themarginalian.org

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

The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She had lived — who could say now with what passion? — since she had loved him for himself…

themarginalian.org

How to Help Someone Change: The Samurai Guide to Giving Feedback

To give a person an opinion you must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not. You must become close with them and earn their trust. Approaching subjects that are dear to them, seek the best way to speak and to be well understood.

themarginalian.org

The 12 Kinds of Time and How to Be More Fully Alive

Time is not a resource we have for cashing in. True timefulness … is to live in awareness of the dynamic and unpredictable array of times that co-exist within one life, as well as the intersubjective nature of time between all individuals. To live it well, we may need to break the temporal norms altogether and finally come to terms with time as entirely relational and contingent upon each other in specific and localised ways.

themarginalian.org

The Art of Dignity Beyond Pride: How to Move Through Heartbreak Like Frida Kahlo

It is a fallacy, a dangerous myth, that this wish should be dispassionate — letting go can be as passionate as love itself, as much an act of devotion, for only a rigor of feeling can ensure not the termination but the transmutation of a relationship.

themarginalian.org

Love After Life: Nobel-Winning Physicist Richard Feynman’s Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife

Fearful of contagion, Richard did not kiss her on the lips. After the ceremony he helped her slowly down the stairs, and onward they drove to Arline's new home, a charity hospital in Browns Mills, New Jersey.

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

Thich Nhat Hanh on the Art of Deep Listening and the 3 Buddhist Steps to Repairing a Relationship

When we are hurt in a relationship, when we are spinning in the blooming buzzing confusion of sensemaking, the explanation we elect as correct usually has more to do with our own fears and vulnerabilities than it does with the reality of the situation; almost always, that explanation is wrong; almost always, the true explanation has more to do with the fears and vulnerabilities roiling in the other person invisibly to us.

longreads.com

On Description

There was another shape formed by these descriptions. It was what my life would have looked like if things had gone according to plan, and how this current situation, far from anywhere I'd ever lived or imagined, may or may not have differed from that normal, which might also inform whether or not I was doing OK, in some process of recovery, and, therefore, whether or not my father needed to worry.

themarginalian.org

True Love Will Find You in the End: Kurt Vonnegut on When to Stop Trying and When to Try Again

Because time is something we can measure and tenderness is not, we keep trying to ward off the singular sense of personal failure that the loss of love can bring by measuring the success of a relationship by quantity of time rather than quality of being, only to find ourselves on barren rock.

theconvivialsociety

Friendship Suffices

"If there is something like a political life to be, to remain for us, in this world of technology, then it begins with friendship. Therefore my task is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful friendships. Mutual friendships always. I and you, and I hope a third one, out of which perhaps community can grow. Because perhaps here we can find what the good is."

themarginalian.org

Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity

Because our vagal pathways are shaped by our earliest experiences of co-regulation in the infant-parent dyad, ruptures in that co-regulation — whether by abuse or neglect — condition the dorsal vagus to become dominant and make a neuroception of danger the default response, storying reality away from safety, nowhere more perilously than in intimate relationships.

longreads.com

A Diehard Drinker Accidentally Quits

Before giving up drinking, I had very little earnestness at my command. I drank in order to give myself permission to talk openly, or at great length, or to heighten the sensation of listening or being listened to. Drinking is way easier than saying that you want to talk to someone, or don't.

themarginalian.org

Nick Cave on the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life

If we look with curiosity at people who do not share our values, they become interesting rather than threatening. As I've grown older I've learnt that the world and the people in it are surprisingly interesting, and that the more you look and listen, the more interesting they become. Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world.

longreads.com

The Feeding

She wanted to forget having been sick, while I was in the next room, sobbing like she was already gone.

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.

longreads.com

How Three Chess Friends Battled Demons and Saved Two Lives

Though the woman died almost 20 years ago, Paul said, the curse remains in effect.

themarginalian.org

Nick Cave on the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life

If we truly comprehend and acknowledge that we are all imperfect creatures, we find that we become more tolerant and accepting of others' shortcomings and the world appears less dissonant, less isolating, less threatening.

noahpinion.blog

Dating advice for men

A lot of men — maybe even most men — get emotionally attached to our sex partners. There are well-known natural mechanisms for this. For those guys, going through one woman after another, again and again, for years and years, is just making and breaking those attachments again and again. That's not fun, that's self-punishment.

longreads.com

I Spent Months with an AI Companion. It Was Worse than Being Alone

You can't customize your friends. You screen for certain traits, but what you're drawn to, as much as the trait's performance, is the 3D process that forms it: your friend's life story. We surmise, based on our affinity, it will be a story we share. We choose our friends because we want to live in the universe of their personality: its past, present, and future. What gives a personality dimension is time, the gathering of experiences.

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.

whyisthisinteresting

The Creative Parent Edition

Unlike my children, my books are cruelly unforgiving of my weaknesses, failings, and flaws of character. Most of all, my books, unlike my children, do not love me back.

3quarksdaily.com

Siri Hustvedt recalls her life with the writer Paul Auster

Before their wedding dinner, Hustvedt writes, a poet friend of Paul's lifted a glass and said, "To the bride and groom, two people so good-looking I'd like to slice their faces with a razor."

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.

themarginalian.org

The Bird That Is Your Life

We don't know what it is like to be any creature other than ourselves — the bird, the dog, the person we love. The great triumph is to let the fantasy of understanding go and love anyway.

themarginalian.org

No One You Love Is Ever Dead: Hemingway on the Most Devastating of Losses and the Meaning of Life

Very few people ever really are alive and those that are never die; no matter if they are gone. No one you love is ever dead.

3quarksdaily.com

On the Joys of Collecting Junk

My friends, being my friends, invariably champion the necessity of objects piling up in my yard.

themarginalian.org

The Kiln and the Quantum of Relationships

Under the extreme pressures of expectation and the high heat of need, something reacts with something, impurities are exposed and bubbles burst, each person activating dormant potencies in the other, so that a distinct third entity comes alive — the dynamic reality of the relationship — incinerating the notion of the individual self as a set of inherent properties, hinting at the relational nature of reality itself.

themarginalian.org

How to See More Clearly and Love More Purely: Iris Murdoch on the Angst of Not Knowing Ourselves and Each Other

It is, of course, impossible to ever fully know what it is like to be someone else — this is the cost of consciousness, singular and secretive as it is; impossible, too, to fully convey to another what it is like to be you. The dream of perfectly clear vision is indeed just a dream. But we can always see a little more clearly in order to love a little more purely.

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.

themarginalian.org

Erich Fromm’s 6 Rules of Listening: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist on the Art of Unselfish Understanding

Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.

themarginalian.org

George Saunders on the Antidote to Regret

At the end of my life, I know I won't be wishing I'd held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me.

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.