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20 Favorite Children’s Books from 20 Years of The Marginalian

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.

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Nineteen Truths and One Beguiling Lie about Life from 20 Years of The Marginalian

The process itself is a lovely reminder that life is like language — it is not the words you have, your givens, but how you configure them that makes meaning, makes beauty, makes poetry. And the loveliness of life is that we are endlessly reconfigurable, brightly capable of rewriting the story with each sentence of living.

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How to Speak Forest

To name something is to instate it in the family of things, to make it a node in the relational web we call reality. A word can be a pinhole, pinching a vista of complexity to a narrow point, but it can also be a magnifying glass for the invisible processes and nuances that tessellate that complexity.

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Albert Camus on the Source of Strength and How to Save Our Sanity in Trying Times

We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century.

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The True Purpose of Tarot

Just as the primary function of prayer is to clarify our own hopes and fears, to hone our priorities and reassert our values, the primary purpose of tarot is not to give us a telescope aimed at the frontiers of the future but a microscope aimed at the most elusive intricacies of the self.

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Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”

Schiller died considering his "Ode to Joy" a failure — an idealist's fantasy unmoored from reality, a work of art that might have been of service perhaps for him, perhaps for a handful of others, "but not for the world." The young Beethoven was among those few it touched, and this was enough, more than enough — he took Schiller's bright beam of possibility and magnified it through the lens of his own genius to illuminate all of humanity for all of time.

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How to Live and How to Die

I close my eyes, savor a wafer of sacred cake on my tongue and try to taste my mother, to discern the message she baked in these loaves when she was too ill to eat them: I love you. It will end. Leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world.

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Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life

Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful. An analysis of the idea of revolt could help us to discover ideas capable of restoring a relative meaning to existence, although a meaning that would always be in danger.

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How to Bear Your Sorrows: Nick Cave on Integrating the Darkness of Loss with the Bright Ongoingness of Life

I am not saying this just to offer comfort to those who have lost someone, as if to say that in time everything will be all right, because even though it will be, it won't be. Rather, I am acknowledging that although this day marks the 11th anniversary of the worst day of our lives, it is also a beautiful day, with the sun shining, a child playing, a man enjoying a cigarette, a world quietly waking and moving forward.

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The Pain in You and the God in You: Carl Jung on the Relationship Between Psychological Suffering and Creativity

Art is the music we make from the bewildered cry of being alive — sometimes a cry of exultant astonishment, but often a cry of devastation at the collision between our wishes and the will of the world. Every artist's art is their coping mechanism for what they are living through — the longings, the heartbreaks, the triumphs, the wars within and without.

themarginalian.org

Very Necessary Qualifications of a Great Storyteller

All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctly other than our own, whose very otherness clarifies ours, returns us to it magnified and annealed.

themarginalian.org

Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life

Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.

themarginalian.org

Existentialist Embroidery

A tradition is not a material entity that can survive apart from any human agency. It can live only by a people's power to grasp its structure, and to answer to the warmth of its fires.

jefftweedy

Judy Just Left (Ball of Light) (2026 Revision)

What I'm talking about is a moment where you can be convinced that there's an unknown, deeper order for things. A meaning behind it all, even if we're just trying to apply meaning to coincidence. But it's sweet enough, to me, even if it's just a reminder that we make meaning.

themarginalian.org

The Enemy Outside and the Enemy Within: Audre Lorde’s Antidote to Despair

I do not have to win in order to know my dreams are valid, I only have to believe in a process of which I am a part. My work kept me alive this past year, my work and the love of women. They are inseparable from each other. In the recognition of the existence of love lies the answer to despair. Work is that recognition given voice and name.

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Let Your Heart Be Broken

The miracle is that we rise again out of suffering… The miracle is that we create ourselves anew.

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3 Kinds of Loneliness and 4 Kinds of Forever

Everything of beauty and substance that we make — every poem, every painting, every friendship — is an outstretched hand reaching out from one loneliness to another, reaching into the mute mouth of forever for the vowels of a common language to howl our requiem for the evanescent now.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Jannes Soerensen

At their best, they return you to yourself. I left The Beaumont in 2021 to build Kepler — a hospitality company built around attention, care and meaning.

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Mary Oliver on the Measure of a Life Well Lived and How to Magnify Your Aliveness

I know, you never intended to be in this world. But you're in it all the same. So why not get started immediately. I mean, belonging to it. There is so much to admire, to weep over.

whyisthisinteresting

The Romantic Education Edition

Reflecting on these efforts, it strikes me that in much the same way I would fill in all the action in a comic book between the panels, I was reaching to understand adult relations—an unchartered land of intrigue, heartbreak and some little thing called "love". There was no guide, there was no chatbot to inquire of.

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Wilderness, Solitude, and Creativity: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent’s Century-Old Meditations on Art and Life During Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island

Often I think that however much I draw or paint, or however well, I am not an artist as art is generally understood. The abstract is meaningless to me save as a fragment of the whole, which is life itself… It is the ultimate which concerns me, and all physical, all material things are but an expression of it… We are part and parcel of the big plan of things. We are simply instruments recording in different measure our particular portion of the infinite.

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Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say: A Tender Painted Lexicon of Consolation and Connection

We need flowers for the same reason we need poems, or paintings, or songs — because what we can feel will always be infinitely vaster and more complex than what we can name, because words will always break under the weight of the immensities we task them with carrying, will never fully answer the soul's cry for connection, for consolation, for mercy.

themarginalian.org

Michael Rosen’s Sad Book: A Beautiful Anatomy of Loss, Illustrated by Quentin Blake

What emerges is a breathtaking bow before the central paradox of the human experience — the awareness that the heart's enormous capacity for love is matched with an equal capacity for pain, and yet we love anyway and somehow find fragments of that love even amid the ruins of loss.

themarginalian.org

Something Deeper Than Hope: Terry Tempest Williams on Our Stays Against Despair

there must be something deeper than hope — more prayerful, more purposeful, more pulsating with aliveness.

3quarksdaily.com

Heated Rivalry In Russia

After the finale, what's left isn't the euphoria you get from so many series. It's the opposite: emptiness, and the urge to go back to the beginning and watch the story again, already knowing how much pain and, at the same time, tenderness is hidden inside it.