as you are conscious of it; but it is real, for that moment. It is as if you could overhear and understand what the trees are whispering to one another; as if you caught a glimpse of a face unveiled, which veils itself from every willful glance. The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before.
Complement with James Baldwin on the revelation that taught him to truly see and Georgia O’Keeffe on the art of seeing, then revisit Hawthorne on the edges of consciousness and his stirring meditation on life, death, and what fills the interlude with meaning, composed while watching his young daughter interact with his dying mother.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-22T11:19:16Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-22T11:19:16Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=88230", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/22/museum-of-delight/", "external_url": null, "title": "Introducing the Museum of Delight", "content_text": "", "content_html": "After twenty years of making immaterial things with my mind — ideas sculpted of words, questions woven of sentences, translucent vessels for thought and feeling in the shape of poems — I found myself overcome by the urge to make things with my hands out of matter: clay, thread, stone, resin, wood, lichen.
\nThey all now live in the Museum of Delight.
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/mod_sign_big.jpg?resize=680%2C477&ssl=1\")
Housed in a decommissioned airstream from the 1950s that took a year to transform, the Museum of Delight is a collaboration with my friend and neighbor Ryan Vahey — a multidisciplinary artist who lost his entire life’s work and all of his equipment as he watched his studio burn to the ground in the ferocious fire that lit up our neighborhood with the glaring reminder that anything can change for any one of us at any given moment.
\nLike a museum, the Museum of Delight constellates objects into an experience; unlike a museum, and more like an art gallery, you can have what is in it; unlike a gallery, you can’t buy anything: the objects of delight are not sold but given away in a pay-what-you-wish raffle. You can enter it in person or remotely by making a donation in any amount commensurate with your ability and level of delight, so long as it ends with the decimal .11. (The loveliness of a lottery is the antipode to the rich-getting-richer ugliness of art world auctions: Whether you enter with $1.11 or $10,000.11, your odds are the same — the only difference is by how much you support this labor of love, all the thousands of hours and thousands of dollars poured into making these constellations of matter, into turning waste to wonder.)
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/MoD_build4.jpg?resize=680%2C510&ssl=1\")
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/mod4.jpg?resize=680%2C617&ssl=1\")
Proceeds from the raffle will also help Ryan rebuild his life: delight as the counterforce to destruction.
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/MoD_build1.jpg?resize=680%2C510&ssl=1\")
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/MoD_build2.jpg?resize=680%2C510&ssl=1\")
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/mod2.jpg?resize=680%2C680&ssl=1\")
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/MoD_build3.jpg?resize=680%2C510&ssl=1\")
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/mod1.jpg?resize=680%2C831&ssl=1\")
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/hand1.jpg?resize=680%2C794&ssl=1\")
The Museum of Delight, which opens its space-age door at the twentieth anniversary celebration of The Marginalian tomorrow, will be touring New York City and Upstate New York in the coming months, making its next stop at Woodstock’s beloved Japanese restaurant Medo on Sunday, October 25, 1PM-4PM. More stops will be announced on this page. (If you have a dining establishment in New York City, which apparently is the only place this felictious colossus can be parked without a special permit, and you would like to host the Museum of Delight for an afternoon or evening, please contact Ryan.) Meanwhile, here is a taste of some of the objects in it.
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/refiguring_all.jpg?resize=680%2C634&ssl=1\")
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/urnsforliving_set1.jpg?w=1200&ssl=1\")
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/yessel1.jpg?w=1200&ssl=1\")
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/serpentine_birdworld_trusttime4.jpg?w=1200&ssl=1\")
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/heartwood_mariapopova.jpg?resize=680%2C594&ssl=1\")
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/MoD_night2.jpg?resize=680%2C548&ssl=1\")
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "After twenty years of making immaterial things with my mind — ideas sculpted of words, questions woven of sentences, translucent vessels for thought and feeling in the shape of poems — I found myself overcome by the urge to make things with my hands out of matter: clay, thread, stone, resin, wood, lichen.
\nThey all now live in the Museum of Delight.
\n
Housed in a decommissioned airstream from the 1950s that took a year to transform, the Museum of Delight is a collaboration with my friend and neighbor Ryan Vahey — a multidisciplinary artist who lost his entire life’s work and all of his equipment as he watched his studio burn to the ground in the ferocious fire that lit up our neighborhood with the glaring reminder that anything can change for any one of us at any given moment.
