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.

longreads.com

The Fantasy Baseball Ties That Bind

I've spent years missing out on what I presume to be a never-ending group chat in which my closest friends, their siblings, one guy someone worked with for a summer in college, and another whom we randomly met at a bachelor party weekend all roast one another in ways that feel, at least occasionally, like love.

themarginalian.org

Between the User and the Used: Zadie Smith on Instrumentalism

It is one of the most discomposing experiences in life, having felt a profound connection with someone only to discover it had been trivial to them — a fleeting fantasy, a frivolous experiment, a use.

3quarksdaily.com

Teenage Frida Kahlo’s Moving Letters

as an artist, as a lover, as a person who lived with extraordinary vulnerability, extraordinary courage, and the precocious awareness that the conversation between the two is the measure of a life.

longreads.com

‘Their Power Feels Like Mine’: A Dog Sled Racer Says Goodbye to Her Pack

I want to call their names, so they know I'm here. I want to guard them in secret forever.

themarginalian.org

What Forgiveness Takes

about its quiet power to dislodge the lump of blame from the thorax of time and fill the lung of life with the oxygen of the possible, about how you bless your own life when you forgive your mother, forgive your father, forgive the person for whom your love was not enough, forgive the person for whom your love was too much, forgive yourself, over and over and over.

3quarksdaily.com

Thursday Poem

But hang on here while we make the turn into the final six where all will be resolved, where longing and heartache will find an end, where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen, take off those crazy medieval tights, blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

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.

themarginalian.org

How to Get Love Less Wrong: George Saunders on Breaking the Patterns that Break Our Hearts

We want to believe that love is singular and exclusive, and it unnerves us to think that it might actually be renewable and somewhat repetitive in its habits. Would your current partner ever call his or her new partner by the same pet name he/she uses for you, once you are dead and buried? Well, why not? There are only so many pet names. Why should that bother you? Well, because you believe it is you, in particular, who is loved (that is why dear Ed calls you "honey-bunny"), but no: love just is, and you happened to be in the path of it.

longreads.com

The Devil’s Crown

But I think this may be parenthood—to give our best love to the ones we hurt most.

themarginalian.org

The Other Significant Others: Living and Loving Outside the Confines of Conventional Friendship and Compulsory Coupledom

While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them.

3quarksdaily.com

Romantic love is a cultural invention that’s making us miserable

We have been in the romantic age now for 200 years, perhaps shorter, perhaps a little longer time period. And let's put it plainly, it's been a disaster.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: Palantir’s secretive CTO & the crypto casino

To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavor. The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a person alone reading a book that interests them; and all economics, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, are only valuable in so far as they prolong and multiply such scenes.