themarginalian.org

J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life

Enchantment — wherever we may find it (as in nature, poetry, music), or wherever it might find us (as in love) — is not escapism but a truer realism than cynicism, pessimism, or optimism. In allowing us to touch the extraordinary, enchantment — which asks of the courage of the encounter — returns us to our lives more in love with the so-called ordinary world, which, we must also not forget, is itself an extraordinary triumph against probability.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The actor portraying Mark Zuckerberg & the NFL’s most cryptic quarterback

The twin towers still stand because we saw them, moved in and out of their long shadows, were lucky enough to know them for a time. They are a part of the city we carry around. It is hard to imagine that something will take their place, but at this very moment the people with the right credentials are considering how to fill the crater.

themarginalian.org

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.

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

Kahlil Gibran on the Courage to Weather the Uncertainties of Love

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure, Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor, Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.

themarginalian.org

The Art of Choosing Love Over Not-Love: Rumi’s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy

It is heartbreaking enough that we do lose everything that exists, everything and everyone we love, until we lose life itself — for we are a function of a universe in which it cannot be otherwise. But it is our singular human-made heartbreak that we often cope with our terror of loss — that deepest awareness of our own mortality — by losing sight of just how precious we are to each other, squandering in less-than-love the chance-miracle of our time alive together, only to recover our vision when entropy has taken its toll, when it is too late.

themarginalian.org

A Lei for Your Losses: Joan Didion on the Art of Letting Go

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead… Let go of them in the water.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Brandon Berskson

Marceline Loridan-Ivens, a French survivor, wrote the book as a letter to her father, who died in the camps. The way she recounts what Auschwitz did to her, and how the pain never ceased even after liberation, moved me to such a degree that I've read the paperback three times.

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?

fs.blog

Steve Jobs in Exile

NeXT spent years losing money. His co-founders left. His investors lost faith. His fortune nearly disappeared. At one point, he was a weekend away from shutting the company down. Somewhere in those failures, Jobs learned how to become the leader Apple would eventually need.

themarginalian.org

The Moving Letter James Baldwin Received from His Childhood Teacher at the Peak of His Fame and His Heartbreak

"My first conscious calculation as to how to go about defeating the world's intentions for me," Baldwin would later write of his first cultural outing with Bill, "began on that Saturday afternoon." The defeat was total and triumphant.

readtheprofile.com

My Annual Birthday Check-In: 13 Lessons From my 35th Year of Life

We spend so much time preparing ourselves for disappointment that we rarely consider the opposite skill: how to receive success, happiness, love, or abundance without immediately bracing for its disappearance. When life becomes better than we imagined, we sometimes stop trusting that it will last & we start waiting for the other shoe to drop. We become so afraid of losing the thing we love that we don't even enjoy having it.

theparisreview.org

Paris Review - Writers, Quotes, Biography, Interviews, Artists

He hadn't been sure if he was supposed to fight back or just take the beating, if he could dodge the blows or cover his face or what, but it wound up not mattering.

themarginalian.org

How to Bear Your Desolations

A breath can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard, the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything you dread, all you can't bear, dissolves and, like a needle slipped into your vein — that sudden rush of the world.

themarginalian.org

How Love Comes to You

To give up on anything — a dream, a loved one, love itself — is to deny this most irrepressible pulse-beat of being alive.

themarginalian.org

How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo

Six ginkgos were among the handful of organisms that survived the bombing of Hiroshima. Long after Hitler and Oppenheimer have been pressed between the pages of history, the ginkgos are still alive, rising from the ruins of our capacity for destruction by hate as an emblem of our capacity for salvation by love. Salvation, be it of a species or of a soul, is always anchored in some act of love, and every act of love is at bottom an act of salvation.

whyisthisinteresting

The Thrift Store Edition

"Open up a newspaper and take your pick. The energy crisis, the hostages — it was a marathon of disaster," he explained. "People needed Argent again for proof that there had been good times before the bad times."

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The billionaire betting it all on the AI boom & the mom who vanished without a trace

Most of us are forgetting that from the beginning of our life, we are approaching death.

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

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.

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.