\nLike a museum, the Museum of Delight constellates objects into an experience; unlike a museum, and more like an art gallery, you can have what is in it; unlike a gallery, you can’t buy anything: the objects of delight are not sold but given away in a pay-what-you-wish raffle. You can enter it in person or remotely by making a donation in any amount commensurate with your ability and level of delight, so long as it ends with the decimal .11. (The loveliness of a lottery is the antipode to the rich-getting-richer ugliness of art world auctions: Whether you enter with $1.11 or $10,000.11, your odds are the same — the only difference is by how much you support this labor of love, all the thousands of hours and thousands of dollars poured into making these constellations of matter, into turning waste to wonder.)
\n
Proceeds from the raffle will also help Ryan rebuild his life: delight as the counterforce to destruction.
\n
The Museum of Delight, which opens its space-age door at the twentieth anniversary celebration of The Marginalian tomorrow, will be touring New York City and Upstate New York in the coming months, making its next stop at Woodstock’s beloved Japanese restaurant Medo on Sunday, October 25, 1PM-4PM. More stops will be announced on this page. (If you have a dining establishment in New York City, which apparently is the only place this felictious colossus can be parked without a special permit, and you would like to host the Museum of Delight for an afternoon or evening, please contact Ryan.) Meanwhile, here is a taste of some of the objects in it.
\n
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-22T07:57:04Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-22T07:57:04Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=88251", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/22/wood/", "external_url": null, "title": "How to Hold Your Heart with Golden Hands", "content_text": "", "content_html": "One bleak English winter a long time ago, wandering through London in the wake of a relationship that had just unraveled, I walked into an antiquarian bookstore and chanced upon a rare century-old edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales — which I had grown up with — illustrated by Arthur Rackham.
\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/arthurrackham_grimm27.jpg?w=680&ssl=1\")
All fairy tales deal in enchantment, but the Grimms’ are especially powerful cautionary tales about the treacherous line between true and false enchantment in love — something Rackham’s art captured exquisitely.
\nOne particular illustration stopped me up short, unnerved me, captivated me with its disquieting fusion of terror and tenderness:
\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/arthurrackham_grimm5.jpg?w=680&ssl=1\")
The image haunted me for years. I kept returning to it, puzzling over what it was telling me. I lived more, I loved more, and eventually came to see it as a perfect and terrible metaphor for what happens when two people with attachment trauma mistake their trauma for love. Most relationships fail and falter out of this confusion, whatever its manifestation. Here, in this century-old illustration, was a key to an elemental truth: You cannot hold, or hold on to, anyone else unless you can hold yourself — hold your own heart, hold the roots of your pain, whatever it may be — with absolute golden compassion.
\nI wanted a response to Rackham, a counterpoint, something to visualize the power of that truth, so I set out to make it.
\nI began wandering forests and shorelines, looking for driftwood and windthrow trees, exerting inordinate joules taking off their centuries-old roots and giant burls with my Japanese hand-saw, spending inordinate hours sanding them and polishing them with urushi lacquer, then making for them small ceramic hands covered in kintsugi gold powder.
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/wood_MariaPopova2.jpg?resize=680%2C383&ssl=1\")
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/wood_MariaPopova1.jpg?resize=680%2C383&ssl=1\")
![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/wood_MariaPopova3.jpg?resize=680%2C383&ssl=1\")
They now live in the Museum of Delight as large-scale reminders that we spend our whole lives learning how to hold our own hearts.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "One bleak English winter a long time ago, wandering through London in the wake of a relationship that had just unraveled, I walked into an antiquarian bookstore and chanced upon a rare century-old edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales — which I had grown up with — illustrated by Arthur Rackham.
\n
All fairy tales deal in enchantment, but the Grimms’ are especially powerful cautionary tales about the treacherous line between true and false enchantment in love — something Rackham’s art captured exquisitely.
\nOne particular illustration stopped me up short, unnerved me, captivated me with its disquieting fusion of terror and tenderness:
\n
The image haunted me for years. I kept returning to it, puzzling over what it was telling me. I lived more, I loved more, and eventually came to see it as a perfect and terrible metaphor for what happens when two people with attachment trauma mistake their trauma for love. Most relationships fail and falter out of this confusion, whatever its manifestation. Here, in this century-old illustration, was a key to an elemental truth: You cannot hold, or hold on to, anyone else unless you can hold yourself — hold your own heart, hold the roots of your pain, whatever it may be — with absolute golden compassion.
