themarginalian.org

How to Change Your Life

You may have to kneel for days or decades in a pool of silence blue and lonely as a heron but it will be there, the small green stone lying at the bottom lustrous with a peace larger than joy.

themarginalian.org

Frankenstein Author Mary Shelley on the Surest Remedy for a Sunken Spirit and What Makes Life Worth Living

To live, according to this sense of the word, we must not only observe and learn, we must also feel; we must not be mere spectators of action, we must act; we must not describe, but be subjects of description. Deep sorrow must have been the inmate of our bosoms… sickening doubt and false hope must have chequered our days… Who that knows what "life" is, would pine for this feverish species of existence?

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The journalist tasked with reinventing ‘60 Minutes’ & the baseball exec who can’t win enough

There's a Japanese notion called "the red thread of fate" that says we're all connected by an invisible string to people whose lives we're meant to touch. Whether or not you believe that literally, I love the idea that our lives are constantly intersecting in ways we'll never entirely understand.

themarginalian.org

Moonlight and the Magic of the Unnecessary

Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The roboticist who was right about AI & the billionaire blowing the whistle on Trump’s crypto shop

Most of us spend our lives wondering whether we're making a difference. Blood donation is one of the few acts where you can be almost certain that you are — even if the person whose life you change never learns your name.

themarginalian.org

Death and How to Be More Alive: Carl Jung on Immortality and the Rebirth of Middle Age

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life's midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life's fulfillment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die.

themarginalian.org

The Bird in You, the World in You, and the Art of Trusting Time: A Ceramics and Serpentine Raffle

That the Earth decided to make something this beautiful, when it could have just gone on making granite, felt like a miracle — the miracle of all those things unnecessary to survival, like music, like love, that give meaning to being alive.

jefftweedy

Tom Sawyer (Rush cover)

We should be suspicious of the people that don't have something that sustains them, and that they've fallen in love with. And Rush was absolutely something that gave people courage.

themarginalian.org

G.K. Chesterton on the Dandelion and the Meaning of Life

No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he [is] actually alive, and be happy.

jefftweedy

Take Me Home, Hot Stuff

Art, on the otherhand, is ever-expanding, like the universe itself, with limitless new frontiers to explore and question, and with possibilities for unending growth, understanding, and emotion.

longreads.com

The Healing Power of Watching the Boys of ‘Jackass’ Do Incredibly Stupid Things

I just know that anything worth having is worth hurting for: male friendship, a really funny video, a legacy and so on.

themarginalian.org

Hermann Hesse on Solitude, the Value of Hardship, the Courage to Be Yourself, and How to Find Your Destiny

When destiny comes to a man from outside, it lays him low, just as an arrow lays a deer low. When destiny comes to a man from within, from his innermost being, it makes him strong, it makes him into a god… All sorrow, poison, and death are alien, imposed destiny. But every true act, everything that is good and joyful and fruitful on earth, is lived destiny, destiny that has become self.

themarginalian.org

Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning

Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down — the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one — the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that "he" had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self.

themarginalian.org

How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.

themarginalian.org

Ursula K. Le Guin on the Meaning of Life

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.

themarginalian.org

How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older

There 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's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.

theconvivialsociety

Do Not Resign From Life

We've made machines that can fly faster and farther than the swallow-tailed kite, but in no way does it follow that the kite should cease from its flight or that it is somehow diminished because of the advent of flying machines. That there is something else in the world that flies tells us nothing about whether the kite ought to fly.

notboring.co

Riding the Leopard

The greater our means, the harder it might be to find meaning. The more we accomplish, the sooner we ask, "Cool, now what?"

themarginalian.org

Consolation for Sorrow from King Arthur’s Court: Merlyn’s Advice on What to Do When the World Gets You Down

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn.

themarginalian.org

The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Dig for the “Submerged Sunrise of Wonder”

At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he [is] actually alive, and be happy.

themarginalian.org

Walt Whitman, Shortly After His Paralytic Stroke, on What Makes Life Worth Living

The trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes low down enough, and make much of negatives, and of mere daylight and the skies. After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The OpenAI CEO who may control our future & the luxury reading retreats

I've come to believe that the highest form of faith is the kind that extends beyond yourself — helping others, even in the smallest ways.

jefftweedy

Lotta Love (Neil Young cover)

I'm filled with gratitude to have had this experience and to get to play this amount of music with my children, and friends who I've known since they were little kids, too. It's been an incredible thrill and a great thing for my family and me to get to spend that amount of time together.

themarginalian.org

Ursula K. Le Guin on Suffering and Getting to the Other Side of Pain

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

themarginalian.org

Where Love Goes When It Goes

It is also a peculiar question, lexically and syntactically, for it presupposes two things about the life of the heart: a movement and a destination, as if love rose to its feet one day and headed for an elsewhere, left without a map, got lost, lost to seasons and cycles, lost like the mammoth and the human dorsal fin and the surnames of millennia of daughters.

themarginalian.org

How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and Friendship

What is worthwhile, is friendship… this profound mutual confidence between [two people], and this joy of knowing that the other exists.

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 96

From art to religion to sex, instrumentalisation has drained away intrinsic value. But life is about more than material benefits.

themarginalian.org

What Happens When We Die

Whatever our beliefs, these sensemaking playthings of the mind, when the moment of material undoing comes, we — creatures of moment and matter — simply cannot fathom how something as exquisite as the universe of thought and feeling inside us can vanish into nothingness.