\nI wanted a response to Rackham, a counterpoint, something to visualize the power of that truth, so I set out to make it.
\nI began wandering forests and shorelines, looking for driftwood and windthrow trees, exerting inordinate joules taking off their centuries-old roots and giant burls with my Japanese hand-saw, spending inordinate hours sanding them and polishing them with urushi lacquer, then making for them small ceramic hands covered in kintsugi gold powder.
\n
They now live in the Museum of Delight as large-scale reminders that we spend our whole lives learning how to hold our own hearts.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-22T07:51:47Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-22T07:51:47Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=87054", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/21/corrective-for-a-broken-heart/", "external_url": null, "title": "Corrective for a Broken Heart", "content_text": "", "content_html": "“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her passionate insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” It can happen with a shattering, or with a thousand small fissures, but the great paradox — the great salvation — is that every time it happens, you live to see you are unbreakable.
\nAnd so, a poem.
\n\n\nCORRECTIVE FOR A BROKEN HEART
\n
\nby Maria PopovaWhy all the threadbare drama,
\n
\nthe stale catastrophism
\nof calling it broken?
\nIt still beats,
\n doesn’t it,
\nstill trembles at the sight
\nof fog flowing through the forest
\nlike a slow dance song.
\nIt was only
\n dislocated,
\nlost its locus
\nfor a while,
\npopped out of the socket
\nof good sense.
\nThere is no one
\nto pick up the pieces
\n because there are no pieces.
\nOnly the firm, fastidious
\nhand of time
\nto slide it back
\n into place.And after all
\n
\nwho can fault
\nthe wayward compass
\nwhen the magnetic north pole
\nis in constant motion
\ndrifting by fifty kilometers a year
\nand reversing itself altogether
\nevery few centuries
\nwhile each twenty-six thousand years
\na different north star
\ncomes to shine its guiding light
\nabove all the confusion.We are here
\nto lose our way.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her passionate insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” It can happen with a shattering, or with a thousand small fissures, but the great paradox — the great salvation — is that every time it happens, you live to see you are unbreakable.
\nAnd so, a poem.
\n\n\nCORRECTIVE FOR A BROKEN HEART
\n
\nby Maria PopovaWhy all the threadbare drama,
\n
\nthe stale catastrophism
\nof calling it broken?
\nIt still beats,
\n doesn’t it,
\nstill trembles at the sight
\nof fog flowing through the forest
\nlike a slow dance song.
\nIt was only
\n dislocated,
\nlost its locus
\nfor a while,
\npopped out of the socket
\nof good sense.
\nThere is no one
\nto pick up the pieces
\n because there are no pieces.
\nOnly the firm, fastidious
\nhand of time
\nto slide it back
\n into place.And after all
\n
\nwho can fault
\nthe wayward compass
\nwhen the magnetic north pole
\nis in constant motion
\ndrifting by fifty kilometers a year
\nand reversing itself altogether
\nevery few centuries
\nwhile each twenty-six thousand years
\na different north star
\ncomes to shine its guiding light
\nabove all the confusion.We are here
\nto lose our way.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-21T04:49:24Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-21T04:49:24Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=78918", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/20/anais-nin-d-h-lawrence/", "external_url": null, "title": "How to Be Un-Dead: Notes on Waking Up from the Trance of Near-Living", "content_text": "", "content_html": "\u201cWhen you surrender, the problem ceases to exist,\u201d Henry Miller wrote in his stunning letter to Ana\u00efs Nin (February 21, 1903–January 14, 1977). “Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance.”
\nBut we, the controlling species, the conquering species, have a hard time with this notion of surrender; we, the conflicted species, spend our lives resisting it yet craving its liberations.
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/anaisnin_books.jpg?resize=680%2C443&ssl=1\")
Nin herself — a woman uncommonly liberated from the common traps of convention, control, and self-consciousness — took up the spiritual mechanics of this paradox in her first published book, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (public library), composed when she was still in her twenties.
\nWith an eye to D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) and his “philosophy that was against division,” his “plea for whole vision,” she writes:
\n\nWhen the realization came to the moderns of the importance of vitality and warmth, they willed the warmth with their minds. But Lawrence, with the terrible flair of the genius, sensed that a mere mental conjuring of the elemental was a perversion… Lawrence believed that the feelings of the body, from its most extreme impulses to its smallest gesture, are the warm root for true vision, and from that warm root can we truly grow. The livingness of the body was natural; the interference of the mind had created divisions, the consciousness of wrong-doing or well-doing.
In a sentiment central to my own animating ethos, she adds:
\n\nLife is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
It was Lawrence’s own writing that awakened in her this awareness of ongoingness and the urgency of total aliveness — the way “livingness is the axis of his world, the light, the gravitation, and electromagnetism of his world.”
\nIn his 1924 novel The Boy in the Bush, Lawrence makes a stunning case for the indivisibility of it all — the beauty and the sorrow, the ache and the astonishment:
\n\nAll real living hurts as well as fulfils. Happiness comes when we have lived and have a respite for sheer forgetting. Happiness, in the vulgar sense, is just a holiday experience. The life-long happiness lies in being used by life; hurt by life, driven and goaded by life, replenished and overjoyed with life, fighting for life\u2019s sake. That is real happiness. In the undergoing, a large part of it is pain.
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/dhlawrence1.jpg\")
This was the foundational philosophy of Lawrence’s worldview — the pulse-beat that makes his writing so resonant and eternally alive, the way all great spiritual texts are. He distilled this view in an especially beautiful passage from his 1923 novel Kangaroo, reckoning with the most universal reality of life — the reality we spend our lives fighting, yet the one that peeks through in all of our greatest works of art and highest triumphs of the creative spirit. Echoing Whitman’s defense of our inner multitudes, often at odds with each other, he writes in an era when every woman was a “man” purely as a matter of linguistic convention:
\n\nIf a man loves life, and feels the sacredness and mystery of life, then he knows that life is full of strange and subtle and even conflicting imperatives. And a wise man learns to recognize the imperatives as they arise — or nearly so — and to obey. But most men bruise themselves to death trying to fight and overcome their own, new, life-born needs, life’s ever strange imperatives. The secret of all life is obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations.
In the same epoch when Hermann Hesse so beautifully defended the wisdom of the inner voice, Lawrence’s protagonist makes a passionate case for listening to the song of life as it reverberates through the singular cathedral of each self, yours and mine, as it did for Nin and Lawrence and every other great mind long sung out of existence:
\n\nI offer no creed. I offer myself, my heart of wisdom, strange warm cavern where the voice of the oracle steams in from the unknown; I offer my consciousness, which hears the voice; and I offer my mind and my will, for the battle against every obstacle to respond to the voice of life.
Complement with Mary Oliver on how to live with maximum aliveness and Henry Miller on the measure of a life well lived, then revisit Nin on the meaning of maturity and how reading awakens us from the trance of near-living.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "\u201cWhen you surrender, the problem ceases to exist,\u201d Henry Miller wrote in his stunning letter to Ana\u00efs Nin (February 21, 1903–January 14, 1977). “Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance.”
\nBut we, the controlling species, the conquering species, have a hard time with this notion of surrender; we, the conflicted species, spend our lives resisting it yet craving its liberations.
\nNin herself — a woman uncommonly liberated from the common traps of convention, control, and self-consciousness — took up the spiritual mechanics of this paradox in her first published book, D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (public library), composed when she was still in her twenties.
\nWith an eye to D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) and his “philosophy that was against division,” his “plea for whole vision,” she writes:
\n\nWhen the realization came to the moderns of the importance of vitality and warmth, they willed the warmth with their minds. But Lawrence, with the terrible flair of the genius, sensed that a mere mental conjuring of the elemental was a perversion… Lawrence believed that the feelings of the body, from its most extreme impulses to its smallest gesture, are the warm root for true vision, and from that warm root can we truly grow. The livingness of the body was natural; the interference of the mind had created divisions, the consciousness of wrong-doing or well-doing.
In a sentiment central to my own animating ethos, she adds:
\n\nLife is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
It was Lawrence’s own writing that awakened in her this awareness of ongoingness and the urgency of total aliveness — the way “livingness is the axis of his world, the light, the gravitation, and electromagnetism of his world.”
\nIn his 1924 novel The Boy in the Bush, Lawrence makes a stunning case for the indivisibility of it all — the beauty and the sorrow, the ache and the astonishment:
\n\nAll real living hurts as well as fulfils. Happiness comes when we have lived and have a respite for sheer forgetting. Happiness, in the vulgar sense, is just a holiday experience. The life-long happiness lies in being used by life; hurt by life, driven and goaded by life, replenished and overjoyed with life, fighting for life\u2019s sake. That is real happiness. In the undergoing, a large part of it is pain.
This was the foundational philosophy of Lawrence’s worldview — the pulse-beat that makes his writing so resonant and eternally alive, the way all great spiritual texts are. He distilled this view in an especially beautiful passage from his 1923 novel Kangaroo, reckoning with the most universal reality of life — the reality we spend our lives fighting, yet the one that peeks through in all of our greatest works of art and highest triumphs of the creative spirit. Echoing Whitman’s defense of our inner multitudes, often at odds with each other, he writes in an era when every woman was a “man” purely as a matter of linguistic convention:
\n\nIf a man loves life, and feels the sacredness and mystery of life, then he knows that life is full of strange and subtle and even conflicting imperatives. And a wise man learns to recognize the imperatives as they arise — or nearly so — and to obey. But most men bruise themselves to death trying to fight and overcome their own, new, life-born needs, life’s ever strange imperatives. The secret of all life is obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations.
In the same epoch when Hermann Hesse so beautifully defended the wisdom of the inner voice, Lawrence’s protagonist makes a passionate case for listening to the song of life as it reverberates through the singular cathedral of each self, yours and mine, as it did for Nin and Lawrence and every other great mind long sung out of existence:
\n\nI offer no creed. I offer myself, my heart of wisdom, strange warm cavern where the voice of the oracle steams in from the unknown; I offer my consciousness, which hears the voice; and I offer my mind and my will, for the battle against every obstacle to respond to the voice of life.
Complement with Mary Oliver on how to live with maximum aliveness and Henry Miller on the measure of a life well lived, then revisit Nin on the meaning of maturity and how reading awakens us from the trance of near-living.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-20T17:12:18Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-20T17:12:18Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.themarginalian.org/?p=77902", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/20/simone-de-beauvoir-coming-of-age/", "external_url": null, "title": "How to Grow Old without Letting Life Become a Parody of Itself", "content_text": "", "content_html": "![\"How](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/simonedebeauvoir_comingofage.jpg?fit=320%2C480&ssl=1\")
We live in a culture that dreads the entropic inevitability of growing older, treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and regimens, anesthetizes it with botox and silence, somehow forgetting that to grow old at all is a tremendous privilege — one withheld from the vast majority of humans populating the history of our young species (to say nothing of the infinite potential humans who never chanced into existing).
\n“For old people,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her sublime meditation on aging and what beauty really means, “beauty doesn\u2019t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young… It has to do with who the person is.” Another way to say this, to feel it, is that to become a person worthy of old age is the triumph of life. Henry Miller, in his reflection upon turning eighty, located the triumph in remaining able to “fall in love again and again\u2026 forgive as well as forget… keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical.\u201d Grace Paley instructed in what remains the finest advice on the art of growing older: \u201cThe main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.\u201d
\nLife is largely a matter of how we hold ourselves — our hearts, our fears, our forgivenesses — along the procession of the years. Hardly anyone has furnished a more elegant and robust banister for the holding than Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) in her 1970 book La vieillesse, published in England as Old Age and in America as the characteristically cottoned The Coming of Age (public library).
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/SimoneDeBeavuoir_BarbaraKlemm.jpg?resize=625%2C952&ssl=1\")
Two years before she came to consider how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, De Beauvoir observes that contemporary Western culture winces at old age as a “semi-death.” With an eye to the biological privilege of getting to grow old, she writes:
\n\nOld age is not a necessary end to human life.
\n[…]
\nA particular value has sometimes been given to old age for social or political reasons. For some individuals — women in ancient China, for instance — it has been a refuge against the harshness of life in adult years. Others, from a pessimistic general outlook on life, settle comfortably into it… The vast majority of mankind look upon the coming of old age with sorrow and rebellion. It fills them with more aversion than death itself.
\nAnd indeed, it is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension.
Only one thing can keep the final chapter of life from becoming a parody of itself. Growing old, she cautions, is not a project — not something one can endeavor to do industriously, to ace. It is a fact — something to be met on its own terms, something for which we spend our whole lives practicing as we learn to control for surrender.
\n![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/whatislove_ellis_barnett12.jpg\")
She writes:
\n\nGrowing, ripening, aging, dying — the passing of time is predestined, inevitable.
\nThere is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One\u2019s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.
Complement with Bertrand Russell on how to grow old and Thoreau on the greatest gift of the winter years, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir on the ultimate frontier of hope and the artist’s task to liberate the present from the past.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "
We live in a culture that dreads the entropic inevitability of growing older, treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and regimens, anesthetizes it with botox and silence, somehow forgetting that to grow old at all is a tremendous privilege — one withheld from the vast majority of humans populating the history of our young species (to say nothing of the infinite potential humans who never chanced into existing).
\n“For old people,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her sublime meditation on aging and what beauty really means, “beauty doesn\u2019t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young… It has to do with who the person is.” Another way to say this, to feel it, is that to become a person worthy of old age is the triumph of life. Henry Miller, in his reflection upon turning eighty, located the triumph in remaining able to “fall in love again and again\u2026 forgive as well as forget… keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical.\u201d Grace Paley instructed in what remains the finest advice on the art of growing older: \u201cThe main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.\u201d
\nLife is largely a matter of how we hold ourselves — our hearts, our fears, our forgivenesses — along the procession of the years. Hardly anyone has furnished a more elegant and robust banister for the holding than Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) in her 1970 book La vieillesse, published in England as Old Age and in America as the characteristically cottoned The Coming of Age (public library).
\nTwo years before she came to consider how chance and choice converge to make us who we are, De Beauvoir observes that contemporary Western culture winces at old age as a “semi-death.” With an eye to the biological privilege of getting to grow old, she writes:
\n\nOld age is not a necessary end to human life.
\n[…]
\nA particular value has sometimes been given to old age for social or political reasons. For some individuals — women in ancient China, for instance — it has been a refuge against the harshness of life in adult years. Others, from a pessimistic general outlook on life, settle comfortably into it… The vast majority of mankind look upon the coming of old age with sorrow and rebellion. It fills them with more aversion than death itself.
\nAnd indeed, it is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension.
Only one thing can keep the final chapter of life from becoming a parody of itself. Growing old, she cautions, is not a project — not something one can endeavor to do industriously, to ace. It is a fact — something to be met on its own terms, something for which we spend our whole lives practicing as we learn to control for surrender.
\nShe writes:
\n\nGrowing, ripening, aging, dying — the passing of time is predestined, inevitable.
\nThere is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One\u2019s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.
Complement with Bertrand Russell on how to grow old and Thoreau on the greatest gift of the winter years, then revisit Simone de Beauvoir on the ultimate frontier of hope and the artist’s task to liberate the present from the past.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "image": null, "banner_image": null, "date_published": "2026-10-20T08:04:17Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-20T08:04:17Z", "authors": ["Maria Popova"], "tags": [], "language": null, "attachments": ["\n {\"url\": string, \n 'mime_type': string, \n 'title': strinrg,\n 'size_in_bytes': int,\n 'duration_in_seconds': int\n "]}, {"id": "https://www.brainpickings.org/?p=63720", "url": "https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/20/leonard-cohen-death-of-a-ladys-man-words/", "external_url": null, "title": "The Constitution of the Inner Country: Leonard Cohen on Language and the Poetry of Presence", "content_text": "", "content_html": "![\"The](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/deathofaladiesman_leonardcohen.jpg?fit=305%2C458&ssl=1\")
\u201cWe die. That may be the meaning of life,” Toni Morrison asserted in her spectacular Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” We do language not merely with our words — which are themselves events — but with the lived and living presence behind them. “Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality,” Susan Sontag wrote in contemplating the conscience of words. If words are the arrow, we ourselves — our interior landscapes, our outward actions, the authenticity of our lives — are the bow.
\nThe elusive, essential art of not mistaking one for the other is what Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016) explores in a prose poem from his out-of-print 1978 book of poetry, Death of a Lady’s Man (public library).
\n![\"\"](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/leonardcohen_MichaelPutland.jpg?resize=680%2C471&ssl=1\")
In consonance with James Baldwin’s insistence that \u201cit is experience which shapes a language; and it is language which controls an experience,” Cohen — who began his career as a poet — writes:
\n\nTake the word butterfly. To use this word it is not necessary to make the voice weigh less than an ounce or equip it with small dusty wings. It is not necessary to invent a sunny day or a field of daffodils. It is not necessary to be in love, or to be in love with butterflies. The word butterfly is not a real butterfly. There is the word and there is the butterfly. If you confuse these two items people have the right to laugh at you. Do not make so much of the word. Are you trying to suggest that you love butterflies more perfectly than anyone else, or really understand their nature? The word butterfly is merely data. It is not an opportunity for you to hover, soar, befriend flowers, symbolize beauty and frailty, or in any way impersonate a butterfly. Do not act out words. Never act out words.
\n[…]
\nSpeak the words with the exact precision with which you would check out a laundry list. Do not become emotional about the lace blouse. Do not get a hard-on when you say panties. Do not get all shivery just because of the towel. The sheets should not provoke a dreamy expression about the eyes. There is no need to weep into the handkerchief. The socks are not there to remind you of strange and distant voyages. It is just your laundry. It is just your clothes. Don’t peep through them. Just wear them.
![](\"https://i0.wp.com/www.themarginalian.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/littlegoldenbookofwords1.jpg\")
Four decades before poet Elizabeth Alexander contemplated “the revelatory and unguarded and surprising self in language,” Cohen writes:
\n\nThe poem is nothing but information. It is the Constitution of the inner country. If you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. You are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest kind of appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. Think of the words as science, not as art. They are a report. You are speaking before a meeting of the Explorers’ Club of the National Geographic Society. These people know all the risks of mountain climbing. They honour you by taking this for granted. If you rub their faces in it that is an insult to their hospitality. Tell them about the height of the mountain, the equipment you used, be specific about the surfaces and the time it took to scale it. Do not work the audience for gasps and sighs. If you are worthy of gasps and sighs it will not be from your appreciation of the event but from theirs. It will be in the statistics and not the trembling of the voice or the cutting of the air with your hands. It will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence.
Complement with Virginia Woolf’s love letter to words in the only surviving recording of her voice, then revisit Cohen on creativity, the art of stillness, and democracy and its redemptions.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
\n\nThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week\u2019s most inspiring reading. Here\u2019s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
", "summary": "
\u201cWe die. That may be the meaning of life,” Toni Morrison asserted in her spectacular Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” We do language not merely with our words — which are themselves events — but with the lived and living presence behind them. “Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality,” Susan Sontag wrote in contemplating the conscience of words. If words are the arrow, we ourselves — our interior landscapes, our outward actions, the authenticity of our lives — are the bow.
\nThe elusive, essential art of not mistaking one for the other is what Leonard Cohen (September 21, 1934–November 7, 2016) explores in a prose poem from his out-of-print 1978 book of poetry, Death of a Lady’s Man (public library).
\nIn consonance with James Baldwin’s insistence that \u201cit is experience which shapes a language; and it is language which controls an experience,” Cohen — who began his career as a poet — writes:
\n\nTake the word butterfly. To use this word it is not necessary to make the voice weigh less than an ounce or equip it with small dusty wings. It is not necessary to invent a sunny day or a field of daffodils. It is not necessary to be in love, or to be in love with butterflies. The word butterfly is not a real butterfly. There is the word and there is the butterfly. If you confuse these two items people have the right to laugh at you. Do not make so much of the word. Are you trying to suggest that you love butterflies more perfectly than anyone else, or really understand their nature? The word butterfly is merely data. It is not an opportunity for you to hover, soar, befriend flowers, symbolize beauty and frailty, or in any way impersonate a butterfly. Do not act out words. Never act out words.
\n[…]
\nSpeak the words with the exact precision with which you would check out a laundry list. Do not become emotional about the lace blouse. Do not get a hard-on when you say panties. Do not get all shivery just because of the towel. The sheets should not provoke a dreamy expression about the eyes. There is no need to weep into the handkerchief. The socks are not there to remind you of strange and distant voyages. It is just your laundry. It is just your clothes. Don’t peep through them. Just wear them.
Four decades before poet Elizabeth Alexander contemplated “the revelatory and unguarded and surprising self in language,” Cohen writes:
\n\nThe poem is nothing but information. It is the Constitution of the inner country. If you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. You are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest kind of appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. Think of the words as science, not as art. They are a report. You are speaking before a meeting of the Explorers’ Club of the National Geographic Society. These people know all the risks of mountain climbing. They honour you by taking this for granted. If you rub their faces in it that is an insult to their hospitality. Tell them about the height of the mountain, the equipment you used, be specific about the surfaces and the time it took to scale it. Do not work the audience for gasps and sighs. If you are worthy of gasps and sighs it will not be from your appreciation of the event but from theirs. It will be in the statistics and not the trembling of the voice or the cutting of the air with your hands. It will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence.
Complement with Virginia Woolf’s love letter to words in the only surviving recording of her voice, then revisit Cohen on creativity, the art of stillness, and democracy and its redemptions.
\nFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant \u2014 a